Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sparks Jensanity’ in Taiwan

It is early evening and a queue has already begun to form in front of a humble fruit stand in Taipei's Tonghua Night Market, even though most vendors are still setting up their stalls.

- Yip Wai Yee

There is a reason for the surge in the stall's popularity, and it is called the "Jensen Huang effect", where anything that the co-founder and chief executive of US chipmaker Nvidia touches instantly becomes hot property.

While the phrase is usually used to describe the 61-year-old's knack for setting off stock market surges for individual companies that he supports, his power appears to have extended to Taiwanese food establishments.

"Tonghua Night Market is really good because there's a lady... She's the fruit lady. Go find her, okay? It's fantastic, (the fruit is) super tasty," Mr Huang told a packed stadium of 4,000 people during a June 2 speech at National Taiwan University, in a mix of English and the Taiwanese Minnan dialect.

And his fans obeyed. On June 5, when The Sunday Times visited the stall, there was a queue of at least 20 people at 5pm.

The elderly woman manning the fruit stand, who wanted to be known only as "Cheng Popo", or "Grandmother Cheng" in Mandarin, said she was startled by her sudden fame.

"He has stopped by my stall a few times, but I never thought that he would mention it on TV," she told ST. "Maybe he has lived overseas for too long and misses Taiwanese fruit. His favourite is the pickled green mango." From the time he arrived in Taipei two weeks earlier, the Taiwanborn Mr Huang, an American citizen, has dominated local news headlines and social media feeds, stirring a craze that observers dubbed "Jensanity". The mania lasted right up until his departure on the morning of June 8.

Even though the tech billionaire was not part of the official programme at the city's Computex the world's largest computer exhibition this week, he was easily the biggest star at the event, upstaging other tech bigwigs like Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.