NVIDIA, one of the world's most valuable companies by market capitalization, was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, who became its CEO.
Huang co-founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The company initially focused on graphics processing for computer games and multimedia, fields in which specialized chips could handle visual calculations more efficiently than general-purpose processors.
NVIDIA introduced the GeForce brand in 1999, helping establish graphics processing units, or GPUs, as important consumer technology. The company's CUDA software platform later made its GPUs useful for scientific computing and artificial-intelligence workloads.
Huang has led NVIDIA throughout its transformation from a graphics-chip maker into a major supplier of accelerated computing hardware and software. The company's market value rose sharply as investors anticipated demand for AI computing. Market capitalization can change daily, but NVIDIA's founding leadership is a stable historical fact.