Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has sold a ton of stock this year

Yes, but how long can he stay in the bank?

While attending Oneida Elementary School in Kentucky, Jensen Huang, president and CEO of AI mega-monster Nvidia (NVDA) he made a deal with his roommate.

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Huang would teach the illiterate student to read in exchange for teaching him how to bench press.

“I ended up doing a hundred push-ups every night before bed,” he told the New Yorker.

Huang, who was born in Taiwan, said he was relentlessly bullied during this time, but he credits his experience at Oneida with building resilience.

“Back then, there was no counselor to talk to,” he said. “Back then, you just had to tough it out and move on.”

Move on, he did – in Oregon with his parents. Huang graduated high school two years early at age 16 and received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1992.

His first job was at Denny’s in Portland when he was 15 years old.

“We were dishwashers, we were men, we waited tables,” Huang said in a post on the company’s blog. “Nobody can carry more coffee cups than I can.”

And Denny’s would play an important role in Huang’s life beyond throwing hot cups of java and carrying dirty dishes.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Gene Wang/Getty Images

Nvidia is becoming an AI powerhouse

It was at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California, where, in 1993, Huang met with two friends, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, to discuss creating a chip that would enable realistic 3D graphics on personal computers.

Huang said the restaurant, which was right off a busy thoroughfare in the heart of Silicon Valley, was the perfect place to start a business.

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“It had all the coffee you could drink and no one could kick you out,” he said.

The business the three men started turned out to be Nvidia, and Huang has been running the show ever since.

Last year, Huang and Denny’s CEO Kelli Valade, who got her first job as a restaurant waitress at age 16, unveiled a plaque at the Denny’s restaurant where Nvidia was born.

The company became heavily involved in the artificial intelligence sector and briefly surpassed Microsoft as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.

Huang has done quite well for himself and even donated $2 million to his former school in Oneida to build a dormitory and building, called Huang Hall, for female students.

There have been setbacks, including reports earlier this month that the chipmaker is part of an antitrust investigation into the semiconductor sector by the US Department of Justice.

However, Nvidia stock is up 144% year-to-date and up 188% from a year ago.

“In 2024, the technology sector has firmly entered the AI ​​computing phase,” said Bain & Co. in a recent study. “Cloud service providers, enterprises and technology providers are spending more than ever on AI, and adoption rates are high.”

The study says that creating value with AI requires changes in the work processes of hundreds or thousands of employees.

“Companies must conduct business diagnostics, redesign processes, set goals and manage change as they implement this technology,” Bain said. “But early evidence from our customers’ work is encouraging, showing that generative AI initiatives could drive up to 20% of Ebitda.”

Last month, Nvidia posted better-than-expected second-quarter earnings as it unveiled plans for a $50 billion share buyback. The group said demand for its legacy AI chips remains strong ahead of deliveries of its new line of Blackwell processors.

Nvidia CEO: “We want to be the best in the world”

“We want to consistently be the best in the world,” Huang told analysts during the company’s earnings call. “And that’s why we drive so hard.”

“Of course, we want to see our dreams come true and all the capabilities we envision in the future and the benefits we can bring to society, we want to see all of that come true,” he added.

Huang, who said “we are at the beginning of a new industrial revolution,” made some changes to his portfolio, according to Barron’s.

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The former Denny’s employee collected $713 million in stock sales executed through his Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, at an average price of $118.83 per share.

The plan was supposed to take effect by March 2025, but he sold all his allotted shares six months before it expired. Huang could adopt another plan to sell more shares.

Huang’s scheme sold shares from a personal account that now owns 75.4 million Nvidia shares, according to a form he filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He also owns 786 million shares of the company through trusts and partnerships.

Huang is the largest individual owner of Nvidia stock, according to the company’s latest proxy statement, holding a 3.8 percent stake at the end of March ahead of its 2024 share sales.

In 2023, he sold 237,500 Nvidia shares, all in September, for $110 million, an average price of $463.95 each.

The share count and price were before a 10-for-1 stock split that took effect in early June. The 2023 sales were also planned transactions, which involved the purchase of stock through the exercise of options.

Related: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Just Told Investors What’s Next for the AI ​​Chipmaker