Nvidia’s Jensen Huang wins top award from IEEE

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is one of the tech industry’s longest-serving chief executives, leading the chipmaker since cofounding it in 1993. Now he’s the recipient of a long-standing technology award: the IEEE Medal of Honor, established by a predecessor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1917. 

Huang was named the recipient of the medal (and an accompanying $2 million prize) at the Consumer Electronics Show on January 6 in recognition of his lifetime of work in accelerating computing—the technique of using specialized chips like Nvidia’s graphics processing units to speed specialized operations such as rendering images for video games, crunching numbers for scientific research, or, critically for the industry today, powering artificial intelligence.

Nvidia reached an unprecedented $5 trillion market valuation in October, with its chips providing much of the computing power behind today’s AI.  

“It just is so important to have this kind of compute power at our fingertips, to be able to make advances so quickly,” says Mary Ellen Randall, president and CEO of IEEE. 

Nvidia released what it calls the first GPU, the GeForce 256, in 1999. At the time, the chip was principally recognized for advancing computer gaming, letting developers and artists add unprecedented levels of graphical detail without compromising speed. Under Huang’s leadership, the company soon began work on CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), a system that enables developers to harness the parallel processing capabilities of its chips for a variety of computational tasks. 

That proved to be critical for recent advances in AI; Nvidia’s chips and development platforms today power AI technologies such as ChatGPT and other large language models, as well as autonomous vehicles and industrial robots.

Nvidia’s market capitalization has fallen since its October high amid questions about a possible AI bubble, including concern about Nvidia’s investments in AI firms that in turn purchase its chips. But the company maintains a valuation of more than $4 trillion as huge swaths of the economy seek to harness artificial intelligence software that its chips are optimized to run.  

“We’re in unprecedented times where AI is accelerating everything,” says Randall. 

Advances by Huang and his Nvidia colleagues build on the work of previous winners of the Medal of Honor, first awarded by the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1917 to Edwin Howard Armstrong, who was pivotal in developing radio-related technologies including FM broadcasting.

Other early recipients included Lee de Forest, whose work with vacuum tubes paved the way for today’s transistor-powered electronics; Claude Shannon, known for his groundbreaking work tying mathematics to electronic circuitry and digital computation; and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi.  

The Institute of Radio Engineers merged with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1963, forming IEEE, a nonprofit that in November announced its membership had grown to 500,000 across 190 countries. Today Medal of Honor recipients are selected by IEEE’s board of directors based on consultation with a team that includes past IEEE presidents, previous award winners, and other esteemed members of the organization, Randall says.  

Several recent recipients of the IEEE’s top award have been innovators in computer and internet technology, including Ethernet cocreator Robert Metcalfe, recognized in 1996, and Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, instrumental in developing the internet’s core TCP/IP data routing protocol, recognized in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

Other Medal of Honor winners from the chipmaking industry include former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, recognized in 2000; Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, awarded in 2008; Morris Chang, founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), recognized in 2011; and Broadcom cofounder Henry Samueli, last year’s award recipient. 

Randall says Huang’s work builds upon the innovations of previous Medal of Honor recipients while helping to pave the way for tomorrow’s technologies. 

“All those types of things are fundamental to how we got to today,” she says. “And this is certainly a very important step in the transition of technology for the future.”