Nvidia, a leading company by market capitalization, built its hardware business around graphics processing units.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The company became known for designing GPUs used in personal computers, workstations, game consoles, and professional visualization systems.
GPUs were originally associated mainly with rendering graphics, but their highly parallel architecture also made them valuable for scientific computing and artificial-intelligence workloads. Nvidia's CUDA platform helped developers use its GPUs for general-purpose computation.
The abbreviation GPU means graphics processing unit. It should not be confused with a CPU, which is designed for more general sequential and control tasks. Nvidia's rapid growth in the 2020s was strongly connected to demand for accelerated computing and AI data-center hardware.