Nvidia is the company founded in 1993 that is known for designing graphics processors and is often among the world's highest-valued firms.
Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded Nvidia in 1993. The company initially focused on graphics hardware for personal computers, a market that grew rapidly as 3D games became more sophisticated.
Nvidia's GeForce products helped popularize programmable graphics processing units, or GPUs. GPUs later became important for scientific computing and artificial-intelligence workloads because they can perform many calculations in parallel.
Nvidia is sometimes confused with Intel or AMD because all three have major roles in computing hardware. Unlike a market-cap ranking, which changes daily with stock prices, Nvidia's 1993 founding date is a fixed historical fact. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and its chief executive is co-founder Jensen Huang.