Nvidia developed the CUDA platform and became a market-cap leader during the artificial-intelligence boom.
Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded Nvidia in 1993. The company first became prominent for graphics processing units, or GPUs, used to render images and video in computers and games. GPUs contain many processing cores and can perform large numbers of similar calculations in parallel.
Nvidia introduced CUDA in 2006. CUDA gave developers tools for using Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose computing rather than graphics alone. That capability became especially important for machine learning, where training and running large neural networks requires extensive numerical computation.
Nvidia is a chip designer and platform company rather than a conventional owner of large semiconductor factories. It relies heavily on outside manufacturers, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, for production. Intel and AMD also design important processors, but they have different product histories and architectures. Nvidia’s shares trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol NVDA.