Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s first Denny’s job in Portland preceded the 1993 meeting where he and two future co-founders discussed PC graphics, a conversation that led to the company’s creation.
In an account published by Nvidia, Huang said he started at the restaurant when he was 15. He recalled washing dishes, clearing tables and serving customers as part of the work.
The founding discussion came at a different Denny’s. Nvidia places it at a Silicon Valley location, while CBS News identifies San Jose as the city. CBS reported that Huang was 30 when he, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem met there in 1993. They talked about creating a company around graphics hardware for personal computers.
Huang’s route to the meeting included university and semiconductor jobs. Stanford University says he was born in Taiwan, while CBS News reported that he moved to the United States at age nine. He earned an electrical engineering bachelor’s degree from Oregon State University and a master’s degree from Stanford. Nvidia’s official profile lists employment at Advanced Micro Devices from 1984 to 1985, then at LSI Logic from 1985 to 1993.
Nvidia was incorporated in California in April 1993, according to its 2026 annual report. The filing says it reincorporated in Delaware in April 1998. Nvidia’s timeline names NV1 as its first product in 1995 and says RIVA 128 arrived in 1997, selling more than 1 million units in its first four months.
Nvidia’s 2026 filing links the company’s expansion beyond PC graphics to continued demand for 3D graphics and the size of the gaming market. It says Nvidia applied its GPU architecture to other fields, including artificial intelligence, data science, robotics and scientific computing.
Huang later described the founders’ uncertainty in a 2024 interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes.” “None of us knew how to do anything,” he said.
