Nvidia's co-founder and CEO ensured that the company dominates AI chips. By Jack Hough

Saudi Arabia's oil monopoly recorded the largest annual corporate profit ever -- $161 billion in 2022. Nvidia will almost certainly shatter that record this year: The consensus estimate is $217 billion, and rising.

Analysts see Nvidia doubling that figure in the following three years.

This growth is the work of Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, 63, who once told Barron's he originally went into highly parallel processors for videogame graphics only because there wasn't yet a large enough market to use them for supercomputing. That is why the world's artificial intelligence runs today on graphics processing units, or GPUs.

To maintain Nvidia's dominance, Huang shortened its chip road map in recent years to a one-year cycle from two, leaving competitors scrambling to catch up. He has made massive investments and high-profile diplomatic tours to secure crucial supplies. A relentless focus on in-house software helps keep Nvidia hardware the industry standard.

Next up: developing new markets. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Huang pitched government leaders on treating data as a natural resource and building domestic infrastructure for it. He is also pushing platforms for robo-cars and humanoid helpers.

Write to Jack Hough at jack.hough@barrons.com and subscribe to his Barron's Streetwise podcast.

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 19, 2026 21:31 ET (01:31 GMT)

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