NVIDIA was founded on January 31, 1993, by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The three founders had previously worked at Sun Microsystems and other technology companies. NVIDIA was initially focused on developing graphics chips for the emerging PC gaming market.
The company's first major success came with the launch of the RIVA series of graphics processors in the mid-1990s. However, NVIDIA's breakthrough came in 1999 with the introduction of the GeForce 256, the world's first GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), which revolutionized computer graphics and gaming.
Throughout the 2000s, NVIDIA expanded its product lines beyond gaming into professional markets with the Quadro series for workstations and Tesla series for high-performance computing. The company also developed CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), a parallel computing platform that allowed GPUs to be used for general-purpose computing.
In the 2010s, NVIDIA became a major player in artificial intelligence and deep learning, with its GPUs becoming the standard hardware for training neural networks. The company's data center business grew rapidly as cloud computing companies and AI researchers adopted NVIDIA's technology.
Throughout the 2020s, NVIDIA has continued to expand its AI capabilities, developing specialized AI chips like the H100 Tensor Core GPU and software platforms like NVIDIA AI Enterprise. The company has also expanded into automotive markets with its NVIDIA DRIVE platform for autonomous vehicles.
NVIDIA has made strategic acquisitions to enhance its capabilities, including Mellanox Technologies in 2019 for networking and high-performance computing, and various AI software companies to strengthen its AI ecosystem.