Novemeber 5, 2025

Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, who believed that graphics processing would become essential to the future of computing. At a time when the PC market was expanding rapidly, the founders saw an opportunity to create specialized chips capable of handling complex visual workloads better than general-purpose CPUs.

The company’s early years were marked by experimentation, but Nvidia found its breakthrough in 1999 with the launch of the GeForce 256, marketed as the world’s first “GPU.” This moment defined the company’s identity and set a new industry standard for graphics performance. Nvidia continued to release increasingly powerful GPUs, becoming a dominant force in PC gaming and professional visualization.

In the mid-2000s, Nvidia made a strategic bet that would reshape its trajectory: the idea that GPUs could accelerate not only graphics but also general-purpose computation. This led to the development of CUDA, a parallel computing platform introduced in 2006. CUDA opened the door for researchers and developers to use GPUs for scientific computing, simulations, and—critically—the emerging field of machine learning.

Over the 2010s, Nvidia’s GPUs became foundational to artificial intelligence research. Breakthroughs in deep learning, particularly in image recognition and natural language processing, were powered by Nvidia hardware. The company expanded into data centers, autonomous vehicles, edge computing, and robotics, positioning itself as a leader in accelerated computing and become the world’s largest GPU provider.