The 12 Executives Behind Nvidia’s Unprecedented A.I. Domination

Above a table in a San Jose, Calif., Denny’s hangs a plaque that reads: “The booth that launched a $1 trillion company.” The breakfast spot is where, in 1993, engineers Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem founded the technology company Nvidia. As evidenced by the chain’s celebratory plaque, Nvidia surpassed the $1 trillion mark last year. Today, the company’s dominance in the A.I. revolution has boosted its market cap to nearly $3.6 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.

Despite its seemingly rapid rise, Nvidia’s trajectory has been in the making for some time. While the company started off with a vision to reimagine realistic 3D graphics with chips known as graphics processing units (GPUs), it faced several pitfalls along the way—including a graphics format issue in 1996 that forced Huang, the company’s CEO, to lay off more than half of its employees

Three years later, Nvidia launched the industry’s first GPU, the GeForce 256, and became a major player in computer graphics and gaming. Despite its success in that industry, Huang decided to pivot toward A.I. more than a decade ago in the hopes that the nascent technology would take off. His bet has paid off handsomely, with Big Tech players like Microsoft (MSFT), Meta (META), Google (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN) now spending billions of dollars on the Nvidia chips used to power their generative A.I. models.

Besides a penchant for leather jackets, Huang is known for his unique leadership style—his executive team contains more than 60 people, all of whom report directly to the CEO. “It’s not conventional, but I’m certain that it’s the best practice,” Huang told Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, of the structure earlier this year. In addition to Nvidia’s innovation in A.I., data centers and gaming, the company is also a powerhouse in visualization and automotive technologies.

Here’s a look at some of the top leaders helping Nvidia ride the A.I. wave to unprecedented heights:

Jensen Huang, CEO

Huang has served as the CEO and president of Nvidia since its establishment. He owns around 3 percent of the company and has seen his personal net worth swell to an estimated $128 billion over the years, placing Huang among the ten wealthiest people in the world.

Huang, who earned a Bachelor of Science from Oregon State University and a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford, previously worked at companies like LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. But his first-ever job was as a dishwasher at Denny’s—the very same restaurant that would later serve as the location for Nvidia’s inception. “I used to clean bathrooms, and now I’m CEO of a company… There are a lot of things in life I believe you can learn,” Huang told Collison when asked why he rarely fires employees. “People know that I’d rather torture them into greatness. ”

Chris Malachowsky, Nvidia fellow

Huang’s fellow co-founder Malachowsky has held several different positions at Nvidia, where he’s overseen areas like IT, operations and product engineering. The executive, who previously held engineering and technical leadership roles at HP and Sun Microsystems, currently focuses on growing the company’s core technologies as an “Nvidia fellow” and its senior technology executive.

Malachowsky is also an expert on integrated circuit design and holds some 35 patents. In addition to his work at Silicon Valley-based Nvidia, he serves as an advisor to the Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida.

Colette Kress, chief financial officer

Kress, another member of Nvidia’s executive staff, was recruited by Huang in 2013. Her tenure at the company has included Nvidia’s entry into the $1 trillion club, and then the $3 trillion club, with Kress helping guide Nvidia’s soaring growth across its data center business.

Her leadership “has been instrumental in Nvidia’s success with Wall Street and is key to Jensen’s vision,” Dan Ives, a Wedbush Securities analyst, told Fortune in June. Before joining Nvidia, Kress was chief financial officer for Cisco’s business technology and operations finance division and spent more than a dozen years at Microsoft, where her roles included chief financial officer of its server and tools sector.

Jay Puri, executive vice president of worldwide field operations

As head of worldwide field operations, Puri oversees all things related to Nvidia’s global business. The executive’s responsibilities include areas like sales, partnerships, program management and organizing support services.

Before joining Nvidia in 2005, Puri spent more than two decades in sales, marketing and management at Sun Microsystems, where his positions included a stint as senior vice president of its Asia-Pacific Group. Before that, Puri worked in roles at Hewlett-Packard, Booz Allen and Texas Instruments.

