Huang Renxun, known as the "Godfather of Artificial Intelligence", is about to become a member of the American Academy of Engineering.
On February 6th local time, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) of the United States announced a list of new academicians for 2024, including 114 new academicians and 21 international academicians, with Nvidia founder and CEO Huang Renxun prominently listed.
NAE stated that as the co-founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA, Huang Renxun's main reason for being selected as an academician of the American Academy of Engineering is: "He propelled the AI revolution with high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs)."
As a result, Huang Renxun became the third technology industry leader to be elected as a member of the American Academy of Engineering, following Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, who were elected in 2022, none of whom received a doctoral degree.
Source: NAE official website
NAE stated that granting the status of an academician of the Academy of Engineering is to recognize "individuals who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, or education," including "those who have made significant contributions to engineering literature," as well as "those who have opened up new and developing technological fields, made significant progress in traditional engineering fields, or developed/implemented innovative engineering education methods.".
The annual election for new academicians begins in December, and the final vote takes place in January. The new academician will officially join the NAE annual conference on September 29, 2024.
In the list of nominees, you can also see the names of many industry celebrities, such as Nayak Pandurang, Vice President of Google Search Engine, Mattias Steffen, Chief Quantum Architect at IBM, Ion Stoica, Founder and Executive Chairman of AI data company Databricks, as well as two directors from Apple and a scientist from Microsoft, and so on.
At present, the total number of academicians of the American Academy of Engineering has reached 2310, and the total number of international academicians has reached 332. Based on the list of newly added academicians in recent years, it can be seen that the proportion of industry professionals is gradually increasing, covering a wider range of technical fields.
With the help of the AI craze in the past two years, NVDA's high-performance GPUs have almost become a necessity for researching AI, driving the company's market value to soar and earning Huang Renxun both fame and fortune. Last December, Huang Renxun was listed by Forbes as the 10th richest billionaire in 2023, with a current value of $43.6 billion, an increase of $29.8 billion in 2023.
At that time, Forbes commented that no one could better reflect the prosperity of AI than Huang Renxun. As the leader of AI chips, Nvidia's stock price surged by over 230% in 2023, pushing its market value to $1.2 trillion and pushing Huang Renxun into the top 20 billionaires in the United States.
After entering 2024, Nvidia's momentum remains strong, and its stock price has repeatedly set new historical highs. On February 5th, Nvidia's stock price surged to $690 per share, with a total market value of $1.71 trillion, approaching the parent companies of Amazon and Google, Alphabet. The market expects that with such an upward trend, Nvidia may soon become the world's third-largest technology giant in terms of market value, second only to Microsoft and Apple.
On February 6th, Nvidia fell 1.6% to close at $682.23 per share, with a total market value of $1.69 trillion. Since the beginning of the year, Nvidia's stock price has risen by 41.64%.