Welcome to the centibillionaire club, Jensen and Lori Huang.
The Nvidia cofounder and CEO and his wife are now among earth’s wealthiest dozen-plus residents, thanks to the A.I. boom that last month turned the chip maker — of which he owns roughly 3% — briefly into the world’s most valuable public company.
The 61-year-old Jensen Huang shows no signs of taking his focus off leading the company, yet the couple’s $100 billion-plus fortune is bound to draw attention to what they’re doing to give back. And Nvidia’s surging stock price has already turned their large but sleepy foundation into a behemoth.
The Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation — which uses an alternative romanization for Jensen’s first name — reported assets of just over $1 billion to the IRS at the end of 2022, and nearly all of that was in Nvidia stock.
Today, assuming some shares have been sold to meet payout and no new donations, the Palo Alto-based grantmaker’s endowment will likely have skyrocketed in unison with the company’s shares to around $8 billion, making it one of the top 20 largest in the nation, according to John Seitz, founder and CEO of FoundationMark.
Nvidia’s meteoric rise presents two major questions for the couple’s philanthropy. First is a more immediate concern: Who will they favor as they double and triple their foundation payout to match its growing assets? (Assuming they do keep up at all.) To date, their giving has mostly consisted of cutting big checks to a donor-advised fund, along with some grants to universities. But maybe their recent gains will prompt a fresh chapter.
Second is a more philosophical matter: What kind of philanthropists will they be? This is not an entirely new question — the Huangs have been billionaires for years — but the stakes are now even higher. The ultra-wealthy men (they’re nearly all men) they now call peers — see Bill Gates, Larry Page, Elon Musk — offer dramatically different case studies in possible philanthropic paths.
The Huangs are now nearly twice as wealthy as Charles Koch, as well as richer than every one of the Waltons. That’s a lot of potential influence. Centibillionaires like Michael Bloomberg have created massive philanthropic operations, while others like Larry Ellison have done little at all. What might be next for the Huangs? Here’s what the public record shows.
Who will benefit as the Huangs’ foundation ratchets up its payout?
Founded in 2007, the Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation has been a very quiet operation. It has neither any listed staff nor a website. For its first nine years, it never made more than one grant annually, and as of its most recent tax filing, had yet to give out over eight awards in a single year.
As my colleague Philip Rojc observed in a detailed profile in 2021, following a pandemic-era surge in the Huangs’ fortune, there’s not much to report. The foundation’s largest grants had gone into virtual black holes: donor-advised funds. The couple’s few public gifts, at the time of his reporting, followed a “fairly conventional” approach to philanthropy, with most going to universities — including Oregon State (where the couple met in a lab), Stanford and Johns Hopkins.
In the years since, very little has changed, except that the Huangs have ramped up support for their alma mater. Their foundation sent $14 million to OSU between 2020 and 2022, and pledged $40 million for future years, most of it to support a $213 million, 143,000-square-foot research and education facility named for the couple: the Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex.
Other recent grants are intriguing — including to the Living Through Giving Foundation, Crisis Text Line, Asia Society, Mental Health Innovations — but their small size and one-off nature makes it difficult to draw any conclusions about long-term intent. These smaller gifts also pale next to the couple’s continued preference to send their largest awards to donor-advised funds.
The foundation put $55 million into a Schwab Charitable Fund DAF in 2022. The year before, it sent $27 million to the GE Force Fund, which is referred to in earlier filings as a Schwab Charitable DAF, and appears to be named for Nvidia’s popular line of GeForce graphics cards. Each of those transfers accounted for more than 80% of the foundation’s giving in that year.
There’s lots of reasons why the Huangs or anyone else might send money to a donor-advised fund. Some donors might want the help of a DAF sponsor’s back-end services in making grants, or want to make their awards privately, or are simply using them to meet the foundation’s payout requirements. Barring more disclosure from the couple, it’s impossible to know what the case is here. DAFs have virtually no payout or transparency requirements. Likewise, it is unknown whether any of that money — or the tens of millions of dollars sent to DAFs in prior years — has even reached working charities.
It’s also conceivable that the Huangs used a DAF to hold onto Nvidia stock. Bloomberg News reported last week that Schwab holds $4.4 billion in Nvidia shares across all its DAFs, an amount that includes stock the Huangs donated to their GE Force Fund there, according to an unnamed source. This could mean billions more dollars for charity, as those pre-boom contributions have now soared in value. But that’s cold comfort to nonprofits that went without support in past years, even as the Huangs got tax breaks. And the fates of once-dominant tech giants — Cisco, Motorola, IBM — are a long-term reminder that the future is, of course, unpredictable.
In sum, there’s too little evidence to know who might benefit from the Huangs’ foundation’s new riches. We don’t even know who’s already benefiting, if anyone, from all that DAF money. If the operation’s assets stay around $8 billion, payout will have to rise to $400 million a year to meet the mandated 5% minimum, an amount that is many times more than than the foundation’s past annual grantmaking. We might reasonably guess that universities — and particularly OSU — will get some big new awards. But it’s hard to say where the rest might land. Perhaps the question should not be who will benefit from that new bounty, but whether the couple will let us know at all.
Will the Huangs follow Gates? Musk? Their own path?
A quick look at their new peers will show the Huangs that there’s no template for centibillionaire philanthropy. Gates’ foundation has offices around the world, more than 2,000 staff, grants $9 billion a year (and may ramp that up further), and carries more weight in the world of global health and development than most sovereign nations. Musk’s, meanwhile, has no listed employees, a 33-word website and has sent most of its grants to its founder’s own projects — while failing to consistently come close to meeting the 5% annual payout threshold.
Perhaps the closest analog for the Huangs’ grantmaking to date is Google co-founder Larry Page. His foundation — which has about $5 billion in assets — has sent some 97.8% of its grants to a DAF in recent years. The Huangs are not quite at that level, but they’re close. Between 2018 and 2022, nearly 87 cents out of every dollar they granted went to a DAF.
Whether they continue down that path or take another (more well-lit) trail could have repercussions well beyond them. With the multitrillion-dollar Great Wealth Transfer underway, the choices of ultra-rich tech couples like the Huangs may well influence other billionaires, not to mention the legions of merely wealthy individuals and couples watching their lead. Huang, after all, was on Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list this year — his second appearance.
Huang is in his early 60s, and we’ve seen other mega givers launch their philanthropic chapters around that age. Another centibillionaire couple, Steve and Connie Ballmer, have accelerated their giving over recent years, including launching a growing climate portfolio. Admittedly, much of that push has come since Steve Ballmer, who is now 68, stepped down from Microsoft in 2014. Jensen Huang appears nowhere close to a similar move.
It’s also possible, if the status quo holds, to imagine the Huangs as the latest drop in a tide of opaque megadonor giving that ends in new regulation – and possibly some much-need transparency. Recent efforts at philanthropic reform have been largely about payout or partisan politics. But there does seem to be bipartisan support for changes to DAFs. If the winners of the A.I. boom continue to receive foundation-enabled tax relief while using those accounts to sidestep any actual grantmaking, or at least disclosure, that’s one more argument for philanthropy reform advocates to draw on.
What the Huangs do in the coming months and years with their fortune will hardly settle these debates. But given their new power and prominence, their actions will certainly be closely watched.
