Nvidia, founded in 1993, became the leading supplier of graphics processors for artificial intelligence.
The company originally became famous for graphics processing units, or GPUs, used in personal computers and video-game consoles. Its CUDA software platform later allowed developers to use Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose parallel computing.
That capability became especially important for machine learning. Training and running large artificial-intelligence models requires extensive parallel computation, and Nvidia’s hardware, networking products, and software libraries became central to many data-center systems.
Nvidia’s rise sharply increased its market capitalization and made it one of the world’s most valuable companies. It is sometimes confused with AMD, another major GPU designer, but the two companies are separate competitors.