Nvidia is the company founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang that is best known for designing graphics processors used in artificial intelligence.
Huang founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. The company initially focused on graphics hardware for personal computers, especially 3D games and visual applications.
Its CUDA software platform, introduced in 2006, allowed developers to use Nvidia graphics-processing units for general-purpose parallel computing. That capability helped make Nvidia hardware important in machine learning, where large numbers of calculations can run simultaneously.
Nvidia's rise in market capitalization reflects demand for data-center accelerators as well as gaming products. AMD also designs graphics processors, while Intel and Qualcomm are major semiconductor companies with different historical strengths.