AMD vs NVIDIA

AMD was founded on May 1, 1969 by Jerry Sanders and seven colleagues who had all left Fairchild Semiconductor — the company that had spawned Intel a year earlier. Sanders, a former actor and salesman, had been passed over for the top job at Fairchild. He started AMD with $100,000 in seed capital and a philosophy that "people first, products and profits will follow."

IBM's decision to use Intel's 8086 processor in the original PC came with a condition: Intel had to license the design to a second manufacturer for supply security. Intel chose AMD. This "second source" agreement gave AMD the right to manufacture Intel-compatible chips and launched it as a serious competitor. The deal expired in 1986, beginning decades of legal disputes between the two companies over who owned what intellectual property.

By 2014, AMD was burning through cash, had lost its performance advantage over Intel, and was widely rumoured to be on the verge of bankruptcy. The board appointed Lisa Su as CEO in October 2014. Su, an MIT-trained semiconductor engineer, refocused AMD on data centres and high-performance computing, cancelled underperforming projects, and bet the company on a new chip architecture called Zen. She described her first years as "fixing the foundation before building the house." AMD's stock rose over 3,000% from its 2015 low to its 2021 peak.

AMD launched the MI300X AI accelerator in late 2023 — a chip with 192GB of HBM3 memory and 5.3TB/s bandwidth, offering more memory capacity than NVIDIA's competing H100. Lisa Su described it as "the fastest-ramping product in AMD history." Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle began qualifying it for production workloads. AMD's data centre GPU revenue went from near zero in 2023 to over $5 billion in 2024. For the first time in the AI era, there was a credible alternative to NVIDIA.

In a landmark strategic partnership announced in 2025, OpenAI designated AMD as a "core preferred partner" for AI infrastructure, committing to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs — starting with 1 gigawatt of MI450 chips in the second half of 2026. AMD's data centre revenue reached $5.8 billion in Q1 2026 alone — growing sequentially even in AMD's historically weakest quarter, a sign analysts compared to NVIDIA's early AI dominance cycle. AMD guided Q2 2026 total revenue of $11.2 billion. Lisa Su said demand was "sky high." The company that had been weeks from bankruptcy a decade earlier was now a $200 billion chipmaker threatening NVIDIA's AI monopoly.

Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded NVIDIA in 1993. The founding meeting took place at a Denny's restaurant in San Jose — a detail Huang has since made famous in dozens of interviews. The company's original mission was simple: build better graphics chips for video games. Nobody at that table was thinking about artificial intelligence.

NVIDIA's first product, the NV1, was a commercial disaster. It used a quadratic texture mapping approach that was incompatible with the emerging Direct3D standard from Microsoft. Sega, NVIDIA's primary customer, cancelled its contract. The company nearly went under. Jensen Huang has said that the near-death experience of the NV1 taught NVIDIA to make bets that were irreversible — and to make them early.

NVIDIA introduced the GeForce 256 in 1999 and coined the term "GPU" — Graphics Processing Unit. The GeForce 256 could perform 50 million triangles per second, a figure that had previously required a supercomputer. NVIDIA went public the same year at $12 per share. Nobody predicted what the GPU would eventually become.

NVIDIA released CUDA in 2006 — a programming platform that allowed developers to use the GPU for general computation, not just graphics. Almost nobody cared at first. Then researchers used CUDA to train a neural network called AlexNet in 2012, dramatically outperforming every other approach in an image recognition contest. The AI era had begun, and NVIDIA had accidentally built its engine.

NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU architecture, launched in 2024, became the most in-demand piece of hardware in history. Every major cloud provider — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta — was queuing for Blackwell chips. In fiscal year 2026 (ending January 2026), NVIDIA generated $215.9 billion in revenue, up 65% from the prior year. Data centre revenue alone hit $62.3 billion in a single quarter. Jensen Huang announced visibility into $500 billion in Blackwell and Rubin revenue through end of 2026.

By late 2025, NVIDIA had crossed $3 trillion in market capitalisation, briefly overtaking Apple and Microsoft as the world's most valuable company. The H200 and Blackwell chips were sold out across every major cloud provider. Q3 fiscal 2026 revenue hit a record $57 billion — up 62% year-over-year — with Jensen Huang declaring: "Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out. We've entered the virtuous cycle of AI." The company that had been founded to make video game graphics had become the backbone of the entire AI industry.