NVIDIA

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.