Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem co-founded Nvidia in 1993.
The three engineers established the company in Santa Clara, California, with the goal of developing graphics-focused processors. Nvidia initially concentrated on chips for computer graphics and later became a major supplier of graphics processing units, or GPUs.
Nvidia is often associated only with gaming graphics cards, but its GPUs also became important in professional visualization, scientific computing, artificial intelligence, and data centers. A common mix-up is confusing Nvidia with AMD, another major graphics-chip company; AMD did not found Nvidia.
The company’s name was inspired partly by the Latin word “invidia,” meaning envy. Nvidia’s early success came from programmable graphics hardware, while its later growth was strongly linked to parallel computing and machine-learning applications.