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NVIDIA

NVIDIA is the company that created the GPU in 1999 and, through the CUDA architecture and the chips behind AlexNet, became a central supplier of computing power for modern AI.

Founded 1993Website nvidia.com Era Statistical learning

2025 · 11 20072026
Events per year
29Models & products38Events1People5Investors & partners

What NVIDIA is

NVIDIA is a computing company built around the graphics processing unit, or GPU, and around the software that lets those processors be used for work far beyond drawing pictures. It tells its own history as a sequence of platforms laid one on top of another: the GPU in 1999, the CUDA architecture in 2006, and the deep-learning wave that followed AlexNet in 2012[1].

Founding

NVIDIA was founded on April 5, 1993, by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem[1]. That date and those three names are where the company's own corporate timeline begins; from there the timeline moves quickly on to the products it counts as its milestones[1].

The GPU and CUDA

In 1999, the company says, it invented the GPU[1]. A GPU is a processor built to carry out many small calculations at the same time. Graphics work suits that design because the colour of each pixel on a screen can be worked out independently of the others, so thousands of pixels can be handled in parallel instead of one after another. A GPU is therefore made of many relatively simple cores: a single one of them is less flexible than a general-purpose processor, but far more arithmetic happens in the same instant. That trade-off pays off in graphics, and it also pays off in any problem that can be broken into many independent pieces.

In 2006 NVIDIA unveiled the CUDA architecture, which the company describes as opening GPU parallel processing to science and research[1]. CUDA is the layer that lets a programmer treat the GPU as a general-purpose parallel computer rather than as a piece of hardware that only draws images: a problem is split into many small parts that run at the same time across the chip's cores. Lowering that barrier is what moved the GPU from graphics into scientific computing[1].

AlexNet and the AI era

In 2012, the timeline records, NVIDIA's GPUs powered the AlexNet neural network breakthrough, which the company describes as sparking the era of modern AI[1]. A neural network learns by adjusting large numbers of numerical parameters over many rounds of training, and that training is mostly the same kind of parallel arithmetic the GPU was built for. A network could therefore be trained on graphics chips rather than on general-purpose processors, which is the connection the company draws between its hardware and the rise of deep learning[1].

Mellanox

On 27 April 2020 NVIDIA completed its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies[2]. The total purchase consideration was $7.134 billion, of which $7.049 billion was paid in cash[3].

The business today

The financial reports show how much weight now sits on data-centre computing. For fiscal 2025 NVIDIA reported record revenue of $130.5 billion, up 114% from a year earlier[4]. Data Center revenue for the same year was $115.2 billion, up 142%[4]. Revenue in the fourth quarter of that fiscal year was a record $39.3 billion, up 78%[4]. For the first quarter of fiscal 2026 the company guided revenue to $43.0 billion, plus or minus 2%[4]. A fiscal year does not have to line up with the calendar year, so comparisons are best made against the year-earlier figures the company itself gives.

Where it sits

Read as a chain, the three milestones on NVIDIA's timeline are cumulative: first a chip for images, then a programming layer that handed that chip to researchers, then a neural network result that put it at the centre of AI work[1]. Growth has also come through purchase, with the Mellanox deal closing on 27 April 2020[2][3]. The recent filings show where the money is: of the $130.5 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue, $115.2 billion came from Data Center[4]. What began as a graphics company is now, by its own reporting, mainly a supplier of data-centre computing.

TechniquesDeep learning

Ecosystem & regionDeveloper toolsCloudHardware & compute

20266

  1. FundingFal doubles its valuation to $16B on $1.3B round

    Fal, a startup that hosts and runs AI video, image and audio models, raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation, double its valuation from earlier in the year.

  2. AcquisitionMarvell agrees to buy Lumentum in a $115B all-stock deal

    Marvell agreed on 2 November 2026 to buy optical chip and networking equipment maker Lumentum in an all-stock deal valued at $115 billion including debt, one of the largest technology acquisitions on record.

  3. ReleaseNVIDIA releases Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe and Granary 2

    On 28 October 2026 Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open-weight, free speech recognition model covering up to 40 languages, alongside the second version of its Granary speech dataset.

