NVIDIA, one of the world's most valuable public companies, was founded in California.
NVIDIA was incorporated in Delaware in 1993, but its founders established the company in California and its headquarters are in Santa Clara. Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded the company to develop graphics and accelerated-computing technologies.
The distinction between incorporation and founding location matters. Delaware is the company’s legal incorporation state, while California is the state associated with its founding and headquarters. NVIDIA initially focused on graphics processors for personal computers and later expanded into professional visualization, data centers, gaming, and artificial intelligence.
Its 1999 GeForce product helped popularize programmable graphics processing units for consumers. NVIDIA’s GPUs later became important for machine-learning workloads, contributing to a dramatic rise in investor interest and market capitalization.