Among the world's largest companies by market capitalization, Nvidia created the CUDA parallel-computing platform.
Nvidia introduced CUDA in 2006 as a software platform and programming model for using its graphics processing units, or GPUs, for general-purpose computing. Before CUDA, GPUs were mainly associated with rendering images and video, especially for computer games.
CUDA allowed developers to write programs that divide large calculations across many GPU cores. That capability became important in scientific computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, where enormous numbers of operations can be performed in parallel.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. Its graphics processors first built a strong position in gaming, but CUDA helped the company extend its technology into data centers. CUDA is not a chip or a separate company; it is Nvidia's proprietary computing platform and software ecosystem.