  4. AcquisitionNvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

    On 3 September 2026 Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face said it would remain an open platform, and the deal was expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval.

  5. FundingOpenAI raises $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation

    In early 2026 OpenAI assembled a private funding round that grew from $110 billion to $122 billion in committed capital, closing on 31 March 2026 at an $852 billion post-money valuation, with Amazon, SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft among the backers.

  6. MilestoneTSMC CoWoS packaging stays sold out as AI demand outruns capacity

    TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging places logic dies and HBM stacks on a silicon interposer; capacity remains sold out, and TSMC is expanding in Tainan and Chiayi while developing panel-level CoPoS.

202511

  1. PartnershipGroq licenses its inference technology to NVIDIA in a non-exclusive deal

    On 24 December 2025 Groq announced a non-exclusive licensing deal with NVIDIA for its inference technology; founder Jonathan Ross and other staff joined NVIDIA while Groq stayed independent under a new CEO.

  2. MilestoneNvidia becomes the first company worth $5 trillion

    On 29 October 2025 Nvidia became the first company in history to reach a $5 trillion market value, closing at $207.04 a share after a rally driven by large AI chip orders.

  3. ReleaseNVIDIA releases Isaac GR00T N1.6 with the Cosmos open models

    On 28 October 2025 NVIDIA released Isaac GR00T N1.6, an open model for humanoid robots that adds a reasoning vision-language model, Cosmos Reason, so vague instructions can be turned into step-by-step action plans.

  4. PolicyUS allows H20 sales to resume with a 15% revenue share

    In July 2025 the US let Nvidia and AMD resume selling downgraded AI chips to China on condition that 15% of that revenue go to the US government, an unprecedented arrangement that raised questions over whether it amounts to an export tax.

  5. PolicyCommerce rescinds the AI Diffusion Rule

    On 13 May 2025, the US Commerce Department moved to rescind the AI Diffusion Rule two days before its compliance date, told officials not to enforce it, and issued guidance on Huawei Ascend chips and Chinese AI model training.

  6. PolicyUS requires licences for Nvidia H20 exports to China

    In April 2025 the US told Nvidia that H20 accelerators, the most advanced chips it could legally sell in China, would need export licences, forcing a charge of about US$5.5 billion.

  7. FundingCoreWeave goes public on the Nasdaq at $40 a share

    CoreWeave listed on the Nasdaq on 28 March 2025 at $40 a share, raising $1.5 billion in the biggest US tech IPO since 2021, with NVIDIA anchoring the deal.

  8. ReleaseNVIDIA announces Isaac GR00T N1

    On 18 March 2025 NVIDIA announced Isaac GR00T N1, a humanoid robot foundation model released immediately to robotics developers as the first of a family of customizable pretrained models, alongside open simulation tools.

  9. ReleaseNVIDIA announces Blackwell Ultra

    NVIDIA announced Blackwell Ultra at GTC in San Jose on 18 March 2025, a platform aimed at AI training and at inference that spends more compute per answer, alongside new HGX B300 NVL16 systems and named server and cloud partners.

  10. PartnershipOpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announce the Stargate Project

    Announced at the White House on 21 January 2025, Stargate is a joint venture of OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX to build AI data centres, starting with $100 billion and aiming at up to $500 billion by 2029.

  11. PolicyUS issues Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion

    A US Commerce Department interim final rule, effective 13 January 2025, that required licences for exporting advanced computing chips and the model weights of the most advanced AI models, and divided the world into three tiers of access.

20247

  1. PolicyUS adds HBM controls and 140 Chinese entities

    On 2 December 2024, BIS added export controls on high-bandwidth memory, 24 types of chipmaking equipment, three software tools and 140 Chinese entities, widening restrictions on China's advanced-node semiconductor production for military and AI uses.

  2. MilestonexAI brings its Colossus supercomputer online in Memphis

    xAI's Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, built with NVIDIA, went into operation in 2024 with about 100,000 H100 GPUs. It was the main training system behind Grok.

