Jensen Huang: Why a personal scandal for the face of the AI boom has provoked a national security scare

Huang founded Nvidia with fellow electrical engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993.

The company was originally known for chips that process graphics, particularly for computer games.

"In 2012 these machine learning neural net researchers started to use it for that purpose and Jensen immediately recognised that this was going to be a massive industry and the future of computing. He began to pour enormous amounts of resources into building what was essentially the AI hardware market," says Witt.

"Today when we think of that, we think of these giant data centres - none of that existed. There were no customers for the stuff he was building.