Nvidia created the CUDA parallel-computing platform and became a leading maker of AI graphics processors.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It first became widely known for graphics processing units used in personal computers and video games. GPUs perform many calculations simultaneously, making them useful for rendering images as well as for scientific and machine-learning workloads.
Nvidia introduced CUDA in 2006. CUDA allows developers to use compatible Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose parallel computing, and its software ecosystem helped researchers train and run increasingly large artificial-intelligence models.
The company’s data-center business grew dramatically as cloud providers and AI developers sought powerful accelerators. That growth propelled Nvidia into the small group of companies with multi-trillion-dollar market valuations. Nvidia is not the same company as AMD, which also designs CPUs and GPUs, or Intel, which historically focused on x86 processors.