(Yicai) March 21 -- After attending the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Yicai took the opportunity to drop by the US chipmaker’s headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley hoping to gain some insight into what made it only the third US company to achieve a market value of more than USD2 trillion.

Nvidia sank USD1 billion into building its massive Santa Clara HQ, which opened in early 2022. Its signature triangular design is evident everywhere inside and outside of the Endeavor and the Voyager buildings, both of which were designed using computer algorithms.

An Nvidia employee pointed out that the polygons rendered in graphics are based on triangles. It is said that Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s billionaire co-founder and chief executive, convinced staff to use triangles instead of quadrilaterals because triangles are an optimal solution that can be changed into any shape, the person noted.

Huang makes good use of newly recruited graduates, putting them in charge of big projects because lack of experience means no boundaries, according to the employee.

A young software engineer at Nvidia told Yicai that before 2019 he was aware that Nvidia was a big and powerful business, but he had no idea what it did. Almost everyone on the planet is talking about the company now, he added.

Huang believes his success is due to the many hardships he faced when he was young, a person who worked with the 61-year-old told Yicai. Those hardships and ordeals made him more resilient, enabling him to work extremely hard and persist in achieving his goals, the person said.

That has paid off. The company that the Taiwan-born American electrical engineer set up in 1993 is now worth USD2.26 trillion, not far off the nominal gross domestic product of France. Huang himself is worth over USD77 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In his youth, Huang worked in US diner chain Denny’s, where he brainstormed with his partners around a table and set up Nvidia. According to Huang, working there taught him humility, hard work, empathy, and how to please, all of which are important in making a living.

At Nvidia’s tech conference this year, the company unveiled Blackwell, its next-generation artificial intelligence chip architecture. Driven by the new chip, the firm’s market cap will climb to USD3 trillion, according to market insiders. The five-day event ends today.

Editor: Martin Kadiev