Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem.
The company began as a specialist in graphics processors, hardware designed to render images and video efficiently. Its early products helped establish the modern market for graphics processing units, commonly called GPUs. Nvidia’s headquarters are in Santa Clara, California, at the center of Silicon Valley.
Nvidia’s rise in market capitalization has been tied not only to gaming graphics but also to data centers, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. GPUs can perform many calculations in parallel, making them useful for training and running sophisticated AI systems. The company’s CUDA software platform also helped developers use Nvidia hardware for general-purpose computing.
A common mix-up is confusing Nvidia’s founding year with the launch year of a particular graphics chip or product line. The company was created in 1993, while its best-known technologies arrived in later stages of its development. Its name is commonly styled with a lowercase “n” and uppercase “V”: NVIDIA.