Nvidia designs and sells semiconductor chips that companies like Microsoft and Cisco use to run everything from video games to cloud servers and supercomputers. The company is also known as a leader in the AI revolution.
Hours of research by our editors, distilled into minutes of clarity.
Nvidia started as a graphics chip designer for PCs and consoles. This explainer traces its rise from early GPU innovation to powering AI breakthroughs and fueling the data centers behind today’s biggest tech platforms.
Nvidia is one of a handful of companies valued at more than $1T. In its early days, the semiconductor company sold GPUs, or graphics processing units, that were used for video games. But in recent years, Nvidia’s chips have been used for crypto and AI. Nvidia has faced several setbacks on its journey, including when the US sanctioned chip exports to China.
Graphics processing units are specialized computer chips that can process multiple data streams in parallel, including pixel colors for a display. Such processing is required to find connections across text data and generate outputs quickly.
From the mid-1990s to early 2000s, Nvidia carved out a niche as a maker of semiconductor chips specially designed for the video game industry. Nvidia broke through the competition to seal deals with TSMC and Microsoft, and popularized the term “graphics processing unit,” aka GPU.
They can contain billions of microscopic switches on a chip smaller than a fingernail. An article provides a quick overview of how the devices work and how they’ve provided the backbone of the computer age.
Bloomberg created a network diagram that shows how companies like Nvidia and OpenAI are fueling the AI money machine. The chart shows that many top AI companies provide significant investments to one another.
Its semiconductor chips were used in the automotive industry, for data centers, and by crypto miners. And starting in 2006, Nvidia took steps that would ultimately transform it into the AI company it’s known as today. This podcast is the second part of a three-part series diving deep into Nvidia’s company evolution.
CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform that was developed by Nvidia in the mid-2000s. By letting people perform computations in parallel, rather than sequentially, CUDA allowed people to compute large amounts of data quickly. CUDA has been used to build machine-learning models as well.
Semiconductor company Nvidia has a commanding market share when it comes to graphics processing units. Its competitors include Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, which together account for less than a fifth of the GPU market.
Ray tracing allows developers to add more realistic-looking lighting and shadows to video games, and Nvidia continues to improve the tech in newer chips. Rendering light realistically in video games requires immense computing power, and ray tracing “cheats” the process with a little guesswork.
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