Nvidia power players: Meet the 13 leaders driving the AI chip giant's massive success
- Nvidia transformed from a video game graphics company to a semiconductor and AI giant.
- Nvidia's GPUs and CUDA software dominate cloud and data-center operations for major tech firms.
- Business Insider profiled the people instrumental to the company's success and generative AI boom.
It's hard to talk about AI and not mention Nvidia.
Nvidia controls 80% of the semiconductor market, and its GPUs have become a critical component of cloud and data-center operations for Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Nestled in Santa Clara, California, Nvidia began as a graphic chips company servicing the video game industry. It ultimately specialized in the GPU, or the graphics processing unit, the chip that would revolutionize the computing industry.
Its dominance and CUDA software (which is only compatible with Nvidia's chips) ultimately gave the processing power of GPUs an even more competitive advantage, leaving customers and competitors like AMD scrambling to close the gap. Demand for its H100 and A100 GPUs has surged as more tech companies venture into generative AI and need GPUs to process data and train large language learning models.
Business Insider compiled a list of leaders who have been instrumental in Nvidia's transition from a more niche video game graphics company with chips in Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox to a semiconductor behemoth at the center of the generative AI wave.
Jensen Huang, the cofounder, president, and CEO of Nvidia, is at the helm of the company. Along with Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky, Huang famously started Nvidia at a Denny's restaurant in 1993 (he also used to work as a dishwasher at Denny's).
With his signature black leather jacket at keynotes, the Oregon State University and Stanford University electrical engineering graduate is often seen as the visionary behind Nvidia's success. He famously has 50 direct reports at a company with more than 29,000 employees, and he does not do one-on-ones, choosing instead to give immediate feedback.
"In that way, our company was designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible, for people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know," Huang once said at Stanford.
Ian Buck works as the vice president of hyperscale and high performance computing at Nvidia. His team helped develop CUDA, or "compute unified device architecture."
CUDA is Nvidia's parallel computing platform and programming model introduced in 2006. The software, which allows for large amounts of math calculations in parallel, was built off of Buck's research at Stanford University.
"We talked to a lot of people in a lot of different industries and found that no one wanted to learn a new language," Buck told Next Platform.
Buck has been instrumental in the company's competitive advantage over other chip companies. CUDA's adaptability has allowed Nvidia to bundle its software offerings and enabled researchers and businesses to accelerate AI training.
The software is also under growing scrutiny in Europe, as French regulators have voiced concern about how CUDA has contributed to Nvidia's monopoly over GPUs.
While Nvidia was known as a graphics company, Bryan Catanzaro helped elevate the company's focus on AI. He started as an Nvidia intern while in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. He later rose to the ranks as a research scientist before departing to work at Baidu on AI-based speech recognition. He returned to Nvidia in 2016.
Fast Company has credited Catanzaro for Nvidia's "AI Big Bang" by elevating the company's focus on deep learning, a way to train AI to recognize visual, speech, and language patterns.
"I didn't actually convince Jensen, instead I just explained deep learning to him. He instantly formed his own conviction and pivoted Nvidia to be an AI company," Catanzaro posted on LinkedIn. The push for AI has helped Nvidia grow to a value of almost $3 trillion.
Nvidia's CFO Colette Kress leads financial strategies and relays updates on its outlook in key markets. Thanks to the AI boom, Nvidia's reported revenue has jumped to $26 billion in its first quarter, increasing 262% since the same time last year. The chip company has split its stocks 10-for-1 to make shares cheaper and grow its investor pool.
Kress's leadership has been "instrumental" to Nvidia's success, and "she is extremely well respected both internally at Nvidia and across the tech industry," Dan Ives, managing partner at Wedbush Securities, told Fortune.
Alexis Black Bjorlin is the vice president and general manager for DGX Cloud. The semiconductor and cloud industry veteran previously worked at Broadcom and Intel. At the end of last year, she left Meta, where she was the vice president of infrastructure, to join Nvidia after overseeing Meta's development of in-house AI chips.
DGX Cloud is an AI platform for developers, deemed "Your own AI Factory—in the cloud." Nvidia's DGX Cloud allows developers to rent GPU servers. It works with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft (which already buy Nvidia's chips), although it also competes with some of their AI development offerings.
