Nvidia is the chip designer founded in 1993 whose name was inspired by a Latin word meaning “envy.”
The company was established by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem in Santa Clara, California. The founders chose the name Nvidia after considering the Latin word invidia, meaning envy. Its early focus was graphics processing, especially hardware for computer games.
Nvidia’s graphics processing units later became important in scientific computing, cryptocurrency mining, and artificial intelligence. GPUs can perform many calculations in parallel, making them useful for training and running modern machine-learning systems. This expansion helped Nvidia become one of the world’s most valuable public companies.
Nvidia is sometimes confused with Intel or AMD because all three are major semiconductor names. However, Nvidia is best known for designing GPUs and related platforms, while it generally relies on outside manufacturers such as TSMC to fabricate its leading chips.