Nvidia, founded in 1993, became a market-cap leader through graphics processors and AI chips.
Nvidia was established by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem in 1993. It initially focused on graphics-processing technology for computer games and professional visualization, but its programmable GPUs later became important for parallel computing and machine-learning workloads.
The company’s CUDA software platform helped developers use Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose computation. That foundation became especially valuable as generative artificial intelligence created enormous demand for data-center accelerators and related networking equipment.
Nvidia is often confused with a traditional personal-computer manufacturer because its brand is familiar from gaming graphics cards. Its most important market-cap growth in the 2020s, however, was tied to data centers and artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Market-cap rankings can change rapidly because semiconductor demand and expectations for future growth strongly influence share prices.