That ecosystem’s center, of course, is Silicon Valley, where Huang has spent most of his adult life. He was born in Taiwan, the son of a chemical engineer and a teacher. The family moved to Thailand when he was 5, and a few years later, his parents sent him and his older brother to the United States to escape political unrest. Eventually, his parents relocated to the U.S. as well, and Huang grew up in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. In the early 1980s, after majoring in electrical engineering at Oregon State (which at the time didn’t offer a computer-science major), he got a job at Advanced Micro Devices. The company—then the poor cousin of the chip giant Intel—was headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, near US 101, the highway that runs from San Jose to Stanford. Since then, Huang’s career has unfolded within a five-mile radius of that office.