{"id":42205,"date":"2023-11-05T00:11:19","date_gmt":"2023-11-05T00:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innodebt.com\/business\/two-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-tech-execs-come-from-the-same-taiwanese-family\/"},"modified":"2023-11-05T00:11:23","modified_gmt":"2023-11-05T00:11:23","slug":"two-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-tech-execs-come-from-the-same-taiwanese-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/innodebt.com\/?p=42205","title":{"rendered":"Two of the world\u2019s most powerful tech execs come from the same Taiwanese family"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n Jensen Huang and Lisa Su have a lot in common.\n <\/p>\n

\n The chief executives of Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD) aren\u2019t just two of the most powerful people in the global AI chip industry, they\u2019re also family.\n <\/p>\n

\n The connection was first acknowledged by Su in 2020, and more recently, has been fleshed out in detail by Jean Wu, a Taiwanese genealogist.\n <\/p>\n

\n The two didn\u2019t grow up together, which may make it easier considering they now compete against each other atop one of the world\u2019s most closely-watched sectors.\n <\/p>\n

\n Theirs is a shared family history with roots in Taiwan, an island increasingly\u00a0caught between\u00a0the United States and China, as the two nations battle for supremacy in high tech.\n <\/p>\n

\n According to Wu, a former financial journalist who now focuses on researching corporate families, Huang is Su\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>\u201cbiao jiu,\u201d <\/em><\/strong>in Mandarin Chinese. In Western terms, they are first cousins once removed, which refers to cousins separated by a generation, she told CNN.\n <\/p>\n

\n To be exact, Su is Huang\u2019s uncle\u2019s granddaughter, said Wu, who described identifying their relationship by researching public records, newspaper clippings and yearbooks, as well as interviewing a close family member of Huang\u2019s.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe are distant relatives,\u201d Su said with a smile,\u00a0when asked at a Consumer Technology Association (CTA) event in 2020.\n <\/p>\n

\n An Nvidia spokesperson also confirmed that Huang was related to Su as a distant cousin through his mother\u2019s side of the family. Huang declined to comment for this story, while Su did not respond to a request for comment.\n <\/p>\n

\n The link has become a point of fascination for industry watchers.\n <\/p>\n

\n In Taiwan, where Su and Huang were born six years apart and now enjoy rockstar status, the topic has been featured on local news broadcasts.\u00a0<\/strong>Online, users\u00a0of Reddit and\u00a0other forums have buzzed over the coincidence, while\u00a0sketches\u00a0of purported family trees have circulated on social media.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI was really surprised,\u201d Wu said of her discovery. \u201cI think people in Taiwan are happy about it because the world finally sees Taiwan.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Christopher Miller, author of \u201cChip War: The Fight for the World\u2019s Most Critical Technology,\u201d said he was initially astonished, too.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cBut in other ways, it\u2019s not surprising to find two people of Taiwanese descent at the absolute center of the chip industry,\u201d he told CNN. \u201cBecause although Taiwan is a long way from Silicon Valley, in fact, there\u2019s really no two parts of the world that are more closely networked in terms of family ties, in terms of business ties, in terms of educational ties.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

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\n Taiwan has a long tradition of producing world-leading hardware that has propped up its economy, noted Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.\n <\/p>\n

\n She credited companies such as chipmaker TSMC (TSM) and electronics manufacturers ASUS, Acer and Foxconn, as leading the way, encouraging many young people to aspire to work as tech engineers.\n <\/p>\n

\n Miller echoed that view. \u201cFor almost half a century now, Taiwan\u2019s economy has been centered on electronics production, chip assembly, chip manufacturing, chip design, everything semiconductors. And if you look at Taiwan\u2019s economy today, semiconductors are the largest export,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThat means when young people are entering university, when they think about potential career paths, semiconductors are one of the most popular choices.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Su and Huang were no exception, even as they were mostly raised abroad.\n <\/p>\n

\n According to Nvidia, Huang was born in 1963 in Taipei before moving to the southern city of Tainan. His family later relocated to Thailand for his father\u2019s job at an oil refinery.\n <\/p>\n

