NVIDIA chief executive and co-founder Jensen Huang will receive one of the semiconductor industry's top honors, the Robert N. Noyce Award, from the Semiconductor Industry Association, for his contributions to accelerated computing.
John Neuffer, president and CEO of the trade group, said in a statement that Huang's "extraordinary vision and tireless execution" have helped to strengthen "our industry, revolutionized computing and advanced AI."
NVIDIA was co-founded in 1993 by Huang, who was born in Taiwan and raised in Oregon, and he has served since then as chief executive. The fabless semiconductor maker has long dominated the market for graphics processing units (GPUs) used to run popular video games on personal computers. It is also prospering from demand for high-end computer graphics cards, which has remained its largest market in terms of revenue.
Before he co-founded NVIDIA, he worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. Huang holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master's degree from Stanford University.
He has transformed NVIDIA into a semiconductor juggernaut and a leading force in the artificial intelligence space, where NVIDIA chips have long been the gold standard. A GPU has thousands of tiny processor cores that work together to carry out computations that can overload central processing chips (CPUs) from Intel. As a result, NVIDIA chips act as the brains of everything from AI supercomputers to robots and autonomous cars.
While Intel remains America’s largest semiconductor firm by sales, NVIDIA has become the industry's most valuable. NVIDIA is worth more than half a trillion dollars on the stock market, and it employs 20,000 people.
NVIDIA—along with AMD, Intel's top rival in the CPU space—has taken market share from Intel in recent years and forced the company to play from behind in areas such as data centers and artificial intelligence. Intel has been grappling with prolonged delays in chip development in recent years. As a result, it has lost ground to TSMC and other chip foundries in the race to fit smaller and faster transistors on tiny squares of silicon.
But Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is looking to reinvigorate the chip-making giant by aggressively rebuilding its chip design and manufacturing prowess. Last month, the Santa Clara, California-based company rolled out one of its most ambitious roadmaps in years, packed with new technologies that executives hope will help close its performance gap with TSMC by 2024 and return it to process technology leadership by the end of 2025.
One of the industry's most prestigious honors, the award is named for semiconductor industry pioneer Robert Noyce, a co-founder of both Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor. AMD CEO Lisa Su, who has revived her company's fortunes for the first time in years, was awarded the honor in 2020.
"There’s never been a more exciting or important time to be in the semiconductor and computer industries," Huang said.