Nvidia introduced the GeForce 256 in 1999 and called it the world’s first graphics processing unit, or GPU.
The term marked a shift from describing graphics hardware as a graphics accelerator to emphasizing a processor capable of handling parts of the visual-computing workload. GeForce products initially targeted personal-computer graphics and gaming, but Nvidia later expanded into professional visualization, automotive computing, and data-center hardware.
The company’s later market-capitalization growth was strongly connected to GPUs used for artificial-intelligence training and inference. A common mix-up is treating a GPU as only a gaming component; modern GPUs are also used for scientific computing and machine learning. Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem.