NVIDIA’s India connection: CEO Jensen Huang loves eating this desi food

India and chipmaker NVIDIA‘s Founder and CEO Jensen Huang have a lot more in common than you think.

At the NVIDIA AI Summit in Mumbai, the Taiwan-born American revealed that his favourite Indian dish was chicken biryani. He made the revelation while highlighting the intricacies of AI and reasoning.

“Intelligence is not just one shot, but intelligence requires thinking. And thinking is reasoning… For example, if you ask me what my favourite Indian food is, I would tell you chicken biryani. And I don’t have to think about that very much, and I don’t have to reason about that. I just know it,” Huang said at the summit.

Chicken biryani is not just Jensen Huang’s favourite but that of many Indians. In 2023, chicken biryani was the most ordered dish on both Zomato and Swiggy. While 10.09 crore chicken biryani orders were placed on the former, Swiggy saw Indians ordering 2.5 biryanis every second.

Moreover, India has played a notable role in NVIDIA’s genesis. The AI chipmaker, whose market cap now tops $3.4 trillion, was founded with a name that’s a corruption of the word ‘India’.

“In 1993, we had to come up with a name for our company. To tell you a really long story in short, I chose the name NVIDIA because it sounded like a mystical place. India..Nvidia,” Huang, one of the world’s richest persons, told at the conference.

Meanwhile, NVIDIA is taking several steps to strengthen its presence in India. It has struck a deal with Mukesh Ambani’s conglomerate Reliance Industries to build AI computing infrastructure as well as an innovation centre in India. NVIDIA also rolled out a lightweight artificial intelligence model for the Hindi language.