Two of the world's leading AI chip designing companies – Nvidia Corp. NVDA and Advanced Micro Devices AMD – are led by two people who are related to each other.
While Jensen Huang is Nvidia's co-founder and CEO, Lisa Su joined AMD in 2012 and became its CEO two years later, in 2014.
Su revealed in a 2020 interview that she and Huang were "distant relatives." Since then, thanks to some detailed digging by family heritage researcher Wu Jia Jin, we now know that they are fairly close cousins.
What are the odds, though, that two of the world's leading AI chip designing companies are led by people not only born in the same country but also them being closely related to each other? Perhaps it's in the family genes.
Keeping It In The Family
On a more serious note, though, Huang has not only embraced Su as a family but also acknowledged her as a partner in the industry, not as a competitor.
When asked about Su and AMD as competitors in the GPU space by Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrik Collison, Huang had a firm response. "No! We're family. We're all in the industry. We buy from AMD!"
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When he was asked a question that many of us have likely thought of for a while now – how did two of the world's leading AI chipmakers end up being run by close relatives, Huang had a witty comeback.
"You got to keep it close to the family," he quipped.
On a serious note, Huang admitted he had no idea how it happened. "We didn't grow up together. We didn't know each other until she was at IBM."
‘She's Really Quite Extraordinary'
Unsurprisingly – and for good reason – Huang was all praise for Su. Before leading AMD, Su worked at some of the best companies in the tech industry. This includes Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor, among others.
"Her career is incredible and she's really quite extraordinary."
Su joined AMD in 2012 as senior vice president and general manager and helped the company look beyond computers. She got two big tech companies – Microsoft Corp. and Sony, to use AMD chips in the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles.
Su became AMD's president and CEO in 2014, merely two years after joining the company. She brought AMD out of Intel Corp.'s shadows, and three years later, kickstarted the Ryzen revolution that would set the tone for AMD for years to come.
The AI revolution has minted Su as a billionaire, with her net worth estimated to be $1.2 billion. While this is still a far cry from Huang's fortune of $111 billion, AI has helped multiply her wealth considerably.
Su and Huang are still an extremely rare breed – after all, of the nearly 8.2 billion people in the world today, there are only 2,781 people who have a wealth of $1 billion or more.
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Photo courtesy: Nvidia and Wikimedia
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