When Jensen Huang cofounded NVIDIA, in 1993, he focused on a single niche: building powerful computer chips to create graphics for fast-moving video games. As the company went public in 1999 and grew through the 2000s, video games remained its growth engine—but even back then, Huang, a Taiwanese immigrant who studied electrical engineering at Oregon State and Stanford, could see a different path forward. Data scientists were beginning to ask computers to perform much more sophisticated calculations more quickly, so NVIDIA began spending billions of dollars on R&D to create chips that would support artificial intelligence applications. By the mid-2010s its AI-focused chips had come to dominate this nascent market, showing up inside autonomous vehicles, robots, drone aircraft, and dozens of other high-tech tools. One look at NVIDIA's stock chart shows how this bet has paid off: From late 2015 to late 2018, the company's stock grew 14-fold—a performance that puts Huang, 56, in the top spot on HBR's list of best-performing CEOs in the world this year.
Huang is a new face at #1, but he's no newcomer to the list: He ranked #2 in 2018 and #3 in 2017.
It's quite an old report, but I couldn't find a thread about this. And at the end of the year such as now, I believe it's a good time to review how the CEOs of video game companies performed this year. Before you ask, here are some video game related companies that made the list:
- Microsoft at #9
- AMD at #26
- Apple at #62
- Tencent at #63
- Ubisoft at #74
- Activision Blizzard at #81
Meanwhile, no other gaming company CEO made the list, including Sony, Nintendo, Valve, Epic, EA, etc.
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