AI Library
The Double Structure of Digital Sovereignty
Europe’s Departure from Palantir and the Chains of American Big Tech
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
This is a record of 2026, when European intelligence agencies and defense ministries began removing analytics tools from America’s Palantir. It covers the replacement decisions made by France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), and the Netherlands Ministry of Defense; the incident in which US export controls severed an ally’s ac…
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Horticulture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across five chapters and ten sections, this book examines computer vision for crop diagnosis, harvesting robots and autonomous field systems, smart greenhouses and digital twins, precision irrigation and supply-chain quality control, high-throughput phenotyping, and predictive breeding.
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Food Crop Agriculture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across six chapters and eighteen sections, the book examines digital agricultural infrastructure, remote sensing, crop diagnosis, yield forecasting, precision irrigation, genomics, molecular breeding, agricultural robotics, climate-smart agriculture, and global food security.
New English Edition
The Future of Forestry and Agroforestry
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Driven by Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows satellites, drones, LiDAR, digital twins, forest-specific language models, wildfire and pest forecasting, forestry robotics, agroforestry, timber traceability, and forest carbon markets.
New English Edition
Smart Livestock Farming: AI Enters the Barn
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Sensors listen, cameras watch, and artificial intelligence helps farmers decide.
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows precision livestock farming from animal health and reproduction to robotic milking, virtual fencing, digital twins, methane reduction, welfare, and data ownership.
Table of Contents
Han Dong-hoon, Busan Buk-gu Gap: A Record of the 100 Days Before and After the Election (Mar. 26-Jul. 3, 2026)
Kim Kyung-jin
Table of Contents and 13 sections
From March 26 to July 3, 2026, this record follows the spring after expulsion, the Busan Buk-gu Gap by-election, victory as an independent, and the first bill submitted in the National Assembly.
Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence and Medicine
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI in clinical care, hospitals, education, and research
AI in medical imaging, risk prediction, treatment planning, hospital operations, education, and research, with patient safety, privacy, and accountability.
[AI Library] Chapter 2. The Waiter at Denny's
The Jensen Huang Story
Part 1. Building an Empire
Chapter 2. The Waiter at Denny's
Kim Kyung-jin
Scrubbing Dishes, Washing Away Dreams
Some people believe history begins in grand places. Real history is rarely that glamorous. Alexander the Great grew up on the fringes of Macedonia, living in his father's shadow.
Jensen Huang's story is no different. His empire didn't start in a gleaming Silicon Valley lab. It started in an ordinary family restaurant, the kind you'd find in any American city, where the air hung thick with grease and the smell of pancakes.
1978. A Denny's in Portland, Oregon. The restaurant stayed open twenty-four hours a day, a place where late-shift workers and broke college students nursed cheap coffee refills to kill time. Fifteen-year-old Jensen Huang was there. He had only recently left the rough boarding school in Kentucky and reunited with his parents. The boy held a rag in his hands instead of a textbook, and a hazy dream of the future flickered somewhere in his mind.
His first title was Dishwasher.
A corner of the kitchen, the sink shrouded in steam, was his battleground. Plates from finished meals piled up without end. Plates smeared with ketchup, cups sticky with syrup, pans coated in grease. The boy scrubbed them one by one. His hands turned red in the scalding water, but he didn't complain.
Jensen Huang would later recall: "I was the greatest dishwasher." There is no bluster in that statement.
He set his own rules for washing dishes. He never walked empty-handed. When he carried plates to be put away, he always found another task to bring back with him, and the same was true on the return trip to the sink.
Wasting time was something he simply could not tolerate. Efficiency. Optimization. These words would become the core philosophy behind the semiconductor chips he would one day design. But the seed had already sprouted in the kitchen at Denny's.
Having proved himself as a dishwasher, he was soon promoted to busboy, clearing tables after customers left and setting them up for the next guests. Before long, he had risen to the position of waiter. This was
more than a promotion. For the introverted, shy immigrant boy, waiting tables was a challenge.
