Nvidia is the semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, that uses the ticker NVDA.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The company first became known for graphics processing units, or GPUs, designed to render images and video for computer games.
Its CUDA software platform helped make Nvidia GPUs useful for general-purpose parallel computing as well as graphics. That capability became especially important for machine learning, where many calculations can be performed simultaneously. Nvidia later became a major supplier of accelerator hardware used in data centers and artificial-intelligence systems.
Nvidia shares trade on the Nasdaq under NVDA. Its market capitalization rose dramatically as investors assessed the importance of its chips and software in AI infrastructure. The ticker is not the company’s legal name, and Nvidia should not be confused with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which manufactures chips for many designers, including Nvidia.