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 Headquarters in Santa Clara, California, in 2023 | |
| NVIDIA | |
| Company type | Public |
| |
| Industry | |
| Founded | April 5, 1993, in Sunnyvale, California, U.S |
| Founders | |
| Headquarters | , U.S |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
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| Products | |
| Revenue |  US$60.92 billion (FY 2024) |
| US$32.97 billion (FY 2024) | |
| US$29.76 billion (FY 2024) | |
| Total assets | US$65.73 billion (FY 2024) |
| Total equity | US$42.98 billion (FY 2024) |
Number of employees | 29,600 (FY 2024) |
| Subsidiaries | |
| Website | nvidia.com |
| Footnotes / references [1][2] | |
Nvidia Corporation[a][b] (/ɛnˈvɪdiə/, en-VID-ee-ə) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware.[5] It is a software and fabless company which designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing, as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia is also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software.[6][7][8]
Nvidia's professional line of GPUs are used for edge-to-cloud computing and in supercomputers and workstations for applications in such fields as architecture, engineering and construction, media and entertainment, automotive, scientific research, and manufacturing design.[9] Its GeForce line of GPUs are aimed at the consumer market and are used in applications such as video editing, 3D rendering and PC gaming. In the second quarter of 2023, Nvidia had a market share of 80.2% in the discrete desktop GPU market.[10] The company expanded its presence in the gaming industry with the introduction of the Shield Portable (a handheld game console), Shield Tablet (a gaming tablet) and Shield TV (a digital media player), as well as its cloud gaming service GeForce Now.[11]
In addition to GPU design and manufacturing, Nvidia provides the CUDA software platform and API that allows the creation of massively parallel programs which utilize GPUs.[12][13] They are deployed in supercomputing sites around the world.[14][15] In the late 2000s, Nvidia had moved into the mobile computing market, where it produces Tegra mobile processors for smartphones and tablets as well as vehicle navigation and entertainment systems.[16][17][18] Its competitors include AMD, Intel,[19] Qualcomm[20] and AI accelerator companies such as Cerebras and Graphcore. It also makes AI-powered software for audio and video processing, e.g. Nvidia Maxine.[21]
Nvidia's offer to acquire Arm from SoftBank in September 2020 failed to materialize following extended regulatory scrutiny, leading to the termination of the deal in February 2022 in what would have been the largest semiconductor acquisition.[22][23] In 2023, Nvidia became the seventh public U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion,[24] and the company's valuation has skyrocketed since then as the company became a leader in data center chips with AI capabilities. In June 2024, Nvidia overtook Microsoft as the world's most valuable publicly traded company, with a market capitalization of over $3.3 trillion.
History[edit]
Founding[edit]
Nvidia was founded on April 5, 1993,[25][26][27] by Jensen Huang (CEO as of 2024[update]), a Taiwanese-American electrical engineer who was previously the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at AMD; Chris Malachowsky, an engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems; and Curtis Priem, who was previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at IBM and Sun Microsystems.[28][29] The three men agreed to start the company in a meeting at a Denny's roadside diner on Berryessa Road in East San Jose.[30][31]
At the time, Malachowsky and Priem were frustrated with Sun's management and were looking to leave, but Huang was on "firmer ground",[32] in that he was already running his own division at LSI.[31] The three co-founders discussed a vision of the future which was so compelling that Huang decided to leave LSI[32] and become the chief executive officer of their new startup.[31]
In 1993, the three co-founders envisioned that the ideal trajectory for the forthcoming wave of computing would be in the realm of accelerated computing, specifically in graphics-based processing. This path was chosen due to its unique ability to tackle challenges that eluded general-purpose computing methods.[32] As Huang later explained: "We also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume. Those two conditions don’t happen very often. Video games was our killer app—a flywheel to reach large markets funding huge R&D to solve massive computational problems."[32] With $40,000 in the bank, the company was born.[32] The company subsequently received $20 million of venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital and others.[33]
During the late 1990s, Nvidia was one of 70 startup companies chasing the idea that graphics acceleration for video games was the path to the future.[30] Only two survived: Nvidia and ATI Technologies, which merged into AMD.[30]
Nvidia initially had no name and the co-founders named all their files NV, as in "next version".[32] The need to incorporate the company prompted the co-founders to review all words with those two letters.[32] At one point, Malachowsky and Priem wanted to call the company NVision, but that name was already taken by a manufacturer of toilet paper.[31] Huang suggested the name Nvidia,[31] from "invidia", the Latin word for "envy".[32] The company's original headquarters office was in Sunnyvale, California.[32]
