Nvidia is a U.S. semiconductor and computing company that pioneered the modern GPU and has become a core infrastructure provider for artificial intelligence, data centers, and high‑performance computing, alongside its original PC gaming and graphics business.wikipedia+2
What Nvidia is
Nvidia Corporation is an American technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The company designs GPUs, systems‑on‑chips, and software platforms used in gaming, professional visualization, AI, and automotive applications. It is publicly traded on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA and is widely regarded as one of the most valuable and influential Big Tech firms in the world.linkedin+3
Core businesses and products
Nvidia’s best‑known products are its GeForce GPUs, which dominate the discrete graphics market for gaming PCs and creative workstations, with around a 90%+ share in discrete desktop and laptop GPUs as of early 2025. It also sells professional GPUs and complete systems for data centers under brands like H100, B100/Blackwell, and DGX, which are used to train and run large AI models and power many of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers. Over time, Nvidia has expanded into end‑to‑end platforms including networking (via Mellanox), AI software stacks (CUDA, cuDNN, enterprise AI suites), and automotive platforms for driver‑assistance and autonomous driving.techtarget+4
Role in AI and data centers
A key strategic move was the development of CUDA in the mid‑2000s, a programming platform that let developers use GPUs for general‑purpose parallel computing, effectively turning GPUs into accelerators for scientific computing, finance, and later deep learning. As of 2025, Nvidia controls more than 80% of the market for GPUs used to train and deploy AI models and provides chips for over 75% of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers. Its data center revenue has grown explosively—over 400% year‑on‑year to around 18.4 billion dollars in a single quarter in 2024—driven by demand from hyperscalers like Meta, which alone planned to deploy about 350,000 H100 GPUs. Nvidia also partners closely with AI labs such as OpenAI, including a planned investment of up to 100 billion dollars to supply next‑generation AI data center infrastructure.cnbc+3
Growth and market significance
Initially a niche GPU vendor, Nvidia’s pivot from pure graphics to “accelerated computing” made it a central supplier for cloud providers, enterprises, and governments building AI infrastructure. The company’s market capitalization surpassed 3 trillion dollars in June 2024, putting it in the very top tier of global public companies by value. As of 2025 it employed roughly 36,000 people and positioned itself as a “full‑stack” computing company, integrating chips, systems, networking, and software into tightly coupled platforms. Many analysts now see Nvidia’s hardware and software ecosystem as foundational to the current AI cycle, analogous to what Intel plus Microsoft were to the PC era.itpro+3
Brief history
Nvidia was founded on April 5, 1993, after its three founders concluded that dedicated graphics processors would be essential for the next generation of 3D computing. Its early breakthrough was the GeForce 256 in 1999, often cited as the first modern GPU and a catalyst for the explosion of PC 3D gaming. Subsequent milestones included acquiring 3dfx assets, moving into mobile and console graphics, launching CUDA, and then building out a data center‑focused AI hardware and software stack. This sequence of bets shifted Nvidia from a cyclical PC‑graphics supplier into a central player in AI, supercomputing, and cloud infrastructure.finance.yahoo+4