Approaching strangers. Explaining the menu. Apologizing and fixing things when an order went wrong. Every one of these felt as daunting as climbing a mountain. His English was still awkward, and his Asian features made him stand out from the people around him. But he didn't run from it. This was a boy who had fought his way through fistfights and cigarette smoke in Kentucky. He was already learning, in his bones, how to walk straight into discomfort.
His time at Denny's stretched from 1978 to 1983, nearly five years. During that span, Jensen Huang finished high school and entered college. By day he sat in lecture halls studying electrical engineering; by night he took orders from customers at the restaurant. When the graveyard shift ended, dawn was breaking. He carved time from sleep to do homework, then headed back to class. Sleep was scarce. His body was exhausted. But Jensen never called it suffering. It was just his life.
Years later, at a Stanford University commencement address, he would say: "My greatest superpower is that my expectations are very low. I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering." That was not a polished piece of rhetoric tossed out to sound inspiring.
In the Denny's kitchen, in the bone-deep fatigue of early mornings, he learned how to endure hardship. A temperament that doesn't crack under pressure. The strength to get back up after failure. These things don't come from intelligence. They come from character forged over long years.
Denny's taught Jensen Huang something else, too: the philosophy that no task is beneath you.
He didn't just wash dishes. He cleaned toilets without hesitation. In a later interview, he put it this way: "I cleaned a lot of toilets. More toilets than all of you combined, I guarantee." There is no self-pity in his voice, no bitterness. If anything, you can hear a quiet pride.
That philosophy runs through Nvidia's corporate culture to this day. Even now, as CEO, Jensen Huang digs into his employees' problems personally. Rather than scolding someone for being late to a meeting, he jumps in and helps solve the problem alongside them.
He has a phrase he uses often: "Have a good past, and it will follow you." His good past was not a sparkling resume. It was the days when he wore a grease-stained apron and quietly scrubbed dishes. That is his past. And that past made him who he is now.
There is a twist of fate worth noting. In 1993, Jensen Huang, now thirty years old, decided to start a new company with two colleagues. The place they met was none other than a Denny's. A corner booth at a Denny's restaurant in San Jose, California. They drank bottomless coffee and debated the future of graphics chips. "The place had endless coffee, and nobody kicked us out," Jensen recalled.
In the same restaurant chain where the boy had once scrubbed dishes, the grown man founded a company that would change the world. Denny's was his first workplace and his final launchpad. He sweated there, he nurtured his dreams there, and he sketched the blueprint of an empire there. In 2023, after Nvidia became a trillion-dollar company, Denny's corporate headquarters installed a commemorative plaque at that historic booth. It reads: "The booth that launched a trillion-dollar company."
While scrubbing dishes, Jensen Huang was also washing away his old self. The worn-out things, the fears, the feelings of inferiority. They swirled down the drain with the soapy water. What remained was a will as clear and hard as polished glass.
An Afternoon in the Lab Where He Met Lori
The electrical engineering lab at Oregon State University. Wires tangled everywhere, oscilloscope lights blinking in the dim room. In this space, Jensen Huang's fate took another turn. This time it wasn't a circuit board but a person's heart that bent the arc of his trajectory.
In 1980, Jensen Huang entered college at seventeen. Having skipped two grades, he was far younger than his classmates. Sitting in the lecture hall, he stood out. A boyish face, a small frame. As he would later recall, "I was the kid in the classroom who looked like a child."
The electrical engineering department had 250 students. Only three were women. One of them was Lori Mills. She was nineteen, two years older than Jensen. She was also majoring in electrical engineering, and as it happened, she had been assigned to the same lab section. The two became lab partners.
Jensen was captivated from the moment he first saw Lori. He did not take the usual approach. Instead of asking her to a movie or suggesting dinner, he devised a strategy that was thoroughly, unmistakably that of an engineering student.
One day, Jensen walked up to Lori and asked: "Do you want to see my homework?"
There was a careful calculation behind it all. Jensen had already completed his homework perfectly in advance. When he compared answers with Lori, his plan was to let her see how smart he was, as naturally as possible. He figured his young appearance would actually work in his favor. He wanted to leave the impression: 'This kid is incredibly bright for his age.'
