How the chipmaker evolved from a gaming startup to an AI giant

Over the past two decades, NVIDIA has increased to a global conversation.

The semiconductor company is an international pioneer in the design and manufacture of computer chips and has helped in a revolution in the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).

In addition to its strengths in the field of games, data and artificial intelligence fields, NVIDIA announced plans in March of the Quantum Research Center in Boston, where CEO Jensen Huang said that researchers can address problems from drug detection to the development of substances.

Below is a look at the NVIDIA Road to its place today, from creating game devices to the design of chips that work on artificial intelligence.

On April 5, 1993, Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem Nvidia were founded with an initial focus on design and production of 3D computing and video games.

The first version of the company, the NV1 multimedia processor, did not get the reception in which the founders were hoping. This was a very financial situation that NVIDIA cleared half of its employees, which led to its informal slogan: “Our company is 30 days out of work.”

In addition to the unmistakable NV1 return, the NVIDIA partnership forged with the Japanese video game company SEGA to produce control unit graphics chips, adding to the pressure. However, although it is a pivotal for another chips, Sega has invested $ 5 million in NVIDIA – the financing that allowed NVIDIA to survive at work.

Despite the financial challenges and a smaller team, NVIDIA released its next segment in 1997. It was successful. RIVA 128 allowed the support of high -resolution 2 -dimensional graphics, and more than a million units sold in the first four months of sales.

With the basis of RIVA 128 sales, NVIDIA RIVA TNT produced, which has strengthened its place in the industry with better quality and photo performance. Two years later, on January 22, 1999, NVIDIA was announced on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at a price of $ 12 per share, and by May, she shipped the graphics processor of 10,000,000.

Later in 1999, Nvidia GeForce 256, describing the world’s first “graphics” unit. By marketing the slide directly to customers instead of including it only inside a device or console, the company has circulated the term “GPU”.

With its ability to divide the greatest tasks into smaller tasks that can work at the same time, known as parallel treatment, GPU processing units have taken the heavy work burden of graphics. The devices were allowed to work on other processing functions faster, which means that GeForce 256 has provided smoother, faster and more realistic graphics.

Finding a growing success in providing graphics processing units for both customers and key devices such as Xbox, NVIDIA joined NASDAQ 100 and S&P 500 in 2001.

In 2006, Nvidia Cuda, a platform that allowed users to access the possibilities of processing their graphics processing units to run their own program instead of graphics only. From 2006 to 2017, NVIDIA invested approximately $ 12 billion in research and development with a large part of that money heading towards Koda.

CUDA downloads slowed when entering 2010, and while CUDA supplied to users the ability to use chips for purposes other than games, but it does not appear to be a fruit for investors.

“Some investors were adults in the late first decade of the twentieth century and gave them the benefit of doubt during the first five years of Cuda’s investment,” said Ben Gilbert, who participated in the podcast in the 2022 episode. “But in mid -2010, the demand for the market still does not appear significantly, and it has become a larger and larger investment.”

However, subsequent technological developments will make Cuda a very important thing for the company.

“It made all our products more expensive because we were selling these player cards with a computing acceleration mode,” Bian Katranzaro, Vice president of NVIDIA to search in the field of deep applied learning, told Yahoo to fund in 2023.

In 2012, students used Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever Cuda to train the AlexNet nervous knowledge with two NVIDIA graphics units.

AlexNet advanced in photo identification showed that the use of graphics processing units to train machine learning models greatly cuts training times compared to the previously used central processing units.

After this progress, NVIDIA started moving its focus on artificial intelligence, with the support of its revenues from the games. By 2016, it announced the DGX-1, a system specifically designed for deep learning and large language models that were high. That year, NVIDIA shares doubled almost three times.

“It is the fate that meets the coincidence.” People believed that he has achieved success overnight, but like most of the successes overnight, it took years for us. “

Meanwhile, NVIDIA has seized the opportunity to perform strategic acquisitions, such as ICERA in 2011 and Hardware Group in 2013. I tried to get ARM for semiconductor and design company (ARM) in 2020, but the deal eventually after organizational concerns.