First graphics accelerator[edit]
Nvidia's first graphics accelerator product, the NV1, was optimized for processing quadrilateral primitives (forward texture mapping) instead of the triangle primitives preferred by its competitors.[31] Then Microsoft introduced the DirectX platform, refused to support any other graphics software,[34] and also announced that its graphics software (Direct3D) would support only triangles.[31]
Nvidia also signed a contract with Sega to build the graphics chip for the Dreamcast video game console and worked on the project for a year.[35] Having bet on the wrong technology, Nvidia was confronted with a painful dilemma: keep working on its inferior chip for the Dreamcast even though it was already too far behind the competition, or stop working and run out of money right away.[35]
Eventually, Sega's president at the time, Shoichiro Irimajiri, came to visit Huang in person to deliver the news that Sega was going with another graphics chip vendor for the Dreamcast.[35] However, Irimajiri still believed in Huang, and "wanted to make Nvidia successful".[35] Despite Nvidia's disappointing failure to deliver on its contract, Irimajiri somehow managed to convince Sega management to invest $5 million into Nvidia.[35] Years later, Huang explained that this was all the money Nvidia had left at the time, and that Irimajiri's "understanding and generosity gave us six months to live".[35]
In 1996, Huang laid off more than half of Nvidia's employees—then around 100—and focused the company's remaining resources on developing a graphics accelerator product optimized for processing triangle primitives: the RIVA 128.[31][34] By the time the RIVA 128 was released in August 1997, Nvidia was down to about 40 employees[30] and only had enough money left for about one month of payroll.[31] The sense of extreme desperation around Nvidia during this difficult era of its early history gave rise to "the unofficial company motto": "Our company is thirty days from going out of business".[31] Huang routinely began presentations to Nvidia staff with those words for many years.[31]
Nvidia sold about a million RIVA 128s in about four months[31] and used the revenue to develop its next generation of products.[34] In 1998, the release of the RIVA TNT solidified Nvidia's reputation for developing capable graphics adapters.
Public company[edit]
Nvidia went public on January 22, 1999.[36][37][38] Investing in Nvidia after it had already failed to deliver on its contract turned out to be Irimajiri's best decision as Sega's president. After Irimajiri left Sega in 2000, Sega sold its Nvidia stock for $15 million.[35]
In late 1999, Nvidia released the GeForce 256 (NV10), its first product expressly marketed as a GPU, which was most notable for introducing onboard transformation and lighting (T&L) to consumer-level 3D hardware. Running at 120 MHz and featuring four-pixel pipelines, it implemented advanced video acceleration, motion compensation, and hardware sub-picture alpha blending. The GeForce outperformed existing products by a wide margin.
Due to the success of its products, Nvidia won the contract to develop the graphics hardware for Microsoft's Xbox game console, which earned Nvidia a $200 million advance. However, the project took many of its best engineers away from other projects. In the short term this did not matter, and the GeForce2 GTS shipped in the summer of 2000. In December 2000, Nvidia reached an agreement to acquire the intellectual assets of its one-time rival 3dfx, a pioneer in consumer 3D graphics technology leading the field from the mid-1990s until 2000.[39][40] The acquisition process was finalized in April 2002.[41]
In 2001, Standard & Poor's selected Nvidia to replace the departing Enron in the S&P 500 stock index, meaning that index funds would need to hold Nvidia shares going forward.[42]
In July 2002, Nvidia acquired Exluna for an undisclosed sum. Exluna made software-rendering tools and the personnel were merged into the Cg project.[43] In August 2003, Nvidia acquired MediaQ for approximately US$70 million.[44] On April 22, 2004, Nvidia acquired iReady, also a provider of high-performance TCP/IP offload engines and iSCSI controllers.[45] In December 2004, it was announced that Nvidia would assist Sony with the design of the graphics processor (RSX) in the PlayStation 3 game console. On December 14, 2005, Nvidia acquired ULI Electronics, which at the time supplied third-party southbridge parts for chipsets to ATI, Nvidia's competitor.[46] In March 2006, Nvidia acquired Hybrid Graphics.[47] In December 2006, Nvidia, along with its main rival in the graphics industry AMD (which had acquired ATI), received subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice regarding possible antitrust violations in the graphics card industry.[48]
2007–2014[edit]
Forbes named Nvidia its Company of the Year for 2007, citing the accomplishments it made during the said period as well as during the previous five years.[49] On January 5, 2007, Nvidia announced that it had completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc.[50] In February 2008, Nvidia acquired Ageia, developer of PhysX, a physics engine and physics processing unit. Nvidia announced that it planned to integrate the PhysX technology into its future GPU products.[51][52]
