Nvidia has become a trillion-dollar company worth more than Meta, Tesla, and Netflix, and it may even surpass Google and Apple. According to reports, the stock’s value has tripled in the last eight months. In 1997, the company was almost on the verge of bankruptcy. So let us go through what NVIDIA does. Without further ado, let’s check it out.
How Nvidia Became a Trillion-Dollar Company
In today’s generation, almost everyone, including gamers, video editors, crypto-miners, and artificial intelligence users, uses a powerful GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and a CPU. GPUs are vital for rendering complex graphics, like video games and 3D modeling.
Nvidia has an almost trillion-dollar market cap and is one of the leading GPU MANUFACTURERS IN THE WORLD. Of course, they only did this after some time. The company has made massive investments in R&D to make its GPUs more powerful and better than those of its competitors.
Key Points: Nvidia Timeline
The company was founded in 1993 by three engineers, Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Preim, who believed that graphics-based computers could be the future.
- 1997: They almost went broke. The company was working on Sega’s 128-bit gaming console. However, before Nvidia could pull this off, Microsoft had already announced that it would launch its texture mapping, which made it incompatible with Windows 95. However, Nvidia’s CEO asked Sega’s CEO for money because if they did not, the company would file for bankruptcy, allowing them to sustain themselves for another 6 months.
- 1997: Nvidia built Reva 128, which brought Nvidia into the limelight and saw some growth. Nevertheless, there was another problem: manufacturing these CPUs was expensive. They made a contract with TSMC to help build these GPUs for them. The same TSMC makes SoCs for Apple, AMD, Nvidia, and many other tech companies today. Also, it is worth noting that manufacturing with a low margin is only for some. Later, this partnership became complicated.
- 2000: Nvidia won a contract to build a GPU for the Microsoft Xbox, and they paid them 200 million USD in advance. In 2001, the company hit 1 billion USD in revenue and became one of the leading GPUs for playing major games.
- Games are now specifically optimized for NVIDIA GPUs. Another thing is that, despite being good at making graphics cards, they have also been making partnerships with game developers to help optimize games for Nvidia GPUs. This makes games run more smoothly and better. They also approached the same issue with the company’s DLSS technology, which was recently announced and adopted by various industry game developers.
- Later, Nvidia GeForce was used by the PlayStation 3 as well. This means the company is now selling GPUs for both major consoles, Xbox and PlayStation, and Nvidia hardware for PCs.
- Present: In recent years, crypto and artificial intelligence companies have heavily relied on Nvidia GPUs. Also, it makes computing performance a lot better. Nvidia’s CUDA architecture specializes in parallel processing, which allows GPUs to perform better because it divides the task and processes parallel processing where the GPU only does one task at a time. Whether you are rendering, gaming, cryptography, or processing AI, it will do it faster and better.
Over time, it will have multiple use cases, like using it in the data center, GPUs in the cloud, training AI models, and deep learning. Since the founders saw this years ago, a GPU would be essential to computing. This solves complex computing problems with GPUs and their technology, like parallel processing. It is good, and with such a trend, everyone is buying GPUs in the masses, and as the demand increases, the pricing also increases, which helps NVIDIA make tonnes of money.
The company has spent billions of dollars buying these GPUs. Regardless of anything, NVIDIA is winning over both businesses and individuals. The company makes most of its profit from the gaming market category, followed by data centers, automotive, professional visualization, OEM, and others. Nvidia continues to work on its R&D and partnership with TSMC.