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Jensen Huang, the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, made $15.6 billion on Thursday, Aug. 27, without selling anything.
Shares in the American chipmaker rose about 9% after it reported second-quarter results, lifting Huang's fortune to $196.8 billion and moving him into sixth place on the Forbes real-time billionaires list. He passed Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, on $196.2 billion, and Larry Ellison of Oracle, on $194.9 billion.
The gain made him the day's biggest winner among the world's billionaires. It came entirely from the roughly 3% of Nvidia he has held since taking the company public in 1999.
What moved the stock was a forecast rather than the quarter itself. Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer, told analysts the company expects revenue growth of 70% in its 2028 financial year, which runs from February 2027 to January 2028. Wall Street had been modelling 44%.
Huang said demand was much greater than 70% and that the constraint is how much Nvidia can supply rather than how much customers want. He also acknowledged the company had never before forecast a year ahead, saying it now has considerably better visibility.
Analysts moved fast. Raymond James raised its price target on the stock to $515 from $352, the most bullish on the street. Bernstein went to $400 from $315, and JPMorgan to $320 from $280.
Nvidia closed at $227.98, near its all-time high of $236.54, pushing the company's market value back above $5.5 trillion.
The position Huang has just taken is unstable, and he has held it before. Forbes had him seventh in February, ahead of Bernard Arnault, when Ellison was $37.2 billion ahead of him. Ellison overtook him again in early August as Nvidia shares fell. On Aug. 1, Forbes put Huang at $174 billion, and Bloomberg had him at $182 billion and eighth in the world in mid-August.
He now sits $46.6 billion behind Michael Dell, who is fifth on $243.4 billion, and less than $3 billion ahead of the two men he just passed. One bad session would put him back below both.
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem and has run it ever since. The company made graphics chips for video games for two decades before the same architecture turned out to be what artificial intelligence models needed. It became the first company ever valued at $5 trillion in October, and controls roughly 90% of the market for the highest-end AI chips.
Nvidia has been spending heavily. It has pledged $105 billion toward an OpenAI data centre in Ohio, and The Information reported this week that it has agreed to buy the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Nvidia invested $235 million in Hugging Face in 2023, when the company was valued at $4.5 billion.
Huang's fortune has risen roughly $27.5 billion this calendar year, on a stock up 18% over the same period.
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