Debora Shoquist, executive vice president of operations

After more than 20 years spent managing operations at companies like Quantum and Coherent, Shoquist joined Nvidia in 2007. As head of operations, she oversees Nvidia’s supply chain functions, logistics and quality management system.

Shoquist’s role involves working closely with the company’s global suppliers, which notably includes the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). In what constitutes one of the most lucrative partnerships in A.I., Nvidia counts on TSCMC to manufacture chips such as those belonging to its next-generation Blackwell platform.

Dwight Diercks, senior vice president of software engineering

As one of Nvidia’s longest-serving employees, Diercks has been with the technology company since he became its 22nd employee in 1994. Initially joining as a senior software engineer, he has acted as senior vice president of software engineering since 2008 and leads a team that builds the software underpinning its A.I. accelerators, autonomous vehicle technology and gaming products.

Diercks, who previously worked as a software engineer at Pellucid, Inc. and Compaq Computer Group, has also demonstrated an interest in A.I. applications outside of work. Earlier this year, he donated $20 million to fund programs at the Mayo Clinic that will use the new technology for early detection and cancer treatment.

Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of GeForce

Like Diercks, Fisher joined Nvidia three decades ago. During the company’s early days, its initial office was so small that Nvidia employees shared an office bathroom with another company and ate their meals around a ping pong table, he recalled in 2017.

Starting as the company’s first salesman, Fisher worked his way up to become the head of its GeForce business unit, which produces the company’s line of GPUs for gaming and 3D rendering. Before joining Nvidia, he previously worked in sales at Adaptec and the Weitek Corporation.

Jonah Alben, senior vice president of GPU engineering

Alben, since 2008, has headed GPU engineering at Nvidia, where his team focuses on enhancing the capabilities of next-gen chips. Before joining the company in 1997, he briefly worked at Silicon Graphics.

“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,” said Alben during a 2020 podcast interview.

Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of accelerated computing

Ian Buck oversees Nvidia’s vast data center business. Buck has been with Huang’s company for 20 years and started as a systems engineer and director. In charge of hardware and software for data centers and A.I. applications, Buck has testified on A.I. before the U.S. Congress and urged federal agencies to invest in and adopt the new technology to bolster the economy.

While completing a Ph.D. at Stanford in the early 2000s, Buck helped develop the programming language Brook. At Nvidia, his team helped build CUDA, a parallel computing platform and programming model introduced in 2006 that built off Buck’s Stanford research and helps developers speed up applications through GPUs.

Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology

Before embarking on a 22-year career at Nvidia, Lebaredian specialized in visual effects rendering at Warner Brothers Digital and Disney Dream Quest Images and even launched his own company, Steamboat Software, in 1999. Lebaredian joined Nvidia in 2002, where he now heads the company’s Omniverse system and simulation technology.

Bringing together generative A.I. with renderings and physics simulations, Nvidia’s Omniverse allows for the creation of so-called “digital twins,” which virtually replicate environments and processes to help companies solve issues across areas like factory scale, robotics development or even climate research.

Danny Shapiro, vice president of automotive

Shapiro has been with Nvidia since 2009 and currently heads its automotive division. In addition to working on in-vehicle improvements and automobile design, Shapiro’s team is focused on enabling A.I. self-driving through the company’s Nvidia Drive platforms.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Shapiro drives an electric vehicle powered by his California home’s solar system. Before joining Nvidia, the executive held marketing, engineering and business development positions at Advanced Micro Devices, Silicon Graphics and Digital Equipment.

Mohammed Siddeek, corporate vice president and head of NVentures

Siddeek and Nvidia go way back. In the 1990s, he helped the company go public while working at Morgan Stanley (MS) and subsequently joined Nvidia as an investor relations manager in the 2000s before breaking away to work at SoftBank (SFTBF)’s Vision Fund.

The executive returned to Nvidia three years ago to head up NVentures, its venture capital arm. As opposed to the larger investments made through Nvidia’s corporate development division, NVentures specializes in earlier-stage startups using A.I. to advance healthcare and manufacturing. The main criterion for investments is “relevancy,” Siddeek told the Financial Times in 2023, describing “companies that use our technology, who depend on our technology, who build their businesses on our technology” as prime targets.