Nvidia’s Quiet Rising Stars? The Son and Daughter of Billionaire Founder Jensen Huang
After early careers far from Nvidia, Madison and Spencer Huang are growing forces within the world’s most valuable company.
The Takeaway
• Madison and Spencer Huang have risen steadily within Nvidia in the last several years—largely without notice to outside observers.
• Their arrival at Nvidia comes as their father, CEO Jensen Huang, has guided the publicly traded firm to become the world’s most valuable company.
• Madison has become part of a small group of Nvidia execs nicknamed “The Band” who travel with Jensen.
At an all-hands meeting earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang received a question that prompted him to talk about a personal topic: nepotism at Nvidia.
In response, Huang acknowledged that Nvidia had indeed hired the children of many employees and insisted it didn’t bother him. He said he believed those parents wouldn’t have vouched for their kids unless they felt certain their children wouldn’t embarrass them. Besides, many second-generation Nvidia employees often outperformed their parents, Huang added with a laugh.
Of course, there’s a pair of second-generation Nvidians who have not yet eclipsed their parent: Huang’s own children.
Many employees in the audience saw the whole exchange as a reflection of growing intrigue within Nvidia about Madison Huang, 34, a senior director who joined the company in 2020, and Spencer Huang, 35, a product line manager who followed his sister to Nvidia two years later. (None of the Huangs would comment for this story, which is based on interviews with 30 people who know Madison and Spencer.)
Both Spencer and Madison have been steadily promoted. And while soft-spoken Spencer has kept a relatively low profile, Madison has not. In a sign of growing influence, Madison has joined a group of a dozen or so executives who travel with Jensen to his major speaking events. Known informally as “The Band,” these executives review presentation slides with him in hotel rooms, then go to event venues to scrutinize the details, like how the venue will light Jensen’s face on stage. It’s known as thankless, behind-the-scenes work that sometimes keeps executives up until the early hours of the morning on the eve of a major event, such as GTC, Nvidia’s annual developers’ conference, but puts them in Jensen’s innermost orbit.
Neither Madison nor Spencer works in Nvidia’s core business: making and selling the computer chips that have turned publicly traded Nvidia into one of the foremost players in the AI era during recent years. Rather, they work in divisions their father seems to value as areas of additional growth beyond chips—Madison in simulation software for industries such as manufacturing, and Spencer in robotics.
Their relationship to their father looms large over them at Nvidia. “I think it’s human nature that nobody is going to be in a meeting with either one of them and not have it on their minds,” said Greg Estes, a former Nvidia vice president who retired in May after 15 years at the company and who knows all three Huangs well. “The thing is, though, both of them work really hard, are good at their craft and care deeply about the company.”
For a long time, it wasn’t obvious that Madison or Spencer would end up at Nvidia, and neither followed a conventional path to Silicon Valley. Madison went to culinary school, later studying pastries and wine, while Spencer opened a cocktail bar in Taipei. (“I was happy to see that they wandered off at first chance,” said Jens Horstmann, a tech investor and longtime family friend. “I think they wanted to break out and see something different.”)
They have returned to the Bay Area as rarities in the tech world, at least to some degree. Corporate dynasties have long existed in more traditional industries, like media and finance. But since many of the largest businesses in Silicon Valley have scarcely existed for more than a couple decades, few have been around long enough to see a founder or CEO groom their children as possible successors.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who appears here at a White House press conference, has seen his company vault onto the world stage amid the AI boom. (Getty Images)
By and large, the children of the generation of tech founders who established their fortunes in the 1980s and 1990s seem to have deliberately tacked away from following in their parents’ footsteps. Bill Gates’ kids, for instance, have never held any roles at Microsoft, nor have Steve Jobs’ children at Apple.
The Huangs are certainly not the only examples of families with extended ties at Nvidia. The son of Nvidia co-founder Chris Malachowsky works at the company, too, and so does the son of board member Aarti Shah. Many executives’ kids have interned there, and some parents have multiple children who work at the company, public filings and conversations with more than half a dozen current and former employees show.
