Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem and later became a top market-cap company.
The company first built its reputation around graphics processing units, or GPUs, which render images and video. GPUs later became crucial for parallel computation, including the large-scale machine-learning workloads behind modern artificial intelligence systems.
Nvidia’s market value rose sharply as demand increased for data-center accelerators and related software. Its CUDA platform helped developers use Nvidia hardware for general-purpose computing, giving the company an ecosystem beyond gaming graphics.
Nvidia is often confused with Intel or AMD because all three are major semiconductor names. Nvidia designs chips and platforms but relies on outside foundries, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, for much of its manufacturing.