By NUPIAO
On July 3, according to NUPIAO, Sotheby’s is about to drop a one-of-a-kind piece: a Tom Ford black leather jacket worn by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, complete with a gold autograph on the lining. The auction house is guessing it’ll go for $40,000 to $60,000—roughly the price of one of NVIDIA’s super-hot Blackwell AI chips.
Sotheby’s will put the jacket on display at its New York gallery from July 7 to July 16, and the bidding war wraps up on July 17. The auction house says the signature has been verified by the well-known authentication firm JSA (James Spence Authentication), and yes, this is the exact jacket Jensen Huang rocked at the 2023 Hon Hai Tech Day in Taipei.
This whole thing is a charity event thrown by early-stage venture fund Long Journey. All the money raised goes to The Edge Institute, a nonprofit that funds scholarships, grants, and residency programs for the next wave of builders.
Much like Steve Jobs made the black turtleneck his calling card, the black leather jacket has become Jensen Huang’s unmistakable uniform. He’s worn it to pretty much every major product launch and developer conference you can think of.
People have always wondered why he’s so loyal to leather. Back in June, on a Korean variety show, he let the secret slip: “My wife told me to wear it. She buys everything I wear.” He also admitted that since meeting his wife at age 17, he’s barely bought anything for himself.
Looking back on his own journey, Jensen Huang shared that after moving to the U.S. at age 9, he worked as a dishwasher and cleaned restrooms in restaurants. “No matter what I do, I give it 100% effort,” he stressed. “The job itself isn’t important—what matters is the result, because that represents who you are.”
This isn’t his first time donating a signed jacket, either. In June 2025, at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s first “Zhihui” charity gala, he personally gave away two custom leather jackets embroidered with “HKUST” on the back. They were the stars of the night, raising over HK$20 million altogether for HKUST’s engineering and AI programs.
His most recent public appearance in that iconic black leather jacket was at NVIDIA’s 2026 shareholder meeting. During his speech, he called 2026 an extraordinary year for both NVIDIA and the entire computing world. The company is building the infrastructure for a new era. AI isn’t just a model, he said—it’s a fundamental shift in computing. For 60 years, computing was about retrieving, storing, and sending information; now AI is reinventing it into generating intelligence.
The world’s most valuable company just dropped its Q1 fiscal 2027 earnings, and the numbers are insane. Revenue hit $81.615 billion—up 85% year-over-year and 20% sequentially—both record highs. GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins came in at 74.9% and 75.0%. GAAP net income skyrocketed 211% to $58.321 billion, with diluted EPS of $2.39, while non-GAAP EPS was $1.87. Everything smashed market expectations.
Data center revenue remains the absolute growth monster, raking in $75.2 billion—up 92% YoY and 21% sequentially—making up 92.1% of total revenue. Compute alone brought in $60.4 billion (up 77%), while networking revenue exploded 199% to $14.8 billion, way outpacing the overall growth rate.
As NVIDIA’s next growth engine, the Vera Rubin architecture is now in full production. Jensen Huang pointed out that the new Blackwell AI chip has massively expanded NVIDIA’s footprint across hyperscalers, cloud providers, AI labs, industrial companies, and sovereign customers. Model developers and hyperscalers have already deployed hundreds of thousands of Blackwell GPUs. AI factory construction is booming across industries. Names like Capital One, Hyundai Motor Group, Jane Street, and Eli Lilly are all scaling up NVIDIA infrastructure to run AI.
And get this: NVIDIA returned a record $20 billion to shareholders in Q1 FY2027 through buybacks and dividends. On May 18, the board greenlit an additional $80 billion in indefinite share repurchases and jacked up the quarterly cash dividend from $0.01 to $0.25 per share—a 2,400% increase—payable on June 26 to shareholders of record on June 4.
At the shareholder meeting, Jensen Huang said, “Based on our confidence in sustainable market growth and free cash flow generation, we plan to return 50% or more of our free cash flow to shareholders this year, next year, and over the long term—and keep increasing buybacks and dividends.”
Back in mid-May, NVIDIA’s stock hit a record $232.63 per share, pushing its market cap to a jaw-dropping $5.63 trillion. By the close on July 2, the stock had cooled to $194.83, and the market cap dipped below $5 trillion.
Still, Jensen Huang sits comfortably at No. 8 on the Forbes real-time billionaires list, with a net worth of $168.6 billion.
