Nvidia is a Santa Clara-based semiconductor and computing company founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, originally focused on graphics processing units for gaming and visual computing. Over the past decade, Nvidia's GPUs have become the dominant hardware platform for training and running AI models, making the company one of the most consequential infrastructure providers in the AI industry, alongside its CUDA software platform that has become the standard programming environment for AI and high-performance computing workloads.
Under founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Nvidia has expanded well beyond chip manufacturing into a broader AI infrastructure stack, including networking, enterprise software, and cloud services, and has become a strategic investor and partner across much of the AI startup ecosystem, from foundation model labs to application-layer companies, given its central position in the compute supply chain that underpins the industry.