A Full Information to Nvidia: the Chipmaker Behind the AI Growth

• Nvidia is without doubt one of the most useful corporations on the planet.
• The chipmaker is main the AI increase, and its inventory value surged by greater than 800% in two years.
• CEO Jensen Huang’s management and revolutionary merchandise are a part of Nvidia’s success.

Nvidia has been round for over three a long time, however the chipmaker grew to become a family title solely previously couple of years.

Nvidia was based in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem “with a imaginative and prescient to deliver 3D graphics to the gaming and multimedia markets.”

The increase in AI know-how has made it one of the crucial invaluable corporations on the planet as corporations scramble to purchase its graphics processing items. This is what that you must find out about Nvidia.

Historical past

Nvidia’s origin story started at a Denny’s throughout a gathering between Huang — who as soon as labored for the chain — Malachowsky and Priem.

Private computing was on the cusp of taking off, and the trio sought a approach to capitalize on it. Huang stated in a 2010 interview with Stanford College’s engineering college that they “questioned whether or not beginning a graphics firm can be a good suggestion.”

“We brainstormed and fantasized about what sort of firm it will be and the world we might assist,” he stated. “It was enjoyable.”

Their purpose was to enhance the expertise of gaming on a PC.

By 1999, the 12 months it went public, Nvidia had invented the graphics processing unit, a pc chip that may deal with many duties concurrently. It had confronted challenges; it constructed two chips that failed, and it practically went bankrupt. Nevertheless it had additionally established itself as a formidable participant within the business, partnering with corporations akin to Sega, Dell, and Micron and profitable rounds of funding from the enterprise corporations Sequoia Capital and Sierra Ventures.

In 2006, it launched CUDA, a general-purpose programming interface that will broaden its enterprise far past gaming.

On Sequoia Capital’s “Crucible Moments” podcast, Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor who based Google Mind, recalled his college students telling him, “Hey, Andrew, there’s this factor known as CUDA — not that straightforward to program, however it’s letting individuals use GPUs for one thing totally different.”

“We began to see 10x and even 100x speedups coaching neural networks on GPUs as a result of we might do 1,000 or 10,000 issues in parallel reasonably than one step after one other,” he added.

Nvidia’s GPUs have been used to coach AlexNet, a picture classification system unveiled in 2012 that considerably influenced the sphere of deep studying.

The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 ushered Nvidia into a brand new period. The chipmaker’s shares surged by greater than 800% from the beginning of 2023 to the beginning of 2025.

A lot of that progress got here from the success of Nvidia’s H100 chip, which it launched in March 2022. The $40,000 chip, named for the pc scientist Grace Hopper, has performed an important function in offering the computing energy for big language fashions.

Management

Nvidia’s success could also be finest personified by its CEO: Jensen Huang.

A 61-year-old bona fide tech mogul, Huang has a internet value of about $110 billion. Whereas some execs sport chains or Patagonia vests, Huang is usually noticed in a leather-based jacket. BI recognized not less than six variations he is worn over time, together with a virtually $9,000 lizard-embossed coat from Tom Ford he wore on the firm’s world AI convention, GTC, in 2024. He commemorated Nvidia’s inventory value hitting $100 with a tattoo of Nvidia’s brand on his arm.

Huang’s early years have been tumultuous. He was born in Taiwan, and he frolicked there and in Thailand earlier than his mother and father despatched him to the US due to social unrest within the area.

He attended a reform college in Kentucky. In an interview with NPR in 2012, he recalled that “the youngsters have been actually robust,” including: “All of them had pocket knives — and after they get in fights, it isn’t fairly. Youngsters get damage.” He later moved to Oregon, the place he was reunited along with his mother and father. In highschool, he grew to become a nationally ranked desk tennis champion.

Huang graduated from Oregon State College with a level in electrical engineering in 1984.

Throughout his freshman 12 months, Huang met Lori Mills, his future spouse. In an interview on the Hong Kong College of Science and Expertise, he stated he received her over by providing to assist her together with her homework. They married 5 years after assembly and now have two youngsters: Madison Huang, a advertising and marketing director at Nvidia, and Spencer Huang, a senior product supervisor on the firm.

