NVIDIA
NVIDIA is a US technology company that invented the GPU in 1999. It started in gaming and now powers AI infrastructure, data centers, and autonomous vehicles worldwide. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, the company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
The Story
NVIDIA was born in 1993 when Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem bet that 3D graphics could live inside every PC. The first chip, the NV1, flopped. All 250,000 units came back. Sega, their anchor customer, walked. Huang flew to Tokyo, talked Sega's CEO into converting a $5 million contract into equity, and then laid off two-thirds of the company. "It was embarrassing. It was humiliating," he later said. The RIVA 128 chip turned things around and NVIDIA became the name in PC graphics.
The defining bet arrived in 2006 with CUDA, a software platform that turned gaming GPUs into general-purpose supercomputers. For almost a decade, it looked like madness. The stock went sideways. Investors dumped shares. CUDA had to be handed out for free while GeForce kept the lights on. Huang never wavered. "We were always the disruptor," he said. He evangelized CUDA at every university on the planet and let GeForce carry the platform to every desktop.
The payoff came in 2012, when two researchers in Toronto trained a neural network on two GeForce GPUs and shattered every image-recognition record. Huang sent an internal email that weekend: "We are now an AI company." By 2022, the AI arms race was on, and NVIDIA's chips were the only game in town. If NVIDIA were a country, it would rank among the five wealthiest on Earth.
Key Facts & Metrics
Platform
NVIDIA
The world leader in AI computing, graphics, and accelerated computing platforms
Company Timeline
1993 — Company founded
Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded NVIDIA in Santa Clara, California with a vision to bring 3D graphics to every PC.
1995 — NV1 failure and Sega contract
The first NVIDIA chip, the NV1, was a commercial failure. All 250,000 units were returned. A deal with Sega collapsed, forcing the company to lay off two-thirds of its staff.
1997 — RIVA 128 breakthrough
NVIDIA released the RIVA 128, its first successful 3D graphics chip. It won the PC graphics market and put the company on solid financial footing.
1999 — GeForce 256 and the GPU
NVIDIA launched the GeForce 256 and coined the term GPU. It was the first chip capable of hardware T&L, establishing NVIDIA as the graphics industry leader.
2006 — CUDA platform launched
NVIDIA released CUDA, enabling GPUs to run general-purpose parallel computing code. It opened the door to scientific computing, AI research, and deep learning.
2012 — AI inflection point
Two Toronto researchers used NVIDIA GPUs to train AlexNet, triggering the deep learning revolution. CUDA went from niche tool to AI standard almost overnight.
2023 — Worlds most valuable company
Fueled by the generative AI boom, NVIDIA became the worlds most valuable publicly traded company by market cap, surpassing $3 trillion.