\n When Huang was nine, political unrest in the Southeast Asian country led his parents to send him and his brother to live briefly with relatives in Washington state, who then sent the siblings to boarding school in Kentucky.\n <\/p>\n

\n Meanwhile, Su was born in Tainan in 1969. She headed to the United States earlier, immigrating to New York City at the age of 3.\n <\/p>\n

\n Though the two grew up far away from one another, they went on to similar paths as adults.\n <\/p>\n

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\n They picked the same field of study \u2014 electrical engineering \u2014 with Su\u00a0studying\u00a0at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Huang\u00a0attending\u00a0Oregon State University and Stanford University.\n <\/p>\n

\n Later, as they landed in the fast-moving world of semiconductors, they worked at different companies, but did share one employer.\n <\/p>\n

\n Prior to starting Nvidia in 1993, Huang worked at AMD as a microprocessor designer. Su, of course,\u00a0joined AMD too, nearly two decades later, as senior vice president and was ultimately\u00a0credited with turning around\u00a0the company.\n <\/p>\n

\n Now, both executives are based in Santa Clara, California, with their respective headquarters just a 5-minute drive apart.\n <\/p>\n

\n Their companies sell hardware and software to the world\u2019s leading tech companies, in an industry poised to reach\u00a0$1 trillion\u00a0in value by 2030, according to McKinsey. In its most recent\u00a0annual report, AMD named Nvidia as a top competitor in two of its four main lines of business: gaming and data centers.\n <\/p>\n

\n The firms were once best known by gamers for selling GPUs \u2014 graphic processing units \u2014 that display visuals in video games, helping them come to life. While the two still compete in the space, their GPUs are now also being used to power generative AI, the technology that underpins newly popular systems such as ChatGPT.\n <\/p>\n

\n Nvidia\u2019s H100 GPUs, for instance, have been used by OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, to train its language model, according to the chipmaker. Those components have been compared to AMD\u2019s recently launched MI300X, which it bills as \u201cthe world\u2019s most advanced accelerator for generative AI.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n AMD said Tuesday while reporting earnings that <\/strong>it expects GPUs to bring in more than $2 billion in revenue in 2024, and that the MI300 series was forecast to become \u201cthe fastest product <\/strong>to ramp to $1 billion in sales in AMD history.\u201d The robust projections sent AMD\u2019s stock up nearly 10% the next day.\n <\/p>\n

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\n The two also compete in selling gear for data centers, the physical facilities used to store troves of electronic information. They rely on chips such as central processing units (CPUs), which help computers run operating systems and programs smoothly, and data processing units (DPUs), which free up space on computers so users can perform multiple tasks at a time. AMD sells both components to businesses, as does Nvidia.\n <\/p>\n

\n In recent years, the companies have gained more mainstream recognition for providing cutting-edge technology that promises to reshape society. The processors they make are increasingly being used to help run electric cars, in addition to AI systems, bolstering a reach that had already encompassed virtually everything from PCs to PlayStations.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI would say anyone who logs on the internet is likely touching not just one, but dozens and hundreds of Nvidia and AMD chips,\u201d said Miller.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cMost people never think about AMD or Nvidia because they never see the chips that these companies produce. But in fact, in your day-to-day life, you likely rely on both Nvidia and AMD.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The AI boom in particular has supercharged shares of Nvidia, which is seen at the forefront of the tech required to train artificial intelligence. As a result, Nvidia\u2019s stock has enjoyed a\u00a0massive rally, climbing 208% <\/strong>so far this year.\n <\/p>\n

\n AMD\u2019s shares have also popped 73% to date in 2023, though the company is much smaller than Nvidia, Miller noted.\n <\/p>\n

\n Meanwhile, Su has emerged as one of America\u2019s highest paid executives, ranking as the\u00a0best paid\u00a0female CEO in the S&P 500 last year. She\u00a0topped\u00a0the list for both male and female CEOs of companies in the index in 2019, according to joint reviews by executive compensation analysis firm Equilar and the Associated Press.\n <\/p>\n