Nvidia (Nvidia Corporation) is a Santa Clara, California-based company founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Curtis Priem, and Chris Malachowsky. Nvidia employs nearly 12,000 people worldwide and 5,000 in Silicon Valley. Nvidia began as a computer graphics company and has since expanded into a full-stack computing company with data-center-scale offerings.
Nvidia manufactures graphic processing units (GPUs) for gaming and professional markets, along with laptops and drivers. The company's main products are GeForce, the world's largest gaming platform, and NVIDIA DRIVE™, Nvidia's scalable AI car platform. Nvidia also designs GameWorks software for photorealistic gaming.
Nvidia also designs systems on a chip (SOCs) for the automotive and computing markets, for high-end gaming computers, data centers, and automotive infotainment systems. Nvidia offers a series of computing technologies, including the Quadro series of video cards for professional graphics, the Tegra series of chips for cellular phones and lightweight computing, the nForce series for multimedia functions, and the Tesla series for high-end business and scientific computers.
Nvidia develops a variety of technologies across various markets, including consumer, gaming, and enterprise. Much of this technology is centered around the company's GPUs, including digital twin technologies and simulations to help enterprises increase efficiencies and developers build robotic systems. The company offers data centers and cloud-based artificial intelligence engines built on its chip manufacturing and software manufacturing, including developing technologies to power computer vision, conversational AI, recommender systems, AI avatars, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. These technologies and AI are also being developed by Nvidia for healthcare, for AI and compute engines for software-defined medical devices.
Nvidia has developed AI and compute systems to address big data and solve new problems. The company offers machine learning and neural networks for specific feature detection amidst massive amounts of data and based on Nvidia GPU parallel processing power and deep learning capabilities for learning in the neural networks on many layers of abstraction. The company developed the DirectX 12 API, which is used to develop games with ray tracing support to introduce new levels of realism. It has developed the Universal Scene Description (USD), an open-source 3D scene description and file format developed with Pixar for content creation. Other technologies include visual computing technologies, virtual reality capabilities, TXAA anti-aliasing, and 3D vision and surround.
Timeline
Nvidia's $40BN acquisition of UK-based Arm was announced September 2020 but remains to be cleared by regulators.
Funding Rounds
Acquisitions
Patents
Further Resources
Nvidia Defends Arm Acquisition Deal: a 'Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity'
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January 13, 2022
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Nvidia says its 'proprietary information' is being leaked by hackers
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March 2, 2022