Black Leather and American Silicon

There's a booth at a Denny's in San Jose where, by local agreement and a small brass plaque, a company got founded in 1993. Three engineers — two Americans and one Taiwanese-American who'd spent his teenage years on the cleaning crew at a different Denny's in Oregon — sat there with coffee and a napkin and decided the future of computing would be drawn, not typed. The bill came to under $20. The company they sketched on that napkin is now worth more than the GDP of most countries on the UN register.

The Taiwanese-American kid grew into the man in the leather jacket. The jacket's an artifact now. They photograph it at trade shows in Las Vegas and Taipei. Grad seminars study it. H&M knocked it off in cheap polyurethane. And the guy wearing it — Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia — flat refuses, in interview after interview, to call it a strategy. It's just what he wears, he says.

That's true and it's incomplete. Wear anything long enough and it becomes a position. The jacket says: I'm not the kind of executive who wears a suit, and I'm not going to pretend to be. In the long American argument over who gets to wear what to work — the one that runs from the union men in the Pittsburgh mills through the white shirtsleeves of the Apollo flight directors in Houston through the patched denim of the Detroit line foremen — Jensen Huang voted with the people who build the engines, not the people who own them.

The jacket is the argument. In the long American negotiation over who gets to wear what to work, Jensen Huang voted with the people who build the engines, not the people who own them.

And that matters because the engines, again, are getting built here.

The arc

He was born in 1963 in Tainan, on the southern coast of Taiwan. Within a decade his parents looked at the political weather over the Strait of Formosa and decided their two boys would be safer somewhere else. Somewhere else turned out to be Oneida, Kentucky, where the brothers got boarded at a reform school the parents — going off a brochure and a relative's word — had mistaken for a Christian academy. Young Jen-Hsun cleaned toilets and shared a dorm with the kids of the southern Appalachian poor. He's talked since about learning to read American faces in those years. He learned to take a beating without complaint and give one back if it came to it. The Kentucky chapter is short in the biographies, but almost everyone who's worked close to him over four decades says the same thing: the temperament that got forged there never left. Courteous. Watchful. Exceptionally hard to surprise.

The family reunited in Oregon. He bussed tables and worked the dish pit at a Denny's in Aloha, the Portland suburb. He graduated Aloha High at 16 — two years ahead — then Oregon State for an electrical engineering degree, then Stanford for the master's. He married Lori Mills, an Oregon State classmate, in 1985. He worked at LSI Logic and AMD before the napkin and the booth.

Denny's corporate has since officially named that booth the "Founder's Booth." Plaque went up in 2023. Jensen showed up to the little ceremony in a leather jacket. Of course he did.

What gets made here

For most of the last twenty-five years the American semiconductor story was a story about losing. The chips running our laptops and phones and cars were drawn in California and Texas and built in Hsinchu and Taoyuan and Pyeongtaek and Hwaseong. The country that invented the integrated circuit — at Fairchild, at Texas Instruments — let the manufacturing migrate, the steady way it always migrates, to where labor was cheaper and public investment was higher and the politics liked long-cycle capital better. By 2020 the American share of advanced-node fabrication was down to a low single-digit percentage. The chips that ran the country were not, in any real sense, made in the country.

That's turning around this decade. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 put $52 billion of federal money on the table for domestic fabrication, plus another $24 billion in investment tax credits. TSMC — the foundry that builds the big majority of Nvidia's most advanced silicon — broke ground on a campus north of Phoenix that, with its three planned fabs complete, will be the largest direct foreign investment in American manufacturing history. Intel committed to expansions in Ohio and Arizona. Samsung put stakes down in Texas. Micron started the long build of a memory-chip complex outside Syracuse.

Nvidia doesn't run its own fabs, but it's thrown its weight behind the reshoring anyway. Production of the Blackwell-architecture AI accelerator — right now the most contested industrial commodity on the planet — has started at the TSMC Arizona facility. In early 2026 Nvidia announced what it's calling an "AI factory" footprint in Texas: a manufacturing and integration operation, with Foxconn and Wistron, to package and assemble the server-scale systems that run modern AI at the rack. The company frames it as a half-trillion-dollar commitment to American-soil production over four years. The framing's aspirational. The contracts are real.

Plain English: the chips that train the models running more and more of American life are, again, getting made here. Not all of them. Not at scale yet. But the trend line turned, and the turn is partly Jensen Huang's doing.

