NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem in Santa Clara, California. The company started by making graphics chips for PC gaming. Its GeForce line became the standard for gaming GPUs, but NVIDIA’s real transformation came when researchers discovered that GPUs were far better than CPUs at the parallel computations needed for machine learning.
NVIDIA’s CUDA platform, launched in 2006, let developers program GPUs for general-purpose computing. This turned out to be the foundation for the entire modern AI industry. Today, NVIDIA’s data center GPUs — the A100, H100, H200, and B200 — power the vast majority of AI training and inference worldwide.
The financial results have been staggering. NVIDIA’s revenue jumped from $27 billion in fiscal year 2023 to $61 billion in fiscal 2024, driven almost entirely by explosive AI demand. The company’s market cap has surpassed $3 trillion, briefly making it the most valuable company in the world in 2024.
Beyond chips, NVIDIA provides an entire AI computing stack: networking (Mellanox, acquired for $7 billion in 2020), software frameworks (cuDNN, TensorRT, NeMo), and cloud services (DGX Cloud). The company’s dominance is so complete that AI lab budgets are often measured in how many NVIDIA GPUs they can acquire.
NVIDIA also maintains strong positions in automotive computing (DRIVE platform), professional visualization (RTX GPUs for studios), and of course gaming, which still generates substantial revenue.
Headquartered in Santa Clara, NVIDIA employs over 29,000 people. Huang remains CEO, making him one of the longest-tenured tech company leaders.
