Nvidia, a chip technology company, this week became a trillion dollar enterprise and the world’s newest tech giant. Here are some key facts about the little-known firm.
– Decades old upstart –
Nvidia isn’t an out-of-the-blue startup.
Founded in 1993, Nvidia designs chips that are used in some of the fastest-growing areas of the tech business: gaming, video-editing, self-driving cars and, now, artificial intelligence. Its technology was also in the mix for the crypto boom.
“We had the idea that computers were going to be the driving force of graphics technology and [its] The fuel will be video games,” co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in 2018.
Based in California, Nvidia doesn’t actually make its own chips, but instead designs them and then outsources manufacturing to other companies, most notably Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Its chips, known as graphics processing units (GPUs), were used to create effects in “Avatar” and other blockbuster movies.
It also builds the systems and software that run its products, basing its business plan on Apple, which uses the hardware it needs to connect consumers to other services.
– Right product, right time –
Nvidia’s bread and butter has been GPUs and for the first decades of its existence, the company was focused on delivering the best possible graphics for video games and movies.
Chris Malachowski, another Nvidia co-founder, said in 2012, there is only one final judge and “it’s the human eye”.
But soon, the chip was seen as effective for other uses as well, including mining cryptocurrencies, processing massive amounts of data, and machine learning, the massive computing process behind the AI revolution.
As the use cases expanded, and ChatGPT conquered the world, the company only grew stronger and now holds 82 percent market share for standalone GPUs.
In 2022, Nvidia released the H100, one of the most powerful processors ever, priced at around $40,000, which was said to be the first chip specifically designed for generative AI.
The H100, which has 80 billion transistors, is seeing an explosion in demand from cloud giants that power an AI arms race like Microsoft, Amazon and Google and any other company that might join the battle.
Elon Musk said last week that GPUs are “much tougher than drugs” at the moment and that dependency is a rainmaker for Nvidia.
Nvidia announced this month that it will hit $11 billion in sales for the three months ending in July.
– Leather Jacket –
Nvidia’s hard-charging Huang is trying to do for the leather jacket what Steve Jobs did for the turtle neck.
At product launches, the 60-year-old Taiwanese-American immigrant sports a leather motorcycle jacket and has been known to make video gags sporting the coat to plug new releases.
Born in Taiwan, his parents sent him to a strict boarding school in Kentucky in the 1970s, where Huang said he and his brothers learned to survive in a tough environment.
Huang later earned engineering degrees at Oregon State University and Stanford University.
Last week, Huang made a hero’s homecoming in Taiwan where he said the world was at the “tipping point of a new computer era”.
– meme stock –
For a while, Nvidia was an unsung hero of the tech industry and even became a meme stock, pumped up on social media by day traders when it was still ignored by the big guys on Wall Street. Was.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – AFP,