Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang.
Huang co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem and has served as its chief executive since the company began. Nvidia initially concentrated on graphics-processing hardware for computer games, where specialized chips could render images more efficiently.
The company’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, later became valuable for scientific computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Nvidia’s CUDA software platform helped developers use its hardware for general-purpose parallel computation, creating an ecosystem around the chips.
Nvidia’s market capitalization surged during the 2020s as demand for AI data-center hardware grew. Market value can rise rapidly when investors expect strong future earnings, even before all those expected profits appear in reported results. Lisa Su is the chief executive of AMD, a major rival, while Pat Gelsinger led Intel; neither founded Nvidia.