The Jensen Huang Family Tree, Explained

Here is one of the strangest facts in the AI boom: the two CEOs racing to build the chips that power it are family. NVIDIA's Jensen Huang and AMD's Lisa Su are first cousins once removed — both born in Tainan, Taiwan, both at the top of rival semiconductor giants. This guide walks through who's who, from the two engineer-immigrant households that produced them to the children now working at NVIDIA.

How to read the graph

Each circle is a person. Lines connect parents to children, and spouses to each other. The single sibling link in the top row — between Jensen's mother and Lisa Su's grandfather — is the bridge that makes the two CEOs relatives. Click a node to focus on it; drag to rearrange the layout.

Generation 1 — the engineer-immigrant parents

Jensen's father, Huang Hsing-tai, was a chemical engineer who trained briefly at an air-conditioning company in New York in the late 1960s — the trip that convinced him to send his sons to America. His mother, Lo Tsai-hsiu, was a schoolteacher who taught the boys English by drilling them on ten randomly-picked dictionary words a day. She was also the youngest sister of Lisa Su's maternal grandfather — and that single sibling tie is the whole reason these two families share a tree.

Generation 2 — Jensen, his brother, and a first cousin

Jensen and his older brother Jeff emigrated together in 1973. An uncle in Tacoma mistakenly enrolled them at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky — a reform school, not the college-prep boarding school he'd imagined. Jensen later met his wife, Lori, as his engineering lab partner at Oregon State. On the other branch sits Sandy Lo, Jensen's first cousin and Lisa Su's mother, who married Su Chun-hwai — a statistician for the New York City government after the family settled in Queens.

Generation 3 — children and a CEO cousin

NVIDIA is, in part, a family business: Jensen and Lori's children both work there. Spencer is a product manager who once ran a Taipei bar that made Forbes' Asia's-Top-50 list; Madison is a director of product marketing. And one generation down the Lo–Su branch is Lisa Su herself — the MIT-trained engineer who turned AMD around with Ryzen and EPYC, and Jensen's first cousin once removed.

A century in dates

Generation by generation

How the two CEOs connect

The shortest path from Lisa Su's grandfather to Lisa herself runs through three generations — and his sister is Jensen's mother. Follow that line and the cousin relationship stops being a headline and becomes a simple chain of parents and children.