Nvidia's Jensen Huang Doesn't Want You To Order A Shake At Denny's, 'Get A Coke' He Says

Jensen Huang says bussing tables at Denny's as a shy teenager taught him the people skills that helped him co-found Nvidia NVDA, now an AI colossus worth roughly $3 trillion.

What Happened: Speaking on Hewlett-Packard's "The Moment" show back in October 2023, he added that the all-night diner doubled as the brainstorming lab where he and two friends "talked me into building Nvidia."

"My job at Denny's… I was incredibly shy and it got me to be able to interact with people a lot better," Huang recalled, praising the chain's bottomless coffee for fueling their late-night design sessions.

He and co-founders Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky "had kids and dog," so they commandeered a booth near their San Jose homes to sketch out what became the first GeForce chip in 1993.

See also: Trump Decides To Bypass Individual Trade Deals — New Tariff Rates To Be Set Unilaterally And Notified Through ‘Letters’

Three decades later, Huang still wraps sausages in pancakes — “This is exactly how I eat a pancake, to this very day,” he laughed — and tries to dissuade milkshake orders because “nothing kills me more than when somebody orders a shake.”

Denny's has since dedicated that corner booth to Nvidia's origin story, a tribute Huang calls “the real birthplace of trillion-dollar silicon.”

What To Know: The former busboy now ranks 16th on Forbes' billionaires list, with a fortune topping $116 billion. Nvidia's shares have surged on demand for its H100 and upcoming Blackwell GPUs, positioning the firm to capture a projected $400 billion slice of data-center spending next year.

Similar to Nvidia, Reddit traces its spark to an eatery too — a 2005 after-class stop at a Waffle House in Charlottesville, where University of Virginia roommates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman ditched LSAT plans, brainstormed a new online hub and soon pitched the idea to Y Combinator, laying the groundwork for what would become "the front page of the internet."

Image via Shutterstock

Read next: Elizabeth Warren Torches DOGE’s Social Security Fraud Claims Pointing At Internal Memo Discovery, Says ‘Elon Musk, JD Vance, And Trump Are Lying’