  3. MilestoneNvidia's market value breaks $3 trillion

    On 5 June 2024 Nvidia's market value passed $3 trillion, making it the third company to reach that level after Microsoft and Apple; two weeks later it became the world's most valuable company, driven by demand for data-center AI chips.

  4. FundingCoreWeave raises a $1.1 billion Series C at a $19 billion valuation

    On 1 May 2024 CoreWeave announced a $1.1 billion Series C round led by Coatue at a $19 billion valuation, up from $7 billion a few months earlier, and weeks later closed a $7.5 billion debt facility led by Blackstone.

  5. AcquisitionNVIDIA agrees to acquire GPU orchestration software provider Run:ai

    In April 2024 NVIDIA agreed to acquire Run:ai, an Israeli maker of Kubernetes-based GPU orchestration software, reported at about $700 million. The European Commission approved the deal in December and it closed on 30 December 2024, with the software to be open-sourced.

  6. ReleaseNVIDIA announces the Blackwell platform

    On 18 March 2024 NVIDIA announced Blackwell, the GPU platform succeeding Hopper, claiming it can run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter models at up to 25 times lower cost and energy.

  7. ReleaseBigCode and NVIDIA release StarCoder2 and The Stack v2

    On 28 February 2024 BigCode and NVIDIA released StarCoder2 in 3B, 7B and 15B sizes. The new training set, The Stack v2, is 67.5 TB and is built from the Software Heritage archive.

20235

  1. ReleaseNVIDIA announces H200 at SC23

    On 13 November 2023 NVIDIA announced the HGX H200 at the SC23 conference in Denver, an addition to its Hopper line that twelve server partners and four major cloud providers were named to offer, with shipments expected from the second quarter of 2024.

  2. PolicyUS tightens advanced chip export controls on China

    On 17 October 2023 the US Bureau of Industry and Security issued three rules updating its October 2022 chip export controls, changing the chip parameters, adding licence exceptions and requirements, and expanding the Entity List.

  3. FundingDatabricks raises $500 million Series I at a $43 billion valuation

    On 14 September 2023 Databricks raised more than $500 million in a Series I round at a $43 billion valuation, led by funds advised by T. Rowe Price, about two months after closing its roughly $1.3 billion MosaicML acquisition [^1][^2].

  4. FundingHugging Face raises $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation

    On 24 August 2023 Hugging Face raised a $235 million Series D led by Salesforce Ventures, valuing the open-model hub at $4.5 billion, more than double its 2022 valuation, with chipmakers and cloud providers among the investors.

  5. MilestoneNvidia becomes the first chip company worth $1 trillion

    On 30 May 2023 Nvidia became the first chip company on the US stock market to pass a $1 trillion market value, as demand for the GPUs used to train large AI models surged after ChatGPT.

20224

  1. ReleaseNvidia ships the A800 to China to stay inside export rules

    In late 2022, after the United States restricted exports of its A100 and H100 data-center chips, Nvidia began selling the A800 in China — a part whose only change was slower links between GPUs, keeping it inside the rules.

  2. PolicyUS imposes export controls on advanced computing chips to China

    On 7 October 2022 the US Bureau of Industry and Security issued two rules restricting China's access to advanced computing chips, supercomputer development and advanced chip manufacturing, setting thresholds that later shaped how Nvidia sold chips in China.

  3. ReleaseNVIDIA announces the Hopper architecture and H100

    At GTC on 22 March 2022, NVIDIA announced the Hopper architecture and its first Hopper GPU, the H100, headlined by a Transformer Engine and paired with new HBM3 memory and NVLink, with cloud instances planned from the third quarter of 2022.

  4. ReleaseNVIDIA and SoftBank terminate the $40 billion Arm acquisition

    On 7 February 2022, NVIDIA and SoftBank Group called off NVIDIA's planned acquisition of Arm Limited, citing regulatory obstacles. SoftBank kept a $1.25 billion prepayment and began preparing Arm for a public offering, while NVIDIA retained its 20-year Arm licence.