Jensen Huang later earned a grasp’s in electrical engineering from Stanford and he labored on the chip corporations LSI Logic and Superior Micro Units earlier than launching Nvidia.

Huang offered about 1.3 million shares of Nvidia when the corporate hit a $3 trillion market cap in June 2024, however he retains a greater than 3% stake within the firm.

Merchandise

Nvidia’s enterprise is constructed round GPUs, which might deal with duties concurrently, versus central processing items, or CPUs, that are in customary computer systems.

Nvidia’s GPUs have grow to be a mainstay of the AI revolution as a result of they supply the computing energy wanted to run large giant language fashions like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Meta’s Llama 3.

Demand for Nvidia’s H100 chips, constructed on its Hopper structure, has been so excessive in late 2023 and 2024 that tech execs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have bragged about what number of items they’re coaching new know-how on. ByteDance has discovered workarounds to US export bans on the chips to China. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have purchased up 1000’s of items to gas their AI ambitions, whereas enterprise capitalists have purchased Nvidia GPUs as backup items for his or her startups.

Final 12 months, Nvidia unveiled its Blackwell chips, which it says are twice as quick as its Hopper chips and have attracted clients together with SoftBank, Amazon Internet Providers, and Microsoft. The current frenzy across the Chinese language firm DeepSeek’s fashions has fueled demand for Nvidia’s H200 chips.

However a key to Nvidia’s success is CUDA, a software program layer that may hyperlink GPUs to virtually any AI utility a developer needs to run. It is a important part of the aggressive benefit, or moat, that Nvidia has constructed up over time.

Nonetheless, AMD, Nvidia’s primary competitor, is quietly catching up. In AMD’s third-quarter earnings name in October 2024, CEO Lisa Su stated the corporate had “closed a very good a part of” the hole with Nvidia.

Nvidia’s different opponents embody Intel and IBM. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have additionally launched their very own AI chips.

In January 2025, on the Client Electronics Present in Las Vegas, Huang unveiled new chips concentrating on the gaming, robotics, and autonomous car industries, in addition to partnerships with Toyota and Microsoft.

Financials

Nvidia has been competing with Apple and Microsoft for the title of probably the most invaluable firm on the planet. It briefly surpassed Apple to take the highest spot quite a few instances in 2024 and once more in January 2025, when its market capitalization reached $3.45 trillion.

For the fiscal quarter that ended January 26, 2025, Nvidia reported report income of $39.3 billion, up by 78% from the prior 12 months. Web earnings for the quarter was greater than $22.1 billion, up by 80% from the prior 12 months.

Working at Nvidia

Nvidia is predicated in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia’s headquarters, generally known as Voyager, was designed by the architectural agency Gensler and is about 750,000 sq. toes.

It has parks, “treehouses” for gatherings, and locations designed to assist workers focus. Nonetheless, the general design is meant to facilitate Nvidia’s flat organizational construction.

“While you’re shifting that quick, you wish to make it possible for that info is flowing by the corporate as rapidly as potential,” Huang informed the Harvard Enterprise Evaluate in 2023.

It is also a approach to create extra concord between management and staff. Huang, who in 2023 oversaw 50 direct experiences, has stated that CEOs “by definition” ought to have probably the most direct experiences at an organization.

Huang has earned a popularity amongst those that work with him as a demanding boss. Conferences with Huang can get heated, and senior workers have described his robust questions as a “Jensen grilling.”

Nvidia’s high executives embody Ian Buck, a vice chairman of hyperscale and high-performance computing; Colette Kress, the chief monetary officer; and Bryan Catanzaro, a vice chairman of utilized deep studying analysis.

Touchdown a job at Nvidia is not straightforward, however Lindsey Duran, a VP of recruitment, informed BI that Nvidia candidates ought to specific an curiosity in generative AI, faucet into their skilled community for referrals, and purpose to do an internship.