Commentary: What do Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Clay County’s Oneida Baptist Institute have in common?

It sounds like something out of a spy novel: a Taiwanese-American major tech mogul, head of one of the most successful companies in the world pushing for U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence, is being investigated for his relationship with a woman being described as a Chinese spy. 

But amid this international intrigue is, as often happens, the Kentucky connection. Before Nvidia, CEO Jensen Huang’s rise to fame and notoriety started in Clay County, where he was a young student scrubbing toilets at Oneida Bible Institute, and taught his 17-year-old roommate to read in exchange for learning how to benchpress. 

“I remember that part of my life more vividly than just about any other,” Huang told Wired Magazine in 2002.

According to various press reports, Huang and his brother, Jeff, grew up in Taiwan and Thailand. But as political unrest hit those areas in the early 1970s, his parents sent him and his brother to an uncle in Washington State. In 1972, the uncle, who spoke limited English, sent the brothers, then aged 9 and 10, to Oneida Baptist Institute, thinking it was a prestigious boarding school, instead of a religious reform facility for high school students. The boys were so young, they had to go to school at Oneida Elementary, the nearby public school. They were bullied terribly, and a story in the New Yorker recounts how the other students would try to throw Huang off the rickety swinging bridge Huang had to take to get to school. 

He learned to play table tennis from the guy who came to fill the vending machines, Wired reported, later becoming a nationally ranked player, and he learned to scrub toilets, as work requirements were an integral part of Oneida’s curriculum.

The current president of Oneida Baptist, Larry Gritton said he’s not surprised by Huang’s ascendancy. “It’s our school and ministry – part of what we do – we’ve always tried to teach our students the value of work,” he said.

Gritton’s parents were teachers at the school at the time; then-president, Dr. Barkley Moore, could have turned the boys away, but didn’t, even though they were so young.

“Dr. Moore had a huge heart and even bigger faith,” Gritton said. “I’m sure he thought, if I can help some kids even though we didn’t have a middle or elementary school, then I will. I’m sure it was a major culture shock for them.”

Two years later, Huang’s parents came to the United States, and the boys returned to live with them in Oregon, where Huang went to high school and Oregon State University.

But Huang apparently remembers Oneida fondly. In 2019, he donated $2 million to Oneida to build a new girls dorm and classroom building. He even returned to Oneida for the dedication of the Jen-Hsun Huang Hall. 

Today, Oneida has about 350 students, Gritton said, most of them from the local community. But there are still about 65 international students who come to Clay County from all over the world to attend boarding school there.

Don’t sleep on Kentucky. You just never know.