What Do We Know About the World’s Newest, AI-Boosted Tech Giant, Nvidia?
This week, the chip technology firm Nvidia, the world’s newest computer powerhouse, reached the trillion dollar mark in revenue. Here are some key details regarding the obscure company.
UPSTART FROM DECADES AGO
Nvidia is not a brand-new company.
Nvidia, which was founded in 1993, creates processors that are utilized in the digital industries that are growing the fastest: gaming, video editing, autonomous vehicles, and, most recently, artificial intelligence. The crypto boom also included its technologies.
According to co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, “We had this idea that computer graphics was going to be the driving force of technology and [its] fuel would be video games,” in 2018.
Nvidia, a California-based company, actually outsources the production of its chips to other businesses, most notably Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, after designing them.
The graphics processing units (GPUs) in its chips were utilized to produce the effects in “Avatar” and other big-budget movies. But as its products showed they could be adapted to other sectors that required a lot of computer power, Nvidia grew into a titan.
It also develops the hardware and software that power its products, modeling its business strategy after Apple, which attracts customers to other services with desirable gear.
THE RIGHT PRODUCT FOR THE RIGHT TIME
The GPU has been Nvidia’s mainstay product, and during the first two decades of its existence, the firm was totally committed to providing the greatest visuals for video games and movies.
According to Chris Malachowsky, another co-founder of Nvidia, “the human eye” is the sole true arbiter,” he said in 2012.
But soon it became clear that the chip could also be used for other tasks, such as machine learning, the labor-intensive computer process that underlies the AI revolution, and crypto currency mining.
The firm only became stronger as the use cases multiplied and ChatGPT took over the globe; now, it has an 82 percent market share for standalone GPUs.
The H100, one of Nvidia’s most powerful processors ever, was introduced in 2022 and, according to the company, was the first chip created particularly for generative AI. Each H100 processor cost over $40,000.
The demand for the H100, which has 80 billion transistors, is skyrocketing from cloud powerhouses like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google as well as any other business that can afford to enter the conflict.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk said that, at the present, GPUs “are considerably harder to get than drugs” and that this reliance is a moneymaker for Nvidia.
This month, Nvidia reported that it will have revenues of an astounding $11 billion for the three months ending in July.
JACKET MADE OF LEATHER
Nvidia’s hard-charging Huang is seeking to accomplish for the leather jacket what Steve Jobs did for the turtleneck.
The 60-year-old Taiwanese-American immigrant is renowned for wearing a leather motorcycle jacket to product launches and making video jokes while wearing the jacket to promote new products.
Huang was raised in Taiwan and was moved by his parents to a severe boarding school in Kentucky in the 1970s, where he and his siblings allegedly taught how to live in a hostile environment.
Huang subsequently graduated from Stanford University and Oregon State University with engineering degrees.
In Taiwan last week, Huang attended a hero’s homecoming where he said that the world had reached “the tipping point of a new computer era.”
THE MEME STOCK
When it was still largely ignored by Wall Street’s power players, Nvidia was for a time an unsung star of the tech sector and even developed into a meme stock.
