April 5, 1993
Jensen Huang co-founds NVIDIA
Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded NVIDIA on April 5, 1993 — starting as a graphics chip company that later powered AI.
What it was for
NVIDIA's GPUs went from PCPersonal computer — a computer designed for individual use, especially desktop or laptop machines. gaming to CUDANVIDIA's parallel computing platform — lets developers run general code on GPUs for ML and simulation. parallel computing to training virtually every large language model. Huang has been CEO since founding — one of the longest and most consequential runs in semiconductorA material whose conductivity can be controlled — silicon semiconductors are the basis of almost all computer chips. history.
People
- Jensen Huang — co founder
- Chris Malachowsky — co founder
- Curtis Priem — co founder
Companies
- NVIDIA
Why it's here
NVIDIA became the dominant AI compute platform of the 2020s.
Why it mattered
GPUs shifted from graphics cards to the engine of deep learningNeural networks with many layers that learn hierarchical representations from data. and HPC.
What it solved
3D graphics needed dedicated parallel hardware beyond general-purpose CPUs.
Media
ImageJensen HuangThe White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons