Nvidia
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Coordinates: 37°22′14.62″N 121°57′49.46″W
Nvidia Corporation
Nvidia's current logo, in use since 2006
Headquarters at Santa Clara in 2018
Type Public
• NASDAQ: NVDA
• NASDAQ-100 component
Traded as • S&P 100 component
• S&P 500 component
• Semiconductors
• Video games
Industry • Consumer electronics
• Computer hardware
Founded April 1993; 26 years ago
• Jensen Huang
• Curtis Priem
Founders
• Chris Malachowsky
Headquarters Santa Clara, California, U.S.
Area served Worldwide
• Jensen Huang (President & CEO)
Key people • Colette M. Kress (CFO)
• Graphics processing units (GPU)
• Central processing units (CPU)
Products • Chipsets
• Drivers
Revenue US$11.716 billion (2018)[1]
Operating income US$3.804 billion (2018)[1]
Net income US$4.141 billion (2018)[1]
Total assets US$13.292 billion (2018)[1]
Total equity US$9.342 billion (2018)[1]
Number of employees 13,227 (January 2019)[1]
Subsidiaries NVIDIA Advanced Rendering Center
www
Website developer
www
Nvidia Corporation (/ɛnˈvɪdiə/ en-VID-ee-ə),[2] more commonly referred to as Nvidia (stylized
as NVIDIA; formerly stylized as nVidia on products from the mid 90s to early 2000s), is an
American technology company incorporated in Delaware and based in Santa Clara, California.[3] It
designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as
system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Its primary GPU
product line, labeled "GeForce", is in direct competition with Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD)
"Radeon" products. Nvidia expanded its presence in the gaming industry with its handheld Shield
Portable, Shield Tablet and Shield Android TV.
Since 2014,[citation needed] Nvidia has diversified its business focusing on four markets – gaming,
professional visualization, data centers and auto. Nvidia is also now focused on artificial
intelligence.[4]
In addition to GPU manufacturing, Nvidia provides parallel processing capabilities to researchers
and scientists that allow them to efficiently run high-performance applications. They are deployed
in supercomputing sites around the world.[5][6] More recently, it has moved into the mobile
computing market, where it produces Tegra mobile processors for smartphones and tablets as well
as vehicle navigation and entertainment systems.[7][8][9] In addition to AMD, its competitors
include Intel, Qualcomm and Arm (e.g., because of Denver, while Nvidia also licenses Arm's
designs).
Contents
• 1 Company history
• 1.1 Founders and initial investment
• 1.2 Major releases and acquisitions
• 1.3 Class action lawsuit
• 1.4 Apple/Nvidia web driver controversy
• 2 Finances
• 3 GPU Technology Conference
• 4 Product families
• 5 Open-source software support
• 6 Deep learning
• 6.1 DGX
• 7 Inception Program
• 7.1 2018 winners[94]
• 7.2 2017 winners[95]
• 8 See also
• 9 References
• 10 External links
Company history
Aerial view of the new Nvidia headquarters building and surrounding campus and area in Santa
Clara, California, in 2017. Apple Park is visible in the distance.
In the early 1990s, the three co-founders hypothesized that the proper direction for the next wave of
computing would be accelerated or graphics based. They believed that this model of computing
could solve problems that general-purpose computing fundamentally couldn't. They also observed
that video games were some of the most computationally challenging problems, but would have
incredibly high sales volume. With a capital of $40,000, the company was born. The company
initially had no name and the co-founders named all their files NV, as in "next version". The need to
incorporate the company prompted the co-founders to review all words with those two letters,
leading them to "invidia", the Latin word for "envy".[10] The company went public on January 22,
1999.[11][12][13]
Founders and initial investment
Three people co-founded Nvidia in April 1993:[14][15]
• Jensen Huang (CEO as of 2019), a Taiwanese American, previously director of CoreWare at
LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
• Chris Malachowsky, an electrical engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems
• Curtis Priem, previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at Sun
Microsystems
The company received $20 million of venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital and others.[16]
Major releases and acquisitions
The release of the RIVA TNT in 1998 solidified Nvidia's reputation for developing capable graphics
adapters. In late 1999, Nvidia released the GeForce 256 (NV10), most notably introducing on-board
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 pion
