Nvidia designed CUDA, a platform widely used for programming its graphics processors.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The company became known for graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were first associated mainly with computer games and 3D graphics.
CUDA, introduced in 2006, allowed developers to use Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose parallel computing. GPUs can perform many calculations simultaneously, making them useful for scientific workloads, simulations, machine learning, and artificial-intelligence systems.
Nvidia’s market capitalization surged as demand for accelerated computing and AI infrastructure grew. The company sells chips and platforms, but it does not generally manufacture all of its own leading-edge silicon; much of that production is performed by specialist foundries. CUDA is software, not a semiconductor chip.