In the summer of 2007, Jensen Huang and his wife Lori established the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation with an initial donation of 370,000 NVIDIA shares, then worth $12.6 million. Today, that foundation is worth around $12.8 billion, according to Celebrity Net Worth, making it one of the largest charitable foundations on the planet — even though almost nobody has heard of it.
The 2007 Donation
NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The company went public on January 22, 1999, and ended its first day of trading with a market capitalisation of $550 million. Its graphics processors became the standard for high-performance PC gaming, and the market cap topped $1 billion in January 2000, doubled a few months later and reached about $3.5 billion before the dot-com bubble burst.
The early 2000s were harder. After briefly nearing $7 billion in value, NVIDIA’s momentum stalled amid the broader tech crash and an SEC inquiry into its accounting practices. By September 2002, its market cap had plunged to roughly $870 million. The company gradually regained its footing with new GPU architectures, growing demand for 3D gaming and major console partnerships with Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation 3. By 2004, NVIDIA had stabilised around the $2–3 billion range, and by 2006 it surged past $10 billion for the first time. In mid-2007, its value reached roughly $15 billion.
With NVIDIA thriving again and its stock climbing to new highs, Huang and Lori began reflecting on how to use their wealth for a greater purpose. That summer they established the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, seeded with the 370,000 shares worth $12.6 million. Compared with the multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley foundations launched with Hewlett-Packard, Intel, eBay, Dell and Google fortunes, it was a modest start.
From $12.6 Million to $12.8 Billion
Over the next 17 years, NVIDIA’s stock went, in Celebrity Net Worth’s words, “absolutely parabolic”, and the company executed three stock splits. Those splits turned the Huangs’ original 370,000 shares into roughly 14.8 million today. At a $6 trillion market capitalisation, that initial donation alone would be worth $2.76 billion.
The Huangs have continued to add to the foundation’s holdings. In June 2025, they contributed another 440,000 shares, valued at approximately $60 million at the time of transfer. According to its latest filing, the foundation held 68.5 million NVIDIA shares at the end of 2023, and with the June 2025 transfer it is probably safe to call it 69 million today. At a $4.5 trillion valuation, those 69 million shares are worth around $12.8 billion.
That is enough to rank the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation among the largest charitable foundations in the world. Yet it does not appear on Wikipedia’s ranking of the world’s largest foundations at all. The reason is simple: the foundation keeps a remarkably low profile. It has no website, no public address and no digital footprint beyond mandatory filings. A LinkedIn search for employees turns up nothing. For comparison, the Ford Foundation employs 423 full-time people and the Gates Foundation employs more than 2,000. The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation employs zero people.
How the Foundation Gives
Like many modern tech philanthropists, the Huangs have relied heavily on donor-advised funds as a vehicle for giving. In 2023, roughly 77% of the foundation’s disbursements — about $46 million — went to a Schwab-managed donor-advised fund. These accounts are popular with wealthy donors because they allow an immediate tax deduction while postponing the actual deployment of funds, and they are not required to publicly disclose where their eventual grants go.
The Huangs have also made several major direct gifts. In 2022, they pledged $50 million to Oregon State University, their alma mater, to fund a new research and education complex. In early 2025, they announced a $22.5 million grant to the California College of the Arts, aimed at strengthening the school’s endowment and academic programs. Public records show additional support for Stanford University and selected community and mental health organisations.
As the foundation’s assets continue to grow, so will the required level of annual giving. United States law requires private foundations to distribute at least 5% of their assets each year. Based on the company’s 2024 average market cap, the foundation likely had to distribute around $350 million this year to meet its 5% minimum. If NVIDIA maintains a market capitalisation above $6 trillion, next year the foundation will be required to distribute $860 million — an amount that would be a generational war chest for most charities, and could soon be the Huangs’ annual minimum.
Huang’s Own Fortune — and His Co-Founders
Jensen Huang himself owns 3.5% of NVIDIA, which at a $5 trillion market cap gives him a net worth of around $150 billion, according to Celebrity Net Worth. His two co-founders took very different paths. Chris Malachowsky still works at the company as an NVIDIA Fellow, deeply involved in research and high-performance computing. If he still owned his original 10% stake, he would be worth $500 billion today.
Curtis Priem walked away two decades ago and gave nearly all of his fortune to his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After transferring most of his NVIDIA stock to a charitable foundation in 1999, he went on to donate more than $275 million to RPI, including a $40 million performing-arts centre that bears his name and a $95 million pledge to bring an IBM Quantum System One computer to campus. At one point he owned 12.8% of NVIDIA; if he still owned that much, he would be worth $768 billion. According to a November 2023 Forbes profile, he was worth around $30 million at that point.
Net worth figures are estimates only, based on public sources.
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