Nvidia’s original primary business was graphics chips when it was founded in 1993, before its rise as a market-cap leader.
Nvidia was established in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It focused on graphics-processing technology for personal computers, especially hardware that could render complex images and video for games and professional applications.
The company popularized the term GPU, short for graphics processing unit, for a programmable processor designed to accelerate visual computation. Nvidia later expanded its chips and software into scientific computing, data centers, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence.
A common mistake is to describe Nvidia as having started as an AI company. Artificial intelligence is now central to its market importance, but the company’s original commercial identity was graphics hardware. Its CUDA software platform, introduced in 2006, helped developers use Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose parallel computing beyond graphics.