Nvidia created the GeForce graphics brand and became a major supplier of AI accelerators.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It initially focused on graphics-processing hardware for personal computers. Its graphics processing units, or GPUs, became especially important for rendering video-game images and other parallel computing tasks.
The company introduced the GeForce 256 in 1999 and described it as the world’s first GPU. Nvidia later developed CUDA, a software platform that allows programmers to use GPUs for general-purpose computing. That combination of hardware and software helped make Nvidia chips useful for scientific computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Nvidia is sometimes described as a semiconductor manufacturer, but it primarily designs chips and relies on foundry partners to fabricate them. Its market value rose sharply as cloud providers and technology companies invested in data-center systems for generative AI. GeForce remains the consumer graphics brand, while data-center products serve professional and enterprise customers.