Nvidia became a leading market-cap giant through graphics processors and artificial intelligence chips.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The company first became prominent for graphics processing units, or GPUs, used in personal computers and video games. Its CUDA software platform later allowed developers to use GPUs for general-purpose parallel computing.
That computing approach became especially important for machine learning. Training and running large artificial-intelligence models require enormous amounts of parallel computation, and Nvidia’s hardware, networking products, and software ecosystem made it a central supplier for data centers. Investor expectations about AI infrastructure drove a dramatic increase in Nvidia’s market capitalization.
Nvidia is sometimes confused with a consumer-device brand because its graphics cards are familiar to gamers. Its largest strategic importance in the market-cap story, however, comes from selling computing platforms to data centers and other organizations building AI systems.