President Donald Trump presented the medal at the “Science: A New Golden Age” summit in Washington.
The White House honored Huang "for advancing the graphics processing unit into a general-purpose computing architecture," citing his chip and software designs.
"Our next recipient is a man whose determination laid the foundations for the explosion of superintelligence and put America at the front of the race," Trump said, adding that "the entire world is now running on Nvidia."
GPUs were designed to render video game graphics, but their knack for running many calculations at once proved ideal for scientific computing and AI.
Nvidia’s CUDA platform, launched in 2006, let researchers harness that power for work from drug discovery to deep learning.
Huang, who was born in Taiwan and co-founded Nvidia in 1993, was honored alongside Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and AMD CEO Lisa Su.
Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
Nvidia, an industry partner in the Energy Department-led Genesis Mission, also announced commitments valued at $1 billion over five years for AI and quantum computing research in the United States.
"President Trump's Genesis Mission is launching a new golden age of American discovery," Huang said in a statement.
AJP Takeaways
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang received the U.S. National Medal of Science from President Donald Trump on Oct. 8, 2026, at the “Science: A New Golden Age” summit in Washington.
- The White House cited Huang for turning the graphics processing unit into a general-purpose computing architecture, the basis of today’s AI and scientific computing.
- Nvidia pledged about $1 billion over five years to the Genesis Mission on the same day. The company had agreed in October 2025 to supply more than 260,000 AI chips to South Korea.
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