Nvidia’s GPUs may be hard to snag, but Jensen Huang’s birthday cake might just be sitting in a display case at your local mall.
A strawberry soft cream cake from Korean bakery brand Paris Baguette was served at a birthday dinner for the Nvidia CEO near the company’s Santa Clara headquarters last Saturday, according to The Korea Times, which cited an interview with the bakery brand’s operator, Paris Croissant.
Huang, who turned 63 on Feb 17, invited about 30 engineers involved in South Korea’s SK Hynix DRAM and high-bandwidth memory for a dinner party at a fried chicken restaurant called 99 Chicken.
Korean business newspaper Hankyung reported that Huang had instructed Nvidia employees to “organize a dinner to encourage SK Hynix HBM engineers.”
“Please supply the highest-performance HBM4 without a hitch,” he told SK Hynix engineers that day, according to Hankyung.
SK Hynix is one of Nvidia’s key suppliers of high-bandwidth memory chips, or HBM chips — the advanced chips that sit alongside GPUs and feed them data at extreme speeds. Memory chips have become one of the biggest choke points in the AI boom.
At one point, Huang personally prepared and served somaek — a mix of soju and beer — to guests at each table.
For about two hours, Huang went table to table thanking his guests, according to Hankyung.
Huang’s cake is a huge marketing win for the bakery brand.
“It was all about the symbolic moment — our brand’s cake being present at a birthday party for the current leader of the global AI industry. It was a total boon without costing us anything,” a Paris Croissant official told The Korea Times.
Paris Croissant operates about 280 Paris Baguette locations across the US, including several in Silicon Valley. It aims to expand to 1,000 outlets in North America by 2030.
The bakery chain is a household name in South Korea, with about 3,400 stores there. Since making its first push overseas in 2004, the Paris Baguette brand has expanded to 15 countries.
The Paris Baguette cake is described as a “vanilla cake filled with soft cream and fresh strawberries, topped with more berries.”
A global AI superstar
Huang has become something of a spectacle wherever he goes.
In October, Huang sat down for fried chicken in Seoul with the heads of Samsung and Hyundai. The casual meal quickly turned into a media event.
A crowd of journalists, photographers, and fans gathered outside the restaurant, while national broadcasters aired live footage of the executives eating and talking inside.
Photos from the evening also captured reflections in the restaurant windows, showing fellow diners lifting their phones to snap pictures.
Following Huang’s visit to the Seoul restaurant, crowds lined up before opening hours, hoping to dine at the same table occupied by the Nvidia chief and his high-profile guests, Korean media outlets reported.
The restaurant has imposed a one-hour time limit on the table used by Huang and the Korean business leaders, the reports added.