The chips that train the models running more and more of American life are, again, getting made here.

The keynote as an American thing

There's a performance Jensen Huang gives once or twice a year — San Jose, Taipei, Washington — that's basically become a form of American oratory. He walks out in the jacket. He's got a clicker. He talks for two hours with no notes. He paces. He digresses. He builds, with the patience of a guy who's spent thirty years explaining hard things to non-engineers, an argument about what the next layer of computing looks like and what it's good for.

These talks are not, in the polished-executive sense, polished. He stumbles. He doubles back. He'll admit a slide doesn't make sense and ask you to ride with him to the next one. He calls graphics cards "the most beautiful product I've ever seen" with the exact un-ironic affection a Vermont furniture maker uses on a tiger-maple drawer front. He says "amazing" way too many times, in a way no marketing department would ever sign off on, and a room full of skeptical engineers and skeptical fund managers and skeptical reporters finds itself, by hour three, sold.

That persuasion has ancestors. There's a register in American public speech — the rhetorician Kenneth Burke clocked it a long time ago — that runs Lincoln to Eugene Debs to Will Rogers to Aaron Copland. It gets its authority by refusing authority's costume. Lincoln in the stovepipe and the country lawyer's coat. Debs at the rail siding in his shirtsleeves. Will Rogers in the Stetson. Copland writing fanfares for the common man. The leather jacket sits right in that line, whether Jensen meant it to or not. The guy on stage is asking to be heard not as a billionaire — and he is one of the richest men in the country — but as a working engineer who happens to know what he's talking about.

That lineage matters because "American Made" lives or dies on whether people believe the folks running American manufacturing are working people first and capital allocators second. The suit-and-tie signals fiduciary discipline to a quarterly earnings call. The leather jacket signals something older and, in the long American argument, tougher.

The immigrant arc is the American arc

Got to say it plain: Jensen Huang is not a product of American manufacturing's golden age. He showed up a refugee from a political situation his family judged untenable. He cleaned toilets in eastern Kentucky as a kid. He worked the dish pit through high school. His parents made the long bet that American institutions would treat their boys fair, and the bet paid out.

That's not an unusual American story. It is the American story — the Carnegies and the Pulitzers, the Goldwyns and the Kaisers, the Sergey Brins and the Elon Musks and the Andy Groves. The country has, with some exceptions and some shame in there, made room for the immigrant kid willing to do the work, and in the trade it got back the steel and the movies and the search engines and now the silicon. The deal isn't free. It runs on institutions — public schools, state universities, a working patent system, an executive class you can actually break into — that immigrant Americans turned around and helped build and defend.

Jensen's careful not to oversell this. He's not a politician. He doesn't, like some of his Valley contemporaries, give lectures on immigration policy or industrial strategy. Ask him about manufacturing, he talks about manufacturing. Ask him about chips, he talks about chips. He wears the jacket and lets the jacket carry the argument he doesn't feel like he has to make in words.

Which is roughly: I'm the son of a chemical engineer who came to Kentucky. I cleaned bathrooms as a boy. I bussed tables as a teenager. I went to a land-grant university. I built a company. It employs tens of thousands of Americans and it's helping bring chip manufacturing back to this country. I dress like the man I am.

Why this is the whole point

It's tempting, writing about somebody as singular as Jensen Huang, to oversell the man and undersell the machine. Nvidia's a corporation with thirty-some thousand employees and a market cap bigger than the GDP of all but a handful of nations. Its chips are designed in California and built, more and more, in Arizona — but its supply chain still runs through Taiwan and South Korea and the Netherlands and a hundred smaller dependencies. The American chip comeback isn't a one-man job. It's public policy and private capital and, most of all, the engineers and techs and construction crews pouring concrete and pulling cable in the Sonoran desert and the Ohio cornfields right now.

Still. Cultures need figures, figures need uniforms, and the leather jacket — worn close to three decades now, through the boom and the dotcom bust and the crypto winter and the AI inflection — has become a uniform that tells the people who recognize it that the men and women building American silicon are working people who happened to build something enormous.

That's the register we're here for. Not the suit-and-tie of the quarterly call. Not the marketing gloss of the press release. The working register of the people who make the things.

The Denny's booth is still in San Jose. The plaque's still up. The chips are coming home.

The jacket is the argument.

— floridaman@america.cool