In March 2022, NVIDIA announced the “Hopper” H100 chip, a faster training promise and better performance of artificial intelligence. A large majority of the market share with this graphics processing unit, and large companies, including Alphabet (Googon), Amazon (Amzn) and Microsoft (MSFT), turn to billions with billions where it started developing AI products and data -based products.

One of these companies is Openai (OPAI.PVT), whose relationship with NVIDIA extends to 2016, when NVIDIA donated the first DGX-1 of the startup. In November 2022, Openai Chatgpt, a language model based on NVIDIA graphics units that quickly reached the main headlines.

In less than two months, Chatgpt set the record for the fastest growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study, as it reached 100 million monthly users in January 2023.

“The new computing era has started,” Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA said in a statement in 2023. “Companies all over the world are transferred from general to accelerating computing and ai Toulidi.”

With investors increasingly interested in artificial intelligence and with the continued growth of the demand for graphics processing units on models, NVIDIA’s revenue for the quarter ending in January 2024 is more than twice as its results on an annual basis.

After issuing the separation report, NVIDIA made the largest profit for one day in the history of the stock market, adding $ 277 billion. Then he rated $ 2 trillion the next day. The record will not stand for a long time, however; Nafidia overcame it again after only two months.

In that march, NVIDIA declared its following digital: Blackwell. Provide a higher performance with a decrease in cost and energy consumption, the chips are designed to work better than previous versions when they are linked to work together in large numbers.

Soon after, NVIDIA announced a division of 10 against 1 in June 2024. After the division, Microsoft and Apple (AAPL) passed to become the most valuable companies in the world with a value of $ 3.3 trillion. By November 2024, it was added to the Dow Jones industrial average.

Despite its successes, NVIDIA also faced challenges throughout its rise. In 2018, a collective lawsuit claimed that it had not properly revealed to investors the impact of the coded currency market on revenues from sales of graphics processing units.

At that time, “mining workers” of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC-weD) and ETHEREUM (ETH-UsD) used graphics processing units to complete transactions and secure new encryption codes. The process requires a great math strength, making NVIDIA GPUS a popular choice. NVIDIA paid a $ 5.5 million settlement in 2022 to the Supreme Education Council due to the case, and in December 2024, the Supreme Court rejected NVIDIA, allowing the 2018 case to move forward.

This was not the first time that NVIDIA has managed legal issues regarding chips. In 2016, she settled a case that has been marketed and actual capacity of the GTX 970, with $ 30 batches per purchase.

In addition to legal issues, there is also a challenge to keep pace with the supply with the request. A global shortage of chip for the first time in early 2020 as a result of the Corona virus and increased dependence on technology to work remotely. Other factors that tallest the shortage until 2023 included the initial trade war between the United States of China, the harsh air events, and the war of Russia Ukraine.

A report from December 2024 of IDC presented global demand for artificial intelligence and high performance computing (HPC) that grows more than 15 % in 2025.

President Trump announced the Stargate project in January 2025, which includes technology companies such as Oracle (ORCL), Openai and SoftBank (SFTBY) investing $ 500 billion in Amnesty International Infrastructure in the United States during the next four years. NVIDIA, as a technical partner for the project, witnessed a jump in its stock, and reached a $ 3.6 trillion market roof.

Later this month, the Chinese company Dibsic released its artificial intelligence model, which was trained at a much lower cost than the competing cost. After this announcement, the shares of NVIDIA decreased 589 billion dollars, or nearly 17 %, which represents the largest loss for one day in the history of the stock market.

After the decrease, March 2025 brought the first appearance of Blackwill Ultra from NVIDIA, Blackweell Khalifa. The new chip has been announced that it has 1.5 times the performance of the previous slide, which can help artificial intelligence models to answer faster information.

In April 2025, Trump banned the export of the company’s H20 chip to China, because chips like NVIDIA are very important in the race to develop artificial intelligence technologies. In the first quarter report, NVIDIA said it expects to miss 8 billion dollars of potential sales due to the ban.

Despite the exported restrictions, NVIDIA continues to grow until Microsoft has a brief time in June as the world’s most valuable company. Some are looking forward, so that some expect that it may be the first company to reach the roof of a market worth $ 4 trillion.

“[Nvidia] The founder of ARK Invest said that the artificial intelligence revolution continues. “

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Nina is a trainee reporter to finance Yahoo.