On a stage in Taipei, under the flat glare of conference lights, Jensen Huang addressed a gathering at Foxconn in 2023. The Nvidia chief executive’s voice carried the cadence of a man accustomed to unveiling the future, but for many in the audience, the most recognisable element of the scene was the uniform: a black leather jacket, its surface catching the light with the dull sheen of a well-worn hide. That same jacket, still carrying the creases of that appearance, was laid out months later in the hushed rooms of Sotheby’s in New York, transformed from corporate armour into a lot number.

Forty-five collectors drove the bidding far beyond the auction house’s pre-sale estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. When the gavel fell, the final price stood at $960,000 — nearly sixteen times the upper expectation and almost a hundred times the garment’s retail value of just under $10,000. Brahm Wachter, Sotheby’s head of modern collectibles, described the jacket as “an object so closely tied to one of the defining figures of the AI era.” The proceeds, the house noted, will fund fellowships, grants and residencies at the Edge Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to innovation.

For nearly two decades, Huang has made the leather jacket his signature, appearing in one at product launches, technology conferences and even on the cover of Time magazine in 2021. The look places him in a lineage of tech leaders whose wardrobes became visual shorthand: Steve Jobs’s Issey Miyake turtlenecks, Mark Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirts. Huang himself has deflected the attention with humour, telling a podcast in 2023 that his wife and daughter choose his clothes, and describing himself on Reddit years earlier simply as “the guy in the leather jacket.”

The garment’s journey from stage to auction block was punctuated by a moment of public theatre. In 2024, during a computer graphics conference, Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg performed a kind of sports-style jersey swap, exchanging jackets on stage. Later that year, Huang handed Zuckerberg another jacket, prompting the Meta chief to joke, “This is worth more because it’s used.” The quip, light in the room, now reads as an unwitting appraisal. The auction result suggests a growing appetite among collectors to acquire artefacts from a period when artificial intelligence reshaped global markets, with the jacket serving as a relic of a figure at the centre of that transformation.

What remains is the image of the jacket changing hands — not in the auction room, but on that conference stage, passed from Huang to Zuckerberg in a gesture that turned a piece of clothing into a talisman. The leather, signed and worn, now sits in a private collection, its next chapter unwritten.