NVIDIA

NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Its GeForce 256 of 1999 was marketed as the first GPU.

Graphics cards made its name, but today most of its business is the data centre: GPUs and systems for training and running AI models, together with the networking it gained by buying Mellanox. CUDA, launched in 2006, turned the GPU into a general-purpose computer and remains the standard way to program it.

NVIDIA also builds platforms for autonomous vehicles (DRIVE), robotics (Isaac) and 3D simulation (Omniverse). Its engineers work in the United States, Israel, India, Taiwan, Europe and across Asia.