Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gets rock star treatment from India’s tech enthusiasts

MUMBAI: Nvidia’s leather-jacket-clad CEO Jensen Huang got a rock star welcome at the company’s AI summit in India on Thursday (Oct 24), with passes sold out and tech enthusiasts spending thousands of rupees to travel to the event.

The reception Huang received in India’s commercial capital Mumbai was reminiscent of the “Jensanity” seen in other parts of the world, especially Taiwan, as his popularity climbs with Nvidia’s soaring earnings and multi-trillion dollar market valuation.

The event, where the US company unveiled plans to supply Reliance Industries and other Indian firms with its AI chips, had to be delayed for more than half an hour due to the crowd that one Nvidia employee said was “easily a few thousand”.

“This was Coldplay, but for tech bros. The passes were all sold out,” Yuvraj Mehta, a robotics engineer for an AI startup that is part of the Nvidia incubation program said, referring to the British rock band.

Two engineers, who declined to be named, said they had spent more than 40,000 rupees (US$476) in total to travel to Mumbai to attend the summit from Surat in the Western state of Gujarat and Gurgaon in the northern state of Haryana.

Big Tech CEOs enjoy strong popularity in India, where engineering degrees from colleges including the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are considered a path to prosperity.

But some attendees said that even among them Huang – who has built Nvidia as the dominant provider of the processors essential to generative AI – stands out.

“He’s a hero”. “He’s a hero in the academic and student communities, and the AI ecosystem community,” said Akash Bansal, founder of robotics startup Orangewood Labs.