Nvidia was co-founded by Taiwanese-American engineer Jensen Huang. He started the company in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, initially focusing on graphics hardware for personal computers.
Huang has served as Nvidia's president and chief executive officer since the company's founding. His leadership helped shift Nvidia from a graphics-chip specialist into a major provider of graphics processing units, artificial-intelligence accelerators, and related software.
A common mix-up is Huang's birth name: he was born Jen-Hsun Huang and later adopted Jensen as his given name. He is also sometimes confused with Lisa Su, another prominent Taiwanese-American semiconductor executive, who leads AMD. Nvidia's name combines “invidia,” the Latin word for envy, with the company's technology branding.
Nvidia is especially associated with GPUs, which originally became popular for rendering computer graphics and later proved highly useful for parallel workloads such as machine learning.