Nvidia, founded in 1993, became the world’s most valuable publicly traded company during the 2020s AI boom.
Nvidia designs graphics processing units, or GPUs, and develops software used to program them. GPUs became crucial for training and running large artificial-intelligence models because they can perform many calculations in parallel.
The company was founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem in 1993. Its early reputation came from computer graphics and gaming, but its CUDA software platform helped make Nvidia hardware useful for scientific computing and machine learning.
Nvidia’s market-cap rise was driven by rapidly increasing demand for data-center accelerators. It is often confused with a computer manufacturer that sells complete systems; Nvidia primarily develops chips, platforms, and related technologies, while manufacturing is largely handled by outside foundries.