NVIDIA CORP

Founding

Nvidia was founded on April 5, 1993, by Jensen Huang, a Taiwanese-American electrical engineer who was previously the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at AMD, Chris Malachowsky, an engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems, and Curtis Priem, who was previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at IBM and Sun Microsystems. In late 1992, the three men agreed to start the company by sketching out their initial ideas in a meeting at a Denny's roadside diner on Berryessa Road in East San Jose.

At the time, Malachowsky and Priem were frustrated with Sun's management and were looking to leave, but Huang was on "firmer ground", in that he was already running his own division at LSI. The three co-founders discussed a vision of the future for gaming and multimedia markets, which was so compelling that Huang decided to leave LSI and become the chief executive officer of their new startup.

The three co-founders envisioned 3D graphics-based processing as the best trajectory for tackling challenges that had eluded general-purpose computing methods. As Huang later explained: "We also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume. Those two conditions don't happen very often. Video games was our killer app – a flywheel to reach large markets funding huge R&D to solve massive computational problems."

The first problem was who would quit first. Huang's wife, Lori, did not want him to resign from LSI unless Malachowsky resigned from Sun at the same time, and Malachowsky's wife, Melody, felt the same way about Huang. Priem broke that deadlock by resigning first from Sun, effective December 31, 1992. According to Priem, this put pressure on Huang and Malachowsky to not leave him to "flail alone", so they gave notice too. Huang left LSI and "officially joined Priem on February 17", which was also Huang's 30th birthday, while Malachowsky left Sun in early March. In early 1993, the three founders began working together on their new startup in Priem's townhouse in Fremont, California.

With $40,000 in the bank (equivalent to $89,000 in 2025), the company was born. The company subsequently received $20 million of venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, and others.

During the late 1990s, Nvidia was one of 70 startup companies pursuing the idea that graphics acceleration for video games was the path to the future. Only two survived: Nvidia and ATI Technologies, the latter of which merged into AMD.

Nvidia initially had no name. Priem's first idea was "Primal Graphics", a syllabic abbreviation of two of the founders' last names, but that left out Huang. They soon discovered it was impossible to create a workable name with syllables from all three founders' names, after considering "Huaprimal", "Prihuamal", "Malluapri", etc. The next idea came from Priem's idea for the name of Nvidia's first product. Priem originally wanted to call it the "GXNV", as in the "next version" of the GX graphics chips which he had worked on at Sun. Then Huang told Priem to "drop the GX", resulting in the name "NV". Priem made a list of words with the letters "NV" in them. At one point, Malachowsky and Priem wanted to call the company NVision, but that name was already taken by a manufacturer of toilet paper. Both Priem and Huang have taken credit for coming up with the name Nvidia, from " invidia ", the Latin word for "envy". After the company outgrew Priem's townhouse, its original headquarters office was in Sunnyvale, California.

In the early-to-mid 2000s, the company invested over a billion dollars to develop CUDA, a software platform and API that enabled GPUs to run massively parallel programs for a broad range of compute-intensive applications. As a result, as of 2025, Nvidia controlled more than 80% of the market for GPUs used in training and deploying AI models, and provided chips for over 75% of the world's TOP500 supercomputers. The company has also expanded into gaming hardware and services, with products such as the Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and Shield TV, and operates the GeForce Now cloud gaming service. Furthermore, it has developed the Tegra line of mobile processors for smartphones, tablets, and automotive infotainment systems.

Public company

Nvidia went public on January 22, 1999. Investing in Nvidia after it had already failed to deliver on its contract turned out to be Irimajiri's best decision as Sega's president. After Irimajiri left Sega in 2000, Sega sold its Nvidia stock for $15 million.

In late 1999, Nvidia released the GeForce 256 (NV10), its first product expressly marketed as a GPU, which was most notable for introducing onboard transformation and lighting (T&L) to consumer-level 3D hardware. Running at 120 MHz and featuring four-pixel pipelines, it implemented advanced video acceleration, motion compensation, and hardware sub-picture alpha blending. The GeForce outperformed existing products by a wide margin.

Because its products were performing well, Nvidia won the contract to develop the graphics hardware for Microsoft's Xbox game console, which included a $200 million advance. However, the project took many of its best engineers away from other projects. In the short term this did not matter, and the GeForce 2 GTS shipped in the summer of 2000. In December 2000, Nvidia reached an agreement to acquire the intellectual assets of its one-time rival 3dfx, a pioneer in consumer 3D graphics technology leading the field from the mid-1990s until 2000. The acquisition process was finalized in April 2002.

In 2001, Standard & Poor's selected Nvidia to replace the departing Enron in the S&P 500 stock index, meaning that index funds would need to hold Nvidia shares going forward.

