Jensen Huang's net worth crosses $200 billion, becomes world's 7th-richest person as Nvidia shares hit record

Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., has surpassed the $200 billion mark in net worth as shares of the artificial intelligence chipmaker hit a record high.

Huang’s net worth stood at an estimated $203.2 billion on Friday morning, making him the seventh-richest person in the world, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaire estimates. His fortune rose by $3.4 billion during the session as Nvidia shares climbed above $237 to a fresh all-time high.

Nvidia shares later eased from the peak but remained up nearly 2% at $235.39 around 11:45 a.m. EDT, Forbes reported.

Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, owns about 4% of the company. His fortune has surged alongside Nvidia’s transformation into the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, driven by demand for chips used in artificial intelligence.

Why are Nvidia shares rising now?

The rally has been buoyed in recent weeks by optimism that AI agents like Meta Platforms Inc.’s Muse could drive increased demand for semiconductors. Shares got a further boost after Nvidia announced Monday that it was increasing the size of its buyback plan by a record $150 billion, a Bloomberg report said

Nvidia’s rebound comes after months of quickly shifting sentiment around the state of the AI landscape, including questions over the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by firms on its infrastructure and safety risks that the technology could pose to humanity.

The Santa Clara, California-based chip developer unveiled a new double-layered AI security system on Monday, meant to stop AI agents from going awry. Nvidia said the new system would have stopped the recent breach of Hugging Face by OpenAI’s models — at a time when investors have become more concerned with AI safety.

However, Nvidia's mammoth financing plan has sparked debate on Wall Street over how much its advanced chips and the infrastructure around them are worth.

Some lenders want higher guarantees than the company originally outlined, even for Nvidia's industry-leading AI processing power, as they try to calculate how long revenue from its chips will last, banking sources and credit managers told Reuters.

All told, Nvidia shares have gained about 27% so far this year, on track for their fourth consecutive year of double-digit returns. Its market capitalization now stands at roughly $5.7 trillion, leaving it less than $300 billion away from becoming the first company in history to hit the $6 trillion level.

(With inputs from Forbes, Bloomberg and Reuters)