A Complete Guide to Nvidia: the Chipmaker Behind the AI Boom

• Nvidia is one of the most valuable companies in the world.
• The chipmaker is leading the AI boom, and its stock price surged by more than 800% in two years.
• CEO Jensen Huang’s leadership and innovative products are part of Nvidia’s success.

Nvidia has been around for over three decades, but the chipmaker became a household name only in the past couple of years.

Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem “with a vision to bring 3D graphics to the gaming and multimedia markets.”

The boom in AI technology has made it one of the most valuable companies in the world as companies scramble to buy its graphics processing units. Here’s what you need to know about Nvidia.

History

Nvidia’s origin story began at a Denny’s during a meeting between Huang — who once worked for the chain — Malachowsky and Priem.

Personal computing was on the cusp of taking off, and the trio sought a way to capitalize on it. Huang said in a 2010 interview with Stanford University’s engineering school that they “wondered whether starting a graphics company would be a good idea.”

“We brainstormed and fantasized about what kind of company it would be and the world we could help,” he said. “It was fun.”

Their goal was to improve the experience of gaming on a PC.

By 1999, the year it went public, Nvidia had invented the graphics processing unit, a computer chip that can handle many tasks simultaneously. It had faced challenges; it built two chips that failed, and it nearly went bankrupt. But it had also established itself as a formidable player in the industry, partnering with companies such as Sega, Dell, and Micron and winning rounds of funding from the venture firms Sequoia Capital and Sierra Ventures.

In 2006, it released CUDA, a general-purpose programming interface that would expand its business far beyond gaming.

On Sequoia Capital’s “Crucible Moments” podcast, Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor who founded Google Brain, recalled his students telling him, “Hey, Andrew, there’s this thing called CUDA — not that easy to program, but it’s letting people use GPUs for something different.”

“We started to see 10x or even 100x speedups training neural networks on GPUs because we could do 1,000 or 10,000 things in parallel rather than one step after another,” he added.

Nvidia’s GPUs were used to train AlexNet, an image classification system unveiled in 2012 that significantly influenced the field of deep learning.

The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 ushered Nvidia into a new era. The chipmaker’s shares surged by more than 800% from the start of 2023 to the start of 2025.

Much of that growth came from the success of Nvidia’s H100 chip, which it released in March 2022. The $40,000 chip, named for the computer scientist Grace Hopper, has played a crucial role in providing the computing power for large language models.

Leadership

Nvidia’s success may be best personified by its CEO: Jensen Huang.

A 61-year-old bona fide tech mogul, Huang has a net worth of about $110 billion. While some execs sport chains or Patagonia vests, Huang is often spotted in a leather jacket. BI identified at least six versions he’s worn over the years, including a nearly $9,000 lizard-embossed coat from Tom Ford he wore at the company’s global AI conference, GTC, in 2024. He commemorated Nvidia’s stock price hitting $100 with a tattoo of Nvidia’s logo on his arm.

Huang’s early years were tumultuous. He was born in Taiwan, and he spent time there and in Thailand before his parents sent him to the United States because of social unrest in the region.

He attended a reform school in Kentucky. In an interview with NPR in 2012, he recalled that “the kids were really tough,” adding: “They all had pocket knives — and when they get in fights, it’s not pretty. Kids get hurt.” He later moved to Oregon, where he was reunited with his parents. In high school, he became a nationally ranked table tennis champion.

Huang graduated from Oregon State University with a degree in electrical engineering in 1984.

During his freshman year, Huang met Lori Mills, his future wife. In an interview at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he said he won her over by offering to help her with her homework. They married five years after meeting and now have two children: Madison Huang, a marketing director at Nvidia, and Spencer Huang, a senior product manager at the company.

Jensen Huang later earned a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford and he worked at the chip companies LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices before launching Nvidia.

Huang sold about 1.3 million shares of Nvidia when the company hit a $3 trillion market cap in June 2024, but he retains a more than 3% stake in the company.

Products

Nvidia’s business is built around GPUs, which can handle tasks simultaneously, as opposed to central processing units, or CPUs, which are in standard computers.

Nvidia’s GPUs have become a mainstay of the AI revolution because they provide the computing power needed to run massive large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Meta’s Llama 3.

Demand for Nvidia’s H100 chips, built on its Hopper architecture, has been so high in late 2023 and 2024 that tech execs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have bragged about how many units they’re training new technology on. ByteDance has found workarounds to US export bans on the chips to China. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have bought up thousands of units to fuel their AI ambitions, while venture capitalists have bought Nvidia GPUs as backup units for their startups.

Last year, Nvidia unveiled its Blackwell chips, which it says are twice as fast as its Hopper chips and have attracted customers including SoftBank, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft. The recent frenzy around the Chinese company DeepSeek’s models has fueled demand for Nvidia’s H200 chips.

But a key to Nvidia’s success is CUDA, a software layer that can link GPUs to almost any AI application a developer wants to run. It’s a critical component of the competitive advantage, or moat, that Nvidia has built up over the years.

Still, AMD, Nvidia’s main competitor, is quietly catching up. In AMD’s third-quarter earnings call in October 2024, CEO Lisa Su said the company had “closed a good part of” the gap with Nvidia.

Nvidia’s other competitors include Intel and IBM. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have also released their own AI chips.

In January 2025, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Huang unveiled new chips targeting the gaming, robotics, and autonomous vehicle industries, as well as partnerships with Toyota and Microsoft.

Financials

Nvidia has been competing with Apple and Microsoft for the title of the most valuable company in the world. It briefly surpassed Apple to take the top spot numerous times in 2024 and again in January 2025, when its market capitalization reached $3.45 trillion.

For the fiscal quarter that ended January 26, 2025, Nvidia reported record revenue of $39.3 billion, up by 78% from the prior year. Net income for the quarter was more than $22.1 billion, up by 80% from the prior year.

Working at Nvidia

Nvidia is based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia’s headquarters, known as Voyager, was designed by the architectural firm Gensler and is about 750,000 square feet.

It has parks, “treehouses” for gatherings, and places designed to help employees focus. However, the overall design is intended to facilitate Nvidia’s flat organizational structure.

“When you’re moving that fast, you want to make sure that that information is flowing through the company as quickly as possible,” Huang told the Harvard Business Review in 2023.

It’s also a way to create more harmony between leadership and workers. Huang, who in 2023 oversaw 50 direct reports, has said that CEOs “by definition” should have the most direct reports at a company.

Huang has earned a reputation among those who work with him as a demanding boss. Meetings with Huang can get heated, and senior employees have described his tough questions as a “Jensen grilling.”

Nvidia’s top executives include Ian Buck, a vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing; Colette Kress, the chief financial officer; and Bryan Catanzaro, a vice president of applied deep learning research.

Landing a job at Nvidia isn’t easy, but Lindsey Duran, a VP of recruitment, told BI that Nvidia applicants should express an interest in generative AI, tap into their professional network for referrals, and aim to do an internship.