As time passed, Jensen took it a step further.
He made Lori a proposal. 'If you do homework with me every Sunday, I'll make sure you get A's in every subject.'
At first glance, it looked less like asking someone on a date and more like striking a deal.
But the offer brimmed with confidence. Lori looked at him with curious eyes. And she accepted.
That was how their Sunday dates began.
Calling them dates might be generous on the romance front. They huddled in a corner of the library, sketching circuit diagrams. Solving equations. Writing lab reports. But for Jensen, it was enough. Every Sunday, all of Lori's time belonged to him. He stretched the homework out all day long, maximizing every minute with her.
Lori gradually opened her heart to Jensen's brilliance. What she saw was not just a student with good grades. She saw a fire in his eyes. A hunger to achieve something, a will to push forward into the world. It was not the recklessness of a young boy. It was the kind of seriousness you could stake a life on.
Around the age of twenty, Jensen made Lori a promise.
'By the time I'm thirty, I'll be the CEO of a company.'
At the time, this must have sounded absurd. A college student barely into his twenties, talking about becoming a CEO. But Jensen's gaze did not waver.
Years later, he would say: 'I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about back then.' And yet he said it. It was a vow to prove his worth in front of the person he loved. And he kept that promise. In 1993, the year he turned exactly thirty, he became the CEO of NVIDIA.
What Lori gave Jensen was not just love. She gave him emotional stability. As an immigrant carrying anxiety and fear about the future, he finally had someone to share all of it with.
Lori never laughed at Jensen's dreams. She never dismissed his ambition as fantasy. She watched the diligence he learned washing dishes at Denny's, the focus he showed designing circuits in the lab. And she believed in him.
The two married in 1984, five years after they first met, the same year Jensen graduated from college.
At the time, Jensen had no prestigious job, no comfortable savings. But Lori didn't care. What she chose was not a man's present circumstances but his potential to race toward the future.
Lori was an engineer herself. After graduating, she worked on microchip design at Hewlett-Packard. The two shared a common language: voltage and current, circuits and semiconductors. It was not just academic knowledge. It was the thread that bound them together.
Years later, when Jensen Huang founded NVIDIA and faced near-bankruptcy multiple times, Lori stood by his side without flinching. In 1996, when the company was in a desperate situation where they might have to close the doors within thirty days, she was still there. Lori remembered that look in Jensen's eyes from the lab. She believed he would not break.
Jensen and Lori have two children.
A son, Spencer, and a daughter, Madison. Both currently work at NVIDIA.
Spencer is a product manager, and Madison is a marketing director. Some might criticize this as a family business, but for Jensen, family is simply another word for trust.
In 2022, Jensen and Lori donated fifty million dollars to their alma mater, Oregon State University. The money is funding the construction of the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex, a facility for research in artificial intelligence and robotics.
That afternoon in the lab where they first met is now extending into a new generation's laboratory.
The love that began on a rainy Oregon campus continues today, more than forty years later. Jensen Huang often mentions his wife in interviews.
His signature black leather jacket, he says, was picked out by his wife and daughter. 'My wife and daughter dress me. That makes me happy.' A simple, honest confession from a man worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
From Oregon to Stanford
In 1984, Jensen Huang graduated from Oregon State University. Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. With highest honors.
He held a diploma in his hands, and in his heart burned a desire aimed at Silicon Valley. But he knew. A single college degree was not enough to build the world he dreamed of. He needed deeper knowledge, a sharper weapon.
After graduation, his first destination was AMD (Advanced Micro Devices).
He interviewed at Texas Instruments, LSI Logic, and several other companies, but chose AMD. Its California location and its position as a challenger competing against Intel in the semiconductor industry drew him in.
His time at AMD lasted just over a year. Brief as it was, he built his foundation in microprocessor design. How CPUs work, how instructions are processed, how the microscopic circuits etched onto a chip cooperate to perform calculations. He learned all of this on the job.
Jensen's curiosity didn't stop there. He moved to another company, LSI Logic. LSI Logic was a leader in the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) field.
