NVIDIA vs Intel

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.

Gordon Moore published a paper in 1965 observing that the number of transistors on a microchip doubled approximately every two years, while the cost halved. He predicted this trend would continue. "Moore's Law" proved to be one of the most reliable predictions in the history of technology, holding for over fifty years. Intel's entire business strategy was built around the predictable improvement curve that Moore had identified: make chips faster and cheaper at a rate that customers could anticipate and plan around.

Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel in July 1968, having left Fairchild Semiconductor. Noyce had co-invented the integrated circuit. Their initial investor, Arthur Rock, raised $2.5 million in two days. Andrew Grove, who joined as employee number three, would eventually become Intel's most transformational CEO.

Intel introduced the 4004 in 1971 — the world's first commercially available microprocessor: a complete CPU on a single chip. It had been commissioned by a Japanese calculator company. Intel engineer Ted Hoff proposed putting the entire computing logic on one chip rather than multiple chips. The 4004 contained 2,300 transistors. A modern chip contains tens of billions. The 4004 made the personal computer possible in principle; a decade of further development made it possible in practice.

IBM chose Intel's 8088 processor for the IBM PC in 1981. IBM's open architecture allowed other manufacturers to clone the PC using Intel chips. The "Wintel" ecosystem — Windows operating system on Intel processors — became the dominant computing platform for three decades. Intel's revenues grew from $800 million in 1980 to $33 billion in 2000 as personal computer adoption spread globally.

Intel spent years falling behind in semiconductor manufacturing, failing to advance to smaller transistor sizes at the pace that Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's Samsung had achieved. Competitors including Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm were having their chips made by TSMC using processes more advanced than Intel's own factories. CEO Pat Gelsinger, who returned to Intel in 2021, announced an ambitious plan to rebuild Intel's manufacturing capability and become a contract chip manufacturer — directly competing with TSMC. The programme required $100 billion in investment. Gelsinger was replaced in December 2024 after the stock fell 60% and the turnaround stalled. Intel remained the processor inside approximately 70% of the world's PCs — but the AI era was running on Nvidia GPUs and TSMC silicon, and Intel was in danger of becoming a passenger in the industry it had created.