20202

  1. ReleaseNVIDIA agrees to acquire Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion

    On 13 September 2020, NVIDIA agreed to buy Arm Limited from SoftBank and the SoftBank Vision Fund for $40 billion in shares and cash, with Arm to keep its open-licensing model and Cambridge headquarters, subject to regulatory approval.

  2. ReleaseNVIDIA launches the A100 GPU

    On 14 May 2020 NVIDIA announced the A100, its first GPU built on the Ampere architecture, claiming up to 20 times the AI performance of its predecessors. It shipped in full production alongside new systems, cloud partners and supercomputer customers.

20171

  1. ReleaseNVIDIA unveils Volta and Tesla V100 at GTC 2017

    On May 10, 2017, NVIDIA unveiled Volta, its seventh-generation GPU architecture, together with the Tesla V100 data center GPU, presented as the most powerful GPU computing architecture yet for AI and high performance computing.

20161

  1. MilestoneNVIDIA delivers the first DGX-1 to OpenAI

    In August 2016 NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang hand-delivered the first DGX-1, a turnkey eight-GPU deep learning machine, to OpenAI in San Francisco — an early piece of dedicated AI hardware at a young research lab.

20071

  1. ReleaseNVIDIA releases CUDA 1.0

    CUDA is NVIDIA's software platform for running general-purpose programs on GPU cores. CUDA Toolkit 1.0 shipped in June 2007, turning graphics chips into parallel processors for science and later for deep learning.

Models and products over time

22
  1. 2010
    • Nov 9, 2010 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Chip

      A consumer graphics card NVIDIA released in November 2010 on its Fermi architecture. Two of them, each with 3 GB of memory, later trained AlexNet, the network that won ILSVRC-2012 and which NVIDIA's timeline credits with sparking the era of modern AI.

  2. 2014
    • Nov 2014 NVIDIA Tesla K80 Chip

      NVIDIA's Tesla K80 is a dual-GPU data-center accelerator announced in November 2014, putting two GK210 chips, 24 GB of memory and up to 8.74 teraflops of single-precision performance on one 300 W board.

  3. 2016
    • Apr 5, 2016 NVIDIA Tesla P100 Chip

      The Tesla P100, announced by NVIDIA in April 2016, was the first data-center GPU on the Pascal architecture, and the first to combine stacked HBM2 memory, half-precision math aimed at deep learning and the NVLink interconnect.

    • Apr 5, 2016 NVIDIA DGX-1 Chip

      NVIDIA's DGX-1, unveiled in April 2016, packed eight Tesla P100 GPUs into a single chassis and was billed as the world's first deep learning supercomputer, turning accelerator count into one purchasable machine.

    • Sep 2016 NVIDIA Tesla P40 Chip

      The NVIDIA Tesla P40 is a data-center GPU accelerator described in a September 2016 NVIDIA datasheet. Built on the Pascal architecture and aimed at deep learning inference, it pairs 24 GB of memory with 47 TOPS of INT8 throughput in a 250 W PCIe card.

  4. 2017
    • May 10, 2017 NVIDIA Tesla V100 Chip

      NVIDIA's first data-center GPU built on its Volta architecture, announced in May 2017. It added Tensor Cores, dedicated matrix-multiply units; OpenAI later trained its GPT-3 models on V100s.

  5. 2018
    • Mar 27, 2018 NVIDIA DGX-2 Chip

      NVIDIA's DGX-2, announced in March 2018, packed 16 Tesla V100 GPUs and a new NVSwitch interconnect into one server that NVIDIA described as the first to reach two petaflops for deep learning.

  6. 2020
    • May 14, 2020 NVIDIA A100 Chip

      NVIDIA's A100 is a data-center GPU, the first built on the Ampere architecture. Announced on 14 May 2020, it introduced third-generation Tensor Cores, the TF32 format and Multi-Instance GPU, and became a standard building block for training large language models.

    • May 14, 2020 NVIDIA DGX A100 Chip

      NVIDIA's third-generation DGX system, unveiled on 14 May 2020: eight A100 GPUs, 320 GB of GPU memory, five petaflops of rated AI performance, and the ability to split into as many as 56 instances.

