Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is likely one of the tech business’s longest-serving chief executives, main the chipmaker since cofounding it in 1993. Now he’s the recipient of a long-standing know-how 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) on the Client Electronics Present on January 6 in recognition of his lifetime of labor in accelerating computing—the strategy of utilizing specialised chips like Nvidia’s graphics processing units to hurry specialised operations akin to rendering photos for video video games, crunching numbers for scientific analysis, or, critically for the business immediately, powering artificial intelligence.
Nvidia reached an unprecedented $5 trillion market valuation in October, with its chips offering a lot of the computing energy behind immediately’s AI.
“It simply is so necessary to have this type of compute energy at our fingertips, to have the ability to make advances so shortly,” says Mary Ellen Randall, president and CEO of IEEE.
Nvidia launched what it calls the primary GPU, the GeForce 256, in 1999. On the time, the chip was principally acknowledged for advancing laptop gaming, letting builders and artists add unprecedented ranges of graphical element with out compromising velocity. Underneath Huang’s management, the corporate quickly started work on CUDA (Compute Unified Machine Structure), a system that permits builders to harness the parallel processing capabilities of its chips for a wide range of computational duties.
That proved to be vital for current advances in AI; Nvidia’s chips and improvement platforms immediately energy AI applied sciences akin to ChatGPT and different massive language fashions, in addition to autonomous autos and industrial robots.
Nvidia’s market capitalization has fallen since its October excessive amid questions a few possible AI bubble, together with concern about Nvidia’s investments in AI firms that in flip buy its chips. However the firm maintains a valuation of greater than $4 trillion as enormous swaths of the financial system search to harness synthetic intelligence software program that its chips are optimized to run.
“We’re in unprecedented occasions the place AI is accelerating all the pieces,” says Randall.
Advances by Huang and his Nvidia colleagues construct on the work of earlier winners of the Medal of Honor, first awarded by the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1917 to Edwin Howard Armstrong, who was pivotal in creating radio-related applied sciences together with FM broadcasting.
Different early recipients included Lee de Forest, whose work with vacuum tubes paved the best way for immediately’s transistor-powered electronics; Claude Shannon, identified for his groundbreaking work tying arithmetic to digital 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 introduced its membership had grown to 500,000 throughout 190 nations. As we speak Medal of Honor recipients are chosen by IEEE’s board of administrators primarily based on session with a staff that features previous IEEE presidents, earlier award winners, and different esteemed members of the group, Randall says.
A number of current recipients of the IEEE’s high award have been innovators in laptop and web know-how, together with Ethernet cocreator Robert Metcalfe, acknowledged in 1996, and Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, instrumental in creating the web’s core TCP/IP information routing protocol, acknowledged in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Different Medal of Honor winners from the chipmaking business embody former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, acknowledged in 2000; Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, awarded in 2008; Morris Chang, founding father of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), acknowledged in 2011; and Broadcom cofounder Henry Samueli, final 12 months’s award recipient.
Randall says Huang’s work builds upon the improvements of earlier Medal of Honor recipients whereas serving to to pave the best way for tomorrow’s applied sciences.
“All these varieties of issues are basic to how we bought to immediately,” she says. “And that is definitely a vital step within the transition of know-how for the long run.”
