Nvidia designed the NV1 graphics accelerator and was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem.
Nvidia was established in Santa Clara, California, with the goal of developing specialized graphics hardware. Its first product, the NV1, appeared in 1995. The company later popularized programmable graphics processors and helped establish the term GPU for a class of chips designed to process large numbers of calculations in parallel.
Nvidia's CUDA platform, introduced in 2006, enabled developers to use its GPUs for general-purpose computing as well as graphics. That capability made Nvidia hardware important in scientific computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Nvidia's market capitalization rose sharply as investors valued its position in accelerated computing. Market cap still reflects shares and share price, not the number of chips manufactured or the company's physical assets.