From waiter to creator of the AI brain: the story of the founder of Nvidia

Perhaps today you woke up to your phone alarm. You had breakfast and drove to work in a state-of-the-art car that corrected your trajectory to keep you in your lane. Sitting at your office, you edited a video and made a couple of queries to an artificial intelligence service. Despite being very different actions, behind them there was very likely a chip from the same brand: Nvidia. For two decades, it has been the leading graphics card company, but now it is also the world's leading supplier of chips for artificial intelligence. Nvidia has become the key component of the data centers that power large generative AI models. This has led it to break stratospheric revenue records. In the last fiscal year, Nvidia generated $215.9 billion, 65% more than the previous year, registering a net profit of almost $117 billion. But who is behind Nvidia, and how has it managed to transition to AI so effectively?

The fascination with computers

Behind the company is Jensen Huang, born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1963. As a child, he emigrated to the United States with his brother. As a teenager, still struggling to speak English, he worked washing dishes, waiting tables, and cleaning restrooms. For a time, he lived and studied at a boarding school in Kentucky that resembled a reformatory more than a conventional school. The atmosphere was harsh: many students carried knives, and fights were common.

When he left, he studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University, where he began to grasp the potential of personal computers. He later completed his studies with a master's degree from Stanford University and made the leap to the semiconductor industry. He worked at companies like AMD and LSI Logic, where he gained experience in chip design and met those who would eventually become his partners. From the combination of this technical knowledge and these professional connections, Nvidia was born in 1993.

An inspiring breakfast

Specifically, the idea to found Nvidia was born in a restaurant in San Jose, California. There, chatting over coffee and snacks, Jensen Huang and engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem had the same intuition: personal computers would become mass-market devices and would need graphics power far superior to what the chips of the time offered. Therefore, they decided to create a company dedicated to designing them. At that time, there were dozens of graphics chip manufacturers. The competition was fierce, and in fact, many did not survive. Nvidia didn't have a smooth start either: its first product, the NV1, launched in 1995, received a lukewarm reception. But in 1997, with the RIVA 128 card, things went much better: it sold a million units in just four months and began to establish itself in the market.

In 1999, a pivotal moment arrived: Nvidia introduced the GeForce 256 and coined the term GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), integrating previously scattered functions onto a single chip. This microprocessor redefined video games and the visual performance of computers.

From the 2000s onward, Nvidia consolidated its leadership in the video game market and expanded into new areas. It developed processors for consoles like the PlayStation 3, entered the integrated graphics segment, and began exploring high-performance computing. However, in 2006, it made its most significant move: the introduction of CUDA, an architecture that allowed GPUs to be used not only for generating images but also for performing massive parallel calculations. What had been born to improve graphics became an ideal platform for future artificial intelligence systems.

The following decade confirmed the shift. Nvidia made a decisive bet on the deep learningNvidia pioneered supercomputers and placed its GPUs at the heart of global data centers. By the time generative artificial intelligence exploded commercially, the company already had the technical ecosystem in place. Its successive architectures have steadily increased computing power, making Nvidia one of the essential providers of the AI ​​revolution.