Ruth Berry leads efforts to grow the semiconductor giant's footprint in AI discussions in Washington.
She worked for more than a decade in government service at the State Department and on the National Security Council. She was involved in transition planning in Libya during the Arab Spring and helped lead the US Department of State's Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy.
Nvidia has quietly increased its lobbying influence in Washington, DC, since 2022, as lawmakers focus more on AI regulation and antitrust probes.
Since 2017, Tim Teter has served as general counsel and secretary at Nvidia, responsible for its legal and government affairs.
Prior to joining Nvidia, Teters had more than 20 years of experience at Cooley LLP in litigating patent and technology-related cases throughout the US.
Nvidia faces an ongoing copyright infringement class action lawsuit from authors who allege that the company's AI model NeMo Megatron has been trained on their books without permission.
Debora Shoquist is the executive vice president of operations at Nvidia. She oversees the company's supply chains and logistics, including manufacturing product and test engineering, foundry operations, supplier management, supply planning, and more. Shoquist has worked at Nvidia since 2007 after managing operations at Coherent, Quantum, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
One of Nvidia's key suppliers is TSMC in Taiwan, the foundry that helps manufacture and package its advanced H100 chips. To help manage the GPU shortage, Nvidia has announced more investments to improve semiconductor manufacturing among its Taiwan-based partners. Shoquist likely must balance delicate relations with Chinese customers after the US government enacted a chip export control.
Vishal Bhagwati is the head of corporate development. He previously oversaw the finances of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's AI business and Oracle's M&A strategy.
S&P Global estimated that Nvidia's annual year-on-year investments increased by 280% in 2023. The value of these investments reached $1.55 billion at the end of January this year. Some of its investments include AI infrastructure and healthcare startups.
"Our platform grew, and therefore our ecosystem grew," Bhagwati told The Wall Street Journal. "And there were more and more companies on the platform and as part of the ecosystem that we wanted to support."
Manuvir Das is the vice president of enterprise computing. He previously worked at Dell EMC on data storage and at Microsoft on the Azure cloud.
Das oversees NVIDIA NIM, which allows organizations to run AI models using Nvidia GPUs.
"We believe that NVIDIA NIM is the best software package, the best runtime for developers to build on top of, so that they can focus on the enterprise applications," Das previously said.
As the senior vice president of GPU engineering, Jonah Alben oversees Nvidia's hardware engineering teams and the development of GPU architectures. He previously worked as an engineer for Silicon Graphics and joined Nvidia in 1997, authoring 34 patents since then.
Alben worked on Nvidia's A100 chip, which an investor called the "workhorse" for the AI industry and the go-to for startups like Stability AI and OpenAI to train their AI models.
"We had a vision that when we put GPUs out in the world…that somewhere somebody out there in the world would find these GPUs and would use them for some new problem that we didn't even know about," Alben said on Nvidia's The AI Podcast.
Danny Shapiro is vice president of automotive, overseeing NVIDIA DRIVE, which is used to develop self-driving cars.
NVIDIA DRIVE has been used to build lidar sensors, which are used in autonomous cars to detect objects and send signals to bounce back detailed 3D images, a key part of safety.
While Rev Lebaredian serves as the vice president of simulation technology, his roots go back to Hollywood filmmaking. He worked as a software engineer for Disney's Dream Quest Images and Warner Brothers Digital before starting his visual effects company Steamboat Software, with renderings used in films like "Stuart Little" and "X-Men 2."
Now, he is leading Nvidia's Omniverse, a software that helps create a "digital twin" 3D simulation for customers to test and change products like robots and cars.
"We're pleasantly surprised that the large language models and things that they're doing with ChatGPT show the world happened a little bit earlier than most people expected. And so now we're harnessing that for Omniverse," Lebaredian previously said.
Correction: July 23, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated Ian Buck's role at the company and that he invented CUDA. His current role is vice president of hyperscale and high performance computing, not vice president of accelerated computing. His team helped develop CUDA. A line about Vishal Bhagwati's role in Nvidia's venture investment arms has been removed.
The story was updated to include Danny Shapiro, vice president of automotive, rather than Gary Hicok, who previously led the unit and has retired from the company.