In July 2002, Nvidia acquired Exluna for an undisclosed sum. Exluna made software-rendering tools and its personnel were merged into Nvidia's Cg project. In August 2003, Nvidia acquired MediaQ for approximately US$70 million. It launched GoForce the following year. On April 22, 2004, Nvidia acquired iReady, also a provider of high-performance TCP offload engines and iSCSI controllers. In December 2004, it was announced that Nvidia would assist Sony with the design of the graphics processor ( RSX ) for the PlayStation 3 game console. On December 14, 2005, Nvidia acquired ULI Electronics, which at the time supplied third-party southbridge parts for chipsets to ATI, Nvidia's competitor. In March 2006, Nvidia acquired Hybrid Graphics.

Forbes named Nvidia its Company of the Year for 2007, citing the accomplishments it made during the said period as well as during the previous five years. On January 5, 2007, Nvidia announced that it had completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc. In February 2008, Nvidia acquired Ageia, developer of PhysX, a physics engine and physics processing unit. Nvidia announced that it planned to integrate the PhysX technology into its future GPU products.

In February 2013, Nvidia announced its plans to build a new headquarters in the form of two giant triangle-shaped buildings on the other side of San Tomas Expressway (to the west of its existing headquarters complex). The company selected triangles as its design theme. As Huang explained in a blog post, the triangle is "the fundamental building block of computer graphics". In May 2022, Nvidia opened Voyager, the second of the two giant buildings at its new headquarters complex to the west of the old one. Unlike its smaller and older sibling Endeavor, the triangle theming is used more "sparingly" in Voyager.

Acquisitions

2019–2020

On March 11, 2019, Nvidia announced a deal to buy Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion to substantially expand its footprint in the high-performance computing market. The acquisition of the Israeli firm, a longtime supplier to the Israeli military, led to the 2023 launch of "Israel-1," described as the country's most powerful AI supercomputer. In May 2019, Nvidia announced new RTX Studio laptops. The creators said that the new laptop was going to be seven times faster than a top-end MacBook Pro with a Core i9 and AMD's Radeon Pro Vega 20 graphics in apps like Maya and RedCine-X Pro. In August 2019, Nvidia announced Minecraft RTX, an official Nvidia-developed graphics mode for the game Minecraft adding real-time DXR ray tracing exclusively to the game's Windows version. The whole game was, in Nvidia's words, "refit" with path tracing, which dramatically affects the way light, reflections, and shadows work inside the engine.

In May 2020, Nvidia announced it was acquiring Cumulus Networks. Post-acquisition, the company was absorbed into Nvidia's networking business unit, along with Mellanox.

On September 13, 2020, Nvidia announced that it would buy Arm from SoftBank Group for $40 billion, subject to the usual scrutiny, with the latter retaining a 10% share of Nvidia. In August 2021, the proposed takeover of Arm was stalled after the UK's Competition and Markets Authority raised "significant competition concerns". This would have been the largest semiconductor acquisition in history.

2021–2026

In April 2022, it was reported that Nvidia planned to open a new research center in Yerevan, Armenia.

In 2023, Nvidia became the seventh U.S. company to reach a US$1 trillion valuation. In 2025, amid increased demand for AI data center hardware in the midst of the AI boom, Nvidia became the first company in the world to surpass US$4 trillion and US$5 trillion in market capitalization. Because of its market capitalization and role in major technology indexes, Nvidia has been selected as one of Bloomberg 's " Magnificent Seven ", the seven biggest companies on the stock market in these regards.

In February 2024, it was reported that Nvidia was the "hot employer" in Silicon Valley because it was offering interesting work and good pay at a time when other tech employers were downsizing. Half of Nvidia employees earned over $228,000 in 2023. By then, Nvidia GPUs had become so valuable that they needed special security while in transit to data centers. Cisco chief information officer Fletcher Previn explained at a CIO summit: "Those GPUs arrive by armored car".

On March 1, 2024, Nvidia became the third company in the history of the United States to close with a market capitalization in excess of $2 trillion. Nvidia needed only 180 days to get to $2 trillion from $1 trillion, while the first two companies, Apple and Microsoft, each took over 500 days. On June 18, 2024, the company became the world's most valuable, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, after its market capitalization exceeded $3.3 trillion.

In November 2024, the company was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In November 2024, Morgan Stanley reported that "the entire 2025 production" of all of Nvidia's Blackwell chips was "already sold out".

Nvidia was ranked No. 3 on Forbes' "Best Places to Work" list in 2024.

In November 2024, the company bought 1.2 million shares of Nebius Group.

As of January 7, 2025, Nvidia's $3.66 trillion market cap was worth more than double of the combined value of AMD, ARM, Broadcom, and Intel. Also in January 2025, Nvidia saw the largest one-day loss in market capitalization for a U.S. company in history at $600 billion. This was due to DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that developed an advanced AI model at a lower cost and computing power. DeepSeek's AI assistant, using the V3 model, surpassed ChatGPT as the highest-rated free app in the U.S. on Apple 's App Store.

In August 2026, Charles Schwab reported that Nvidia and Micron together accounted for approximately one-third of aggregate S&P 500 earnings growth for 2026, while the ten largest contributors accounted for about two-thirds.