Nvidia, founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, became a market-cap giant.
The company began by designing graphics processing units, or GPUs, for computer graphics and video games. Its CUDA software platform later allowed developers to use those processors for general-purpose computing, greatly expanding Nvidia's role beyond gaming.
Demand for artificial intelligence training and inference transformed Nvidia's financial profile. Large language models and other AI systems require vast amounts of parallel computation, an area where GPUs are especially effective. This helped Nvidia become one of the world's most valuable public companies.
Nvidia's name is sometimes confused with Intel or AMD because all three are major semiconductor businesses. Nvidia primarily became known for GPUs and accelerated computing, while Intel and AMD have historically been associated more strongly with central processing units.