At LSI Logic, Jensen didn't remain a mere engineer. He expanded his experience beyond technical roles into marketing and management. Eventually he rose to the position of director of a business unit.
During the day, he worked intensely at the company. But his day didn't end when he clocked out. At night, he became a student again.
He enrolled in Stanford University's evening master's program.
Stanford. It was more than a university. Situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, it was a crucible where brilliant minds from around the world came to design the future. Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Cisco. Countless technology companies were born on Stanford's campus. Jensen Huang threw himself into that heat.
Working by day and studying by night was grueling. During the day he ran projects at LSI Logic; at night he attended lectures at Stanford. On weekends he caught up on assignments and looked after his two children.
He was also a married husband and father. He carved time from sleep, compressed every hour, and kept pushing forward.
In 1992, he finally received his master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford.
Eight years had passed since joining AMD, seven since starting at LSI Logic. The young immigrant who had graduated from Oregon's state university now held a degree from Stanford, the breeding ground of Silicon Valley's elite.
His time at Stanford gave him something beyond a diploma.
There he began thinking not just about 'what' to build, but 'why' it needed to be built. A way of thinking that digs into the essence of a problem, an approach that starts from fundamental principles (First Principles Thinking). This would become the philosophical foundation driving Nvidia's innovations in years to come.
At LSI Logic, Jensen met two important people.
Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. Both were veteran engineers who had come from Sun Microsystems.
LSI Logic had a contract with Sun Microsystems at the time to develop a graphics accelerator card, and Jensen ended up working alongside Chris and Curtis on that project.
The three hit it off.
They met frequently after work to talk about the future of technology. At the time, PCs could barely handle text and 2D graphics. Rendering 3D graphics required workstations costing tens of thousands of dollars. But the three of them saw a different possibility.
"What if ordinary PCs could render 3D graphics?" "What if games could move as vividly as movies?" "What if, instead of a general-purpose CPU, there were a separate processor specialized for graphics?"
These questions circled through their minds. Gradually they grew certain. The old ways could not open the future of computing. A new architecture, a new philosophy was needed.
In 1992, the three gathered often at Denny's. A Denny's restaurant on the east side of San Jose. The very same chain where Jensen had once washed dishes. They sat in a corner booth, refilling their coffee while sketching out a business plan. "The coffee was unlimited, and nobody kicked us out," Jensen recalled.
Jensen went to a bookstore to learn about starting a company. He picked up a book called How to Write a Business Plan. Four hundred fifty pages. He flipped through a few and put it down. "By the time I finish this book, I'll be bankrupt." His way was never to learn from a book. It was to jump in headfirst.
In April 1993, the three founded Nvidia.
The name traces back to the Latin word 'invidia' (envy). It carried the ambition of making everyone envy their chips.
Jensen was thirty years old. The promise he had made to Lori, "I'll be a CEO by thirty," had become reality.
Their startup capital was $40,000. It was everything the three of them had saved.
But Jensen had credibility built up at LSI Logic. The company's founder, Wilfred Corrigan, thought highly of Jensen.
He introduced Jensen to Don Valentine, a venture capitalist. Valentine, who headed Sequoia Capital, decided to invest in NVIDIA.
Twenty million dollars in initial funding was secured.
Jensen Huang became CEO from day one.
He was the youngest of the three, but Chris and Curtis handed him the leadership. "Jensen, you run the company. The things we don't know, that's your job." Those were Curtis Priem's words.
They knew Jensen was not just an engineer. He was a rare talent who understood both technology and business.
The journey that began on a rainy campus in Oregon passed through Stanford under the hot California sun, and finally came together at a corner booth in Denny's.
The boy who once washed dishes was now a thirty-year-old CEO, taking his first step toward the world.
But this was only the beginning. Failure, setbacks, and the brink of bankruptcy lay ahead. History does not make heroes easily. Before Jensen Huang could become a true empire builder, there were many more mountains to climb. He had crossed the Rubicon, but the road to Rome was long and treacherous.
Kim Kyung-jin
Attorney · Former Member of the National Assembly · AI Policy Researcher
© 2026 Kim Kyung-jin. All rights reserved.