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Over the past two decades, Nvidia (NVDA) has skyrocketed into global conversation.
The semiconductor company is considered an international leader in the design and manufacturing of computer chips and helped revolutionize the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).
Beyond its strengths in the gaming, data, and AI fields, Nvidia announced plans this March for a quantum research center in Boston, where CEO Jensen Huang said researchers could tackle problems from drug discovery to materials development.
Here’s a look at Nvidia’s path to where it is today, from creating hardware for the gaming industry to designing the chips that power AI.
On April 5, 1993, Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded Nvidia with an initial focus on designing and producing 3D graphics processors for computing and video games.
The company’s first product release, the multimedia processor NV1, didn’t get the reception the founders were hoping for. What followed was a financial situation so dire that Nvidia laid off half its staff, leading to its unofficial motto: “Our company is 30 days from going out of business.”
In addition to the NV1’s unimpressive return, a partnership that Nvidia had forged with Japanese video game company Sega to produce console graphics chips fell through, adding to the pressure. However, even as it pivoted to another company for chips, Sega invested $5 million in Nvidia — funding which allowed Nvidia to survive going out of business.
Despite financial challenges and a smaller team, Nvidia released its next chip in 1997. It was a success. RIVA 128 allowed for support of high-resolution 2D and 3D graphics, and over a million units were sold in its first four months of sales.
With the foundation of RIVA 128 sales, Nvidia produced RIVA TNT, which further cemented its place in the industry with better image quality and performance. Two years later, on Jan. 22, 1999, Nvidia went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at $12 a share, and by May, it shipped out its 10,000,000th graphics processor.
Later in 1999, Nvidia released GeForce 256, calling it the world’s first “Graphics Processing Unit.” By marketing the chip directly to customers instead of just including it within a device or console, the company popularized the term “GPU.”
With their ability to break larger tasks into smaller ones that could run at the same time, known as parallel processing, GPUs took on the heavy workload of powering graphics. It allowed devices to work on other processing functions faster, which meant GeForce 256 offered smoother, faster, and more realistic graphics.
