CNA Explains: The story of Nvidia's rise to become the world's No 1 company

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SINGAPORE: In March, artificial intelligence chip giant Nvidia's market capitalisation exceeded US$2 trillion.

Reports said the company took just 180 days to double its value from US$1 trillion - less than half the time it took tech behemoths like Apple and Microsoft.

Over 60 days later, Nvidia's value climbed above US$3 trillion.

And on Jun 18, it became the world's most valuable company.

Soon, however, a days-long sell-off took hold, and it ceded the No 1 position to Microsoft.

Still, it's been a heady, blistering ride for Nvidia.

What's Nvidia's story?
It began in a humble American diner.

The year was 1993 and three friends - Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem – met in a Denny's in Silicon Valley to discuss a business idea.

They wanted to create a chip that would enable realistic, three-dimensional graphics on personal computers.

The company's first product was a flop – it wasn't what the market wanted or needed, and Nvidia almost went out of business, according to previous reports.

Nvidia's second chip, meanwhile, was "doomed" from the start, even while it was being developed for video game firm Sega.

Other 3D graphics companies had emerged, and the rest of the world, including Microsoft, was using software that would not support Nvidia's product.

Sega's then-CEO Shoichiro Irimajiri made an unusual decision to release Nvidia from its obligations, but continue paying them as agreed in the contract.

"It was all the money that we had. And it gave us just enough money to hunker down," Mr Huang, Nvidia's CEO, has said.

For many years, he would go on to kick off presentations to staff by reciting Nvidia's unofficial motto: "Our company is thirty days from going out of business".

It did see other bumps in the road, such as receiving subpoenas over possible anti-trust violations and becoming the subject of a class action lawsuit.

But Nvidia went public in 1999, entered the S&P 500 stock index in 2001, and is far from going bust now.


An Nvidia logo is seen on one of their products on display at their headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan May 31, 2023. (File photo: REUTERS/Ann Wang)
What's Nvidia's secret sauce?
Its "massive advantage" over other chip companies lies in how it specialised in designing graphics processing units (GPUs) for thirty years, Moody's senior vice president Raj Joshi once told NBC News.

In contrast, rival companies such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices were focused on producing central processing units (CPUs).

GPUs use parallel processing, where many calculations can be carried out at the same time, making them more efficient than CPUs - and far more useful for newfangled things like cryptocurrency mining and AI.

For instance, a GPU can divide up the mathematical problem in crypto mining and assign it to various parts of the chip, solving it more quickly than if a traditional computing method was used, according to American media outlet Vox.

GPUs also power generative AI: When a prompt is entered into something like the ChatGPT assistant, the AI model has to generate an answer from massive datasets. To do so, it needs thousands of GPUs performing parallel processing at data centres.

Nvidia saw an opportunity to reimagine its GPU for AI, and created a programming model that has become the industry standard.

Reports have also pointed to the company's competitive edge in networking.

GPUs need to be connected to boost their processing power, and Nvidia acquired in 2019 a company supplying networking technology. This optimises the performance of Nvidia's network of chips, and its competitors have not been able to do the same, according to an Economist analysis.

Today, with AI creeping into popular tech platforms – from Netflix to social media apps – Nvidia's chips are becoming more and more central to the man on the street and to everyday life. In tandem, the firm now holds its own among names that consumers have been more familiar with.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/nvidia-story-ai-semiconductors-chips-jensen-huang-cna-explains-4442656

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Who remembers Creative last time also got produce graphics card? i think is using 3dfx voodoo

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx

[jim889]

Who remembers Creative last time also got produce graphics card? i think is using 3dfx voodoo

they produce cd rom drive too.. and i leemember they have a factory in ayer rajah jtc there and hwz was there too.

after that creative seems rike cannot make it.. 大伤元气。coz of this cdrom drive mistep.

then that they move to jurong east.. moi go there b4 buy thing.. 

and then there wwas a time... creative mp3 player and apple ipod competition.. if creative steel compete with apple that time maybe now got creative fone liao but too bad they lost the competition or give up