Nvidia, founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang and two engineers, became one of the world's richest companies by market capitalization through graphics and AI chips.
Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem established the company in Sunnyvale, California. Nvidia initially focused on graphics-processing units, or GPUs, which render images and video for computers and games.
The company later expanded into scientific computing and artificial intelligence. Its CUDA software platform, introduced in 2006, helped developers use Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose parallel computing. This became an important foundation for modern machine-learning workloads.
Nvidia is sometimes confused with Intel or AMD because all three design important computing chips. Nvidia is especially associated with discrete GPUs and AI accelerators, while Intel remains strongly associated with central processing units. The company's name is derived from invidia, a Latin word associated with envy.