Silicon Valley has always been a place where work can easily overtake everything else. It produces legends, startups, fortunes, and products that change the world. It is less known for marriages that quietly endure.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, is now one of the most recognizable figures of the AI era. On stage, he is known for his energy, his direct speaking style, and his familiar black leather jacket. But behind that public image is another story, one that began long before NVIDIA existed: his more than 40-year marriage to Lori Huang.
That black leather jacket, now almost inseparable from his image, was not simply a branding decision. Jensen Huang has said his wife and daughter helped shape the way he dresses. In that small detail, one can see something larger: the steady presence of a woman who has known him since he was not a famous CEO, but a young engineering student trying to make his way in America.
The Taiwanese student serving plates
Jensen Huang was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1963. When he was still young, his parents sent him to the United States so he could receive a better education. He first attended a boarding school in Kentucky, far from his parents and familiar surroundings. It was a difficult beginning, marked by a new language, a new culture, and the loneliness of being far from home.
But Jensen Huang was not crushed by those years.
He later entered Oregon State University, where he studied electrical engineering. To help pay for tuition and living expenses, he worked at Denny’s, the American restaurant chain known for all-day breakfasts, pancakes, coffee, and late-night booths filled with ordinary people.
At the time, he was just a young student working in a restaurant. No one watching him carry plates or work around the kitchen would have imagined that, years later, he would sit in another Denny’s booth, write down the name of a new company, and help change the direction of the technology industry.
That came later. For the moment, he was a student trying to study, work, and adjust to life in a new country.
A homework assignment and a Sunday routine
In 1980, Jensen Huang was taking an electrical engineering class at Oregon State University. By his own later telling, there were about 250 students in the class, and only three were women. One of them was Lori Mills.
Jensen Huang was 17. Lori was 19.
He later recalled the story in a speech at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, humorously describing the scene. He knew he did not have an obvious advantage. He was young, not especially tall, and surrounded by older classmates who may have seemed more confident. If he wanted Lori to notice him, he decided, he would have to rely on the one thing he believed he could show clearly: that he was smart.
So he walked up to her and offered his unusual opening line.
“Do you want to see my homework?”
It was not a romantic line. It was not even a particularly smooth one. But it worked well enough for the conversation to continue.
Jensen Huang then made a proposal: If Lori would do homework with him every Sunday, he would help her get straight A’s.
The plan was more clever than it first appeared. Jensen Huang had already done the work in advance. When they compared answers, his answers would be correct, making him look brilliant. In modern business language, one might say he had prepared a product demonstration, and the product was his own intelligence.
So every Sunday, the two sat down together to do homework. When the work was finished, they kept talking. When the talking was done, they lingered. Jensen Huang later said he tried to stretch out the homework as long as possible so they could spend more time together.
A simple homework arrangement became the unlikely beginning of a relationship.
Sunday followed Sunday, and the days slowly became years.
A promise at age 20
Their relationship gradually changed from study partnership to romance. Jensen Huang understood that shared homework was not enough. He wanted Lori to see a future with him, even though he had little to offer at the time except ambition and certainty.
At age 20, he made a declaration that sounded almost absurd.
“I am only 20 now,” he told her, “but I want you to know that when I am 30, I will be a CEO.”
A poor engineering student on a college campus in Oregon told the woman he loved that he would become a CEO by the time he was 30. Jensen Huang later admitted that he did not really know what he was talking about.
But Lori remembered.
They stayed together. They dated for five years, moving from college life into adulthood and their early careers. Lori had studied engineering and, after graduation, worked in chip design at Hewlett-Packard. She was not simply someone being pursued. She had her own training, her own judgment, and her own path.
She did not choose Jensen Huang because he was wealthy. He was not. She did not choose him because he was famous. No one knew who he was. She chose him, perhaps, because she saw something in him that had not yet become visible to the world: a kind of certainty, the belief that although he had little then, he would one day build something.
In 1985, Jensen Huang and Lori Mills married. He was 22, and she was 24.
Neither of them could have known then how far that promise would carry them, or how much of Jensen Huang’s future public life would rest on the quiet foundation they were building together.
Translated by Joseph Wu
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