Nvidia introduced the GeForce 256 in 1999 and later became central to the modern AI-chip boom.
Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, Nvidia first became widely known for graphics processing units, or GPUs. The GeForce 256, released in 1999, was marketed as the world’s first GPU and helped establish Nvidia’s consumer graphics brand.
GPUs proved useful beyond video games because their many parallel processing cores can perform large numbers of similar calculations efficiently. Nvidia developed CUDA, released in 2007, allowing developers to use its GPUs for general-purpose computing. That ecosystem became important in machine learning and generative AI.
Nvidia’s rapid market-capitalization growth is therefore linked to both gaming hardware and demand for data-center accelerators. Its stock split 10-for-1 in June 2024; a split changes the number and price of shares but not the company’s total market value by itself.