Iconic San Jose Denny’s where Jensen Huang sketched a trillion-dollar company reinstalls his plaque

The San Jose Denny’s, the birthplace of Nvidia, which silently removed Jensen Huang’s commemorative plaque from its wall after the liaisonious CEO’s resignation on Thursday, is reinstalling it.

Huang, 63, stepped down from the world’s most valuable chip-making company following reports of at least three extramarital relationships, including one with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy and two employees of the company.

Denny's CEO Kelli Valade and Jensen Huang unveiled the plaque on September 26, 2023. It commemorated the 1993 meetings in which Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem sketched out the plan to build Nvidia over unlimited coffee and pancakes. On Friday, November 13, the company announced it was reinstalling it.


“We’re reinstalling the plaque recognizing the conversations at Denny’s that helped launch NVIDIA,” The South Carolina-based diner said in a statement to NBC News.

When he was 15, the future NVIDIA CEO started his career as a dishwasher at the Portland (Oregon) Denny’s. “Jensen Huang started at Denny’s as a dishwasher. Years later, he and his co-founders gathered in one of our booths to discuss the idea that became NVIDIA. The plaque commemorates that shared history,” they continued.

“America’s Diner has long been a place where people and ideas come together, and that history deserves to be preserved,” the statement concluded.

“I was a dishwasher, I was a busboy, I waited tables,” Huang said as per a NVIDEA blog post from 2023. “No one can carry more coffee cups than I can.”

It all started with a New York Times report that said Huang had an affair with Alice Huang, a businesswoman suspected of being a Chinese spy by US Intelligence.

Huang then released a statement admitting he was being unfaithful to his wife, Lori, whom he had been married to for 40 years. The Times explicitly named a second woman, Kimberly Powell, the VP of healthcare of the organization, whom he believed to have had another extramarital affair.

After he resigned from his position, Reuters broke a story about Huang that revealed he had also been involved in an intimate relationship with a second, unnamed Nvidia employee.