  7. 2022
    • 2022 NVIDIA A800 Chip

      NVIDIA's A800 is a data-center GPU that went into production in 2022 as a China-market alternative to the A100, with a reduced chip-to-chip transfer rate to meet US export-control thresholds.

    • Mar 22, 2022 NVIDIA H100 Chip

      The NVIDIA H100 is the first data-center GPU built on NVIDIA's Hopper architecture, announced in March 2022 with 80 billion transistors, HBM3 memory, FP8 Tensor Cores and a Transformer Engine aimed at large language models.

    • Mar 22, 2022 NVIDIA DGX H100 Chip

      NVIDIA's fourth-generation DGX system, announced in March 2022, packs eight H100 GPUs linked by NVLink plus BlueField-3 networking, and is rated at 32 petaflops of FP8 AI performance for enterprise AI infrastructure.

  8. 2023
    • 2023 NVIDIA H20 Chip

      NVIDIA's China-specific data-center GPU, built to stay inside US export controls. Cut down from the H100 in core count and performance, it was still the most advanced NVIDIA chip legally sold in China until April 2025.

    • Mar 2023 NVIDIA H800 Chip

      The H800 is a China-market version of NVIDIA's H100 data-center GPU, adapted to fit the US export rules of October 2022 by cutting chip-to-chip transfer speed. It was later used to train DeepSeek-V3 and was covered by tighter US controls in October 2023.

    • Nov 13, 2023 NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPU Chip

      NVIDIA's H200, announced in November 2023, is a data center GPU that was the first to use HBM3e memory, offering 141 GB at 4.8 TB/s — nearly double the A100's capacity — and roughly double the H100's inference speed on Llama 2 70B.

  9. 2024
    • Mar 18, 2024 Project GR00T Model

      NVIDIA's project for a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots, announced in March 2024 and followed in March 2025 by Isaac GR00T N1, an open, customizable model released with training data and evaluation scenarios.

    • Mar 18, 2024 NVIDIA B200 (Blackwell) Chip

      NVIDIA's data-center GPU for the Blackwell generation, announced in March 2024 as the successor to Hopper, built from two joined dies and paired with NVLink and FP4 support for large-scale AI training and inference.

    • Mar 18, 2024 NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 Chip

      NVIDIA's GB200 NVL72 is a liquid-cooled rack that links 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs into a single NVLink domain aimed at trillion-parameter AI. Announced at GTC in March 2024, it is the building block of NVIDIA's Blackwell-generation DGX SuperPOD.

  10. 2025
    • Mar 18, 2025 NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1 Model

      Isaac GR00T N1 is an open foundation model for humanoid robots that NVIDIA announced on 18 March 2025. It is designed to be post-trained for a specific robot or task, and it pairs a planning model with quick motion control.

    • Mar 18, 2025 NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 Chip

      A rack-scale NVIDIA system announced in March 2025 that links 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs into one unit, rated at 1.5 times the AI performance of GB200 NVL72.

  11. 2026
    • Jan 2026 NVIDIA Rubin Chip

      NVIDIA Rubin is NVIDIA’s six-chip AI platform and the successor to Blackwell, announced at CES 2026. It targets lower-cost AI token generation, with partner products and cloud instances scheduled for 2026.

    • Oct 28, 2026 NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe Model

      Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe is Nvidia's free, open-weight speech transcription model, released on 28 October 2026. It handles recordings up to an hour long, transcribes up to 40 languages and can separate up to eight speakers.

Contributed to1

Model parallelism

People1

Jensen Huang1993–

Includes1

NVIDIA Research

Invested in4

CoreWeaveHugging FacePerplexity AIScale AI

Notes and sources

  1. NVIDIA History: A Timeline of Innovationhttps://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/corporate-timeline/
  2. NVIDIA CORP Form 8-K (Mellanox closing)https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581020000052/form8-kmellanoxclosing.htm
  3. NVIDIA CORP Form 10-Q (FY2021 Q3, filed 2020)https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581020000189/nvda-20201025.htm
  4. NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2025 (Form 8-K)https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581025000021/q4fy25pr.htm

Cite this page: NVIDIA. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/companies/nvidia. Updated 2026-11-08