Since Madison and Spencer have only recently arrived at Nvidia, it’s impossible to know exactly where they’ll end up within the company and precisely how much sway they’ll amass. But with Nvidia newly the world’s most valuable company, it’s hard to imagine the Huang family story playing out on a bigger stage with more dramatic stakes.
At the time Jensen founded Nvidia in 1993, he was a father of two young children: Madison was just a year old, with Spencer only a year older. Jensen and his wife, Lori, raised them in their San Jose home until 2003, when they moved into a six-bedroom home in the affluent neighborhood of Los Altos Hills a few years after Nvidia went public in 1999.
Spencer didn’t go to a traditional high school his senior year, attending instead the Freestyle Academy of Communication Arts and Technology, a new alternative school for students who wanted to pursue creative careers. There, students could access high-end equipment like professional-grade cameras and editing software to work on photography, design and film, which is what interested Spencer, according to one of his teachers.
Before Spencer’s graduation from the Freestyle Academy, Jensen encouraged Spencer and his classmates to exhibit and present their final projects at Nvidia’s headquarters, according to someone with direct knowledge. He arranged the room so the students could easily play their videos on a screen or hang up their artwork, and he paid for catering, hiring waiters to serve hors d’oeuvres.
The Huangs in 2007 (from left): Madison, Lori, Jensen and Spencer. (Getty Images)
Jensen’s kids became familiar faces at Nvidia. Spencer regularly participated in Nvidia’s annual volunteer day, where employees contributed to a philanthropic project, according to his LinkedIn. Employees said both Spencer and Madison were known to attend GTC alongside their parents long before they started working at the company.
Spencer attended Columbia College Chicago, double-majoring in international marketing and cultural studies. When Madison graduated from Los Altos’ public high school and left for the Culinary Institute of America in 2009, Jensen admitted to feeling bereft. “I’m devastated. We’re empty nesters. I just don’t know how to deal with it,” he told The Mercury News in 2009.
At cooking school, Madison completed a program that prepares students to manage restaurants and other parts of the hospitality industry. She worked as a chef in New York and San Francisco and studied pastries and wine at Le Cordon Bleu, a culinary school in Paris. She also spent nearly four years working at LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate.
Across the world in Jensen Huang’s native Taiwan, Spencer studied Mandarin at the National Taiwan University after graduating from Columbia College. Around 2014, Spencer and a friend persuaded one of Huang’s language professors to help them open a bar in Taipei, R&D Cocktail Lab.
Even as a much smaller company a decade ago, Nvidia had a major presence in Taiwan—its chips are manufactured there—and sometimes Nvidia employees would stop by the bar and good-naturedly ask the bartenders about their CEO’s son. At the bar, Spencer didn’t much discuss Nvidia or his father, who was not yet a celebrity and source of national pride in Taiwan, as he is today. However, Spencer did sometimes talk about his upbringing. “Spencer once told me he has known how to buy stocks since he was eight,” one former employee said.
In at least one way, Spencer tried to emulate his father while running the establishment: Each week, he led a managers’ meeting where employees shared their “top five things,” a list of current priorities, according to a former bartender. That’s seemingly a direct lift from his father’s playbook: For years, Nvidia employees have sent the CEO weekly emails outlining their own “top five things.”
In 2019, both Madison and Spencer started onto a path toward joining their father at Nvidia, enrolling in a six-week, online program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a focus on artificial intelligence.
The same year, Madison began an MBA program at London Business School, a top-tier school known for a large number of international students. Spencer ran the bar through the pandemic until 2021, when he closed its doors after seven years. Later that year, he started his MBA at New York University.
When Madison started business school, it only took a few weeks before many of her classmates began gossiping about her high-profile father. Several of them remember hearing that she flew on a private jet to a group ski trip in France.