In July 2008, Nvidia took a write-down of approximately $200 million on its first-quarter revenue, after reporting that certain mobile chipsets and GPUs produced by the company had "abnormal failure rates" due to manufacturing defects. Nvidia, however, did not reveal the affected products. In September 2008, Nvidia became the subject of a class action lawsuit over the defects, claiming that the faulty GPUs had been incorporated into certain laptop models manufactured by Apple Inc., Dell, and HP. In September 2010, Nvidia reached a settlement, in which it would reimburse owners of the affected laptops for repairs or, in some cases, replacement.[53][54] On January 10, 2011, Nvidia signed a six-year, $1.5 billion cross-licensing agreement with Intel, ending all litigation between the two companies.[55]
In November 2011, after initially unveiling it at Mobile World Congress, Nvidia released its Tegra 3 ARM system on a chip for mobile devices. Nvidia claimed that the chip featured the first-ever quad-core mobile CPU.[56][57] In May 2011, it was announced that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Icera, a baseband chip making company in the UK, for $367 million.[58] In January 2013, Nvidia unveiled the Tegra 4, as well as the Nvidia Shield, an Android-based handheld game console powered by the new system on a chip.[59] On July 29, 2013, Nvidia announced that they acquired PGI from STMicroelectronics.[60]
In February 2013, Nvidia announced its plans to build a new headquarters in the form of two giant triangle-shaped buildings on the other side of San Tomas Expressway (to the west of its existing headquarters complex). The company selected triangles as its design theme. As Huang explained in a blog post, the triangle is "the fundamental building block of computer graphics".[61]
In 2014, Nvidia ported the Valve games Portal and Half Life 2 to its Nvidia Shield tablet as Lightspeed Studio.[62][63] Since 2014, Nvidia has diversified its business focusing on three markets: gaming, automotive electronics, and mobile devices.[64]
That same year, Nvidia also prevailed in litigation brought by the trustee of 3dfx's bankruptcy estate to challenge its 2000 acquisition of 3dfx's intellectual assets. On November 6, 2014, in an unpublished memorandum order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the "district court's judgment affirming the bankruptcy court's determination that [Nvidia] did not pay less than fair market value for assets purchased from 3dfx shortly before 3dfx filed for bankruptcy".[65]
2016–2018[edit]
On May 6, 2016, Nvidia unveiled the first GPUs of the GeForce 10 series, the GTX 1080 and 1070, based on the company's new Pascal microarchitecture. Nvidia claimed that both models outperformed its Maxwell-based Titan X model; the models incorporate GDDR5X and GDDR5 memory respectively, and use a 16 nm manufacturing process. The architecture also supports a new hardware feature known as simultaneous multi-projection (SMP), which is designed to improve the quality of multi-monitor and virtual reality rendering.[66][67][68] Laptops that include these GPUs and are sufficiently thin – as of late 2017, under 0.8 inches (20 mm) – have been designated as meeting Nvidia's "Max-Q" design standard.[69]
In July 2016, Nvidia agreed to a settlement for a false advertising lawsuit regarding its GTX 970 model, as the models were unable to use all of their advertised 4 GB of VRAM due to limitations brought by the design of its hardware.[70] In May 2017, Nvidia announced a partnership with Toyota which will use Nvidia's Drive PX-series artificial intelligence platform for its autonomous vehicles.[71] In July 2017, Nvidia and Chinese search giant Baidu announced a far-reaching AI partnership that includes cloud computing, autonomous driving, consumer devices, and Baidu's open-source AI framework PaddlePaddle. Baidu unveiled that Nvidia's Drive PX 2 AI will be the foundation of its autonomous-vehicle platform.[72]
Nvidia officially released the Titan V on December 7, 2017.[73][74]
Nvidia officially released the Nvidia Quadro GV100 on March 27, 2018.[75] Nvidia officially released the RTX 2080 GPUs on September 27, 2018. In 2018, Google announced that Nvidia's Tesla P4 graphic cards would be integrated into Google Cloud service's artificial intelligence.[76]
In May 2018, on the Nvidia user forum, a thread was started[77] asking the company to update users when they would release web drivers for its cards installed on legacy Mac Pro machines up to mid-2012 5,1 running the macOS Mojave operating system 10.14. Web drivers are required to enable graphics acceleration and multiple display monitor capabilities of the GPU. On its Mojave update info website, Apple stated that macOS Mojave would run on legacy machines with 'Metal compatible' graphics cards[78] and listed Metal compatible GPUs, including some manufactured by Nvidia.[79] However, this list did not include Metal compatible cards that currently work in macOS High Sierra using Nvidia-developed web drivers. In September, Nvidia responded, "Apple fully controls drivers for macOS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for macOS 10.14 (Mojave)."[80] In October, Nvidia followed this up with another public announcement, "Apple fully controls drivers for macOS. Unfortunately, Nvidia currently cannot release a driver unless it is approved by Apple,"[81] suggesting a possible rift between the two companies.[82] By January 2019, with still no sign of the enabling web drivers, Apple Insider weighed into the controversy with a claim that Apple management "doesn't want Nvidia support in macOS".[83] The following month, Apple Insider followed this up with another claim that Nvidia support was abandoned because of "relational issues in the past",[84] and that Apple was developing its own GPU technology.