Nvidia produces the GeForce graphics processors used in gaming and artificial intelligence.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It first became widely known for graphics processing units, or GPUs, designed to render demanding computer games. The GeForce brand debuted in 1999 and became a major force in consumer graphics.
GPUs are also well suited to performing many calculations simultaneously. That made Nvidia hardware valuable for scientific computing and, later, training and running artificial-intelligence models. Nvidia’s CUDA software platform helped developers use its GPUs for general-purpose computing.
People sometimes use “graphics card” and “GPU” interchangeably, although a graphics card is the complete board and a GPU is its main processor. Nvidia’s market-cap growth was closely connected to data-center demand, not only to gaming hardware.