But Madison didn’t talk about her father or about a potential future at Nvidia with friends, according to six people in her class. And they also tended not to ask her about it because they felt it would likely make her uncomfortable.
Back in New York, Spencer’s classmates were a bit more oblivious. On orientation day, faculty introduced Spencer as someone who had run a bar in Taipei, and interest in his background as a cocktail bar owner made him a popular figure, according to three classmates.
The Nvidia connection didn’t click for some until a group project led some to Jensen Huang’s Wikipedia page, and people realized the Spencer Haung in their class was a relative. (Two classmates didn’t learn Spencer was Jensen’s son until contacted by The Information.)
In the summer of 2020, while at London Business School, Madison interned at Nvidia in the marketing department and was then offered a full-time role in the marketing department. Several months later, she moved into Nvidia’s Omniverse business unit, which is responsible for Nvidia’s 3D design and simulation software products, as a product marketing manager.
Omniverse is a much smaller business than Nvidia’s chip and data center business, which makes up the majority of its revenue. Still, it is a key strategic bet for Jensen.
A key part of Omniverse involves digital twins—software that lets businesses simulate the design of a factory before actually putting any shovels in the ground. This business is important to Jensen because he believes simulations of the physical world will be immensely powerful, helping to usher in a new wave of AI for robotics, manufacturing and cars. (Such a boom would also increase demand for Nvidia products by new customers.)
From the outside, one might view putting Madison in Omniverse as a way to keep her out of the spotlight, but employees say it was a sign her father trusted her. He has long been deeply focused on growing Nvidia beyond its core business of selling graphics processing units, and he believed Madison could handle it.
Since Spencer came to Nvidia in 2022, he too has worked in another area of emerging interest for Jensen: robotics simulation. As a product line manager, Spencer oversees groups working on developing AI models for robots, as well as simulation software that aims to help robots better understand the world.
CEO Jensen Huang shows off Nvidia’s robotics work at a Paris conference in June. (Getty Images)
Employees say Madison is the more visible and influential of the two siblings at Nvidia. Her role has broadened over the past few years, and she gets involved in a number of different aspects of the business.
Her pay, too, has grown substantially—from around $160,000 annually in 2021 to more than $1 million in total compensation last year, according to Nvidia’s latest proxy filings with the SEC, which requires Nvidia to disclose this information because they are close family members of the CEO.
In March, Madison was promoted to senior director—one step below vice president—and reports to Rev Lebaredian, who reports to Jensen. She’s known by colleagues as someone who works long hours and will reply to emails within minutes. (“She wants to never be perceived as not earning what she’s achieved,” said Dessi Vatcheva, Madison’s close friend and former business school classmate.)
Madison has displayed an expansive interest in the business. A former employee who worked closely with her said that even though she wasn’t responsible for Omniverse’s sales goals, Madison sometimes checked in with salespeople and asked them about their progress.
She isn’t afraid to tell people they are not meeting her expectations or they are disappointing her, half a dozen former employees said. (Her father is known for doing the same.) Madison has sometimes abruptly logged off virtual meetings, which left co-workers feeling like she was frustrated with them, according to two people who have been in these meetings.
Madison’s big personality has made Spencer look more unassuming, according to several people who have worked with him. Colleagues said they couldn’t imagine Spencer getting upset with them or being as intense, for instance.
Madison and Spencer are not household names in the U.S. But in Taiwan, their presence at the family firm hasn’t gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, Madison traveled to Taipei to attend the Computex conference, a major event that draws tens of thousands of attendees.
Wearing a baby-blue pantsuit and crisp white sneakers, she walked the expo floor, greeting companies and stopping for pictures. (Also in attendance: Madison’s boyfriend, Nico Caprez, a London Business School classmate who joined Nvidia as a corporate development manager in February 2024.)
“She is a rock star,” said one attendee. “We all know she is Jensen’s daughter.”
