NVIDIA Corporation

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.

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.

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.

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.

Following the explosion of generative AI, NVIDIA's H100 GPU became the most sought-after chip in the world. Data centres queued for months to obtain them. In June 2023, NVIDIA crossed $1 trillion in market capitalisation. By 2024, it had crossed $3 trillion, briefly overtaking Apple as the world's most valuable company.