Nvidia Corporation is popularly known as Nvidia is a popular technology company of America which is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It designs and creates GPUs, i.e., graphics processing units and systems on chip units (SoCs) for gaming, mobile computing, and automotive markets. The company has a massive presence in the gaming industry with its Shield Android television, tablet, and gaming consoles. The company has diversified its business in five major industries; gaming, auto, professional visualization, artificial intelligence, and data centers.
Inception
Nvidia Corporation was founded on April 5, 1993, by three people, Jensen Huang, who was a microprocessor designer and the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic, Chris Malachowsky who worked at Sun Microsystems as an electrical engineer, and Curtis Priem who was a graphics chip designer at Sun Microsystems.
In the early 1990s, all three of them thought that the next wave of computing would either be accelerated or graphics-based, as these models will help to solve the general-purpose computing problems. Hence, with a capital of $40,000, Nvidia was born. Initially, they didn’t have a name, and the co-founders named the company “Next Version.” Later, they renamed it “invidia,” which means “envy” in Latin. On January 22, 1999, the company was made public.
In 1998, Nvidia developed 3d graphics accelerated chips for cable graphics adapters. The following year, they released the GeForce 256 (NV10) which became a significant part of the consumer-level 3D hardware. It outperformed most of the existing products by a wide margin. The chip runs at 120 MHz and implements advanced video acceleration, motion compensation, and sub-picture alpha blending.
Evolution
Most of the products of Nvidia were successful, which helped them to earn the contract to develop the graphics hardware for Microsoft’s Xbox game console. In 2000, they acquired consumer 3D graphics technology company, 3dfx. In 2002, they acquired the company Exluna which made software rendering tools. The following year, they bought MediaQ for more than $70 million, and high-performance TCP/IP and iSCSI offload solutions company iReady.
In 2004, Nvidia helped Sony in developing the PlayStation 3 game console. At the same time, they bought several other companies, including ULI Electronics, that supplied third-party southbridge parts to their competitors and graphics software technology company Hybrid Graphics. They also completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc, and Ageia.
In 2011, they launched Tegra 3 ARM system-on-chip for mobile phones, which featured the first-ever quad-core mobile CPU. In the same year, the acquired UK based baseband chip-making company, Icera for $367 million. In 2016, Nvidia launched the first GeForce 10 series GPUs, based on the company’s new Pascal microarchitecture. It supported a new hardware feature known as SMP, which helped to improve the quality of multi-monitor and virtual reality rendering.
In 2017, they signed an agreement with Toyota Motor Corp in which its Drive PX-series artificial intelligence platform was used for Toyota’s autonomous vehicles. Nvidia also partnered with the Chinese search giant Baidu, Inc to research in h giant Baidu, Inc. announced a far-reaching AI partnership that includes cloud computing, autonomous driving, consumer devices.
In December 2017, Nvidia officially released the NVIDIA TITAN V and the following year Nvidia Quadro GV100, and RTX 2080GPUs. The technology giant Google also announced that its Google Cloud service’s artificial intelligence would be integrated with Nvidia’s Tesla P4 graphic cards. To improve its footprint in the high-performance computing market, Nvidia bought Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion in 2019. They also announced the new RTX Studio laptops, which is said to be seven times faster than a top-end MacBook Pro.
Awards & Achievements
Nvidia has won several awards, including the “Company of the Year Award” by Forbes magazine in 2007. It was also named the best workplace to work by the online website Glassdoor. MIT Tech Review included Nvidia in the list of “Top 50 Smartest Companies”.
Nvidia is also named the Best Green Company, Best Corporate Citizen, and a Global Leader by the Harvard Business Review. It also won two Best Choice Awards at Computex 2019, and Fortune listed Nvidia as one of the best 100 companies to work for.
Net Worth of Nvidia in 2024
As of December 2024, Nvidia has an estimated net worth of more than $150 billion. It has a total asset of $13.292 billion and equity worth $9.342 billion.
The company earned $3.047 billion in the 2018 fiscal year and total annual revenue of $9.714 billion, which is 40.6% more than the previous fiscal cycle. Its share is traded over $245 per share and has a total market capitalization of more than $150 billion.
Nvidia is one of the biggest technology companies in the world, which has more than 13227 employees worldwide. Its family includes graphics, wireless communication, PC processors, and automotive hardware/software primarily.