NVIDIA: THE TECH GIANT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT
- Tech Team Bluechip SVC
- Feb 22
- 6 min read
PART-1: BEGINNING
How it all started?
Nvidia is a multinational corporation and technology company founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang,Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. Jensen Huang (CEO), a Taiwanese-American electrical engineer who was previously the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at AMD; Chris Malachosky, an engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems; and Curtis Priem, who was previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at IBM and Sun Microsystems. The three men agreed to start the company in a meeting at a Denny's roadside diner on Berryessa Road in East San Jose.The three co-founders discussed a vision of the future which was so compelling that Huang decided to leave LSI and become the chief executive officer of their new startup.
Intro to Nvidia
As previously mentioned, NVIDIA Corporation is a leading American multinational company known for its cutting-edge innovations in GPUs, AI and high-performance computing. Founded in 1993 it focused initially on graphics cards for gaming, with the introduction of the GeForce series which quickly became renowned for high performance gaming and paved the way for further innovation. The tech giant we know today started from GPUs and has branched out to AI industries, cloud computing, deep learning, etc. Continuous innovation and R&D have helped the company pave the way in new avenues as exemplified by CUDA, Omniverse. Their timeline of innovation truly depicts their commitment to developing new and improved technology for an advanced future.
PART-2 : THE RISE
3-D Graphics
In 1993, the three co-founders envisioned graphics-based processing as the best trajectory for tackling challenges that had eluded general-purpose computing methods. They also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume. Those two conditions don’t happen very often. Video games were their killer app — a flywheel to reach large markets funding huge R&D to solve massive computational problems." With $40,000 in the bank, the company was born. The company subsequently received $20 million of venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and others. Nvidia was one of 70 startup companies pursuing the idea that graphics acceleration for video games was the path to the future. Only two survived: Nvidia and ATI technologies, the latter of which merged into AMD.
Branching into new tech
Nvidia GPUs are used in deep learning, and accelerated analytics due to Nvidia's CUDA software platform and API which allows programmers to utilize the higher number of cores present in GPUs to parallelize BLAS operations which are extensively used in machine learning algorithms. They were included in many Tesla, Inc. vehicles before Musk announced at Tesla Autonomy Day in 2019 that the company developed its own SoC and full self-driving computer now and would stop using Nvidia hardware for their vehicles. These GPUs are used by researchers, laboratories, tech companies and enterprise companies.
Entry to AI
In May 2017, Nvidia announced a partnership with Toyota which would use Nvidia's Drive-PX series artificial intelligence platform for its autonomous vehicles. In July 2017, Nvidia and Chinese search giant Baidu announced a far-reaching AI partnership that includes cloud computing, autonomous driving, consumer devices, and Baidu's open-source AI framework PaddlePaddle. Baidu unveiled that Nvidia's Drive PX 2 AI will be the foundation of its autonomous-vehicle platform. Nvidia officially released the RTX 2080 GPUs on September 27, 2018. In 2018, Google announced that Nvidia's Tesla P4 graphic cards would be integrated into Google Cloud service's artificial intelligence.
In October 2020, Nvidia announced its plan to build the most powerful computer in Cambridge, England. The computer, called Cambridge-1, launched in July 2021 with a $100 million investment and will employ AI to support healthcare research. According to Jensen Huang, "The Cambridge-1 supercomputer will serve as a hub of innovation for the UK, and further the groundbreaking work being done by the nation's researchers in critical healthcare and drug discovery. In October 2023, it was reported that Nvidia had quietly begun designing ARM-based central processing units (CPUs) for Microsoft's Windows operating system with a target to start selling them in 2025.
The Future
On March 1, 2024, Nvidia became the third company in the history of the United States to close with a market capitalization in excess of $2 trillion. On March 18, Nvidia announced its new AI chip and microarchitecture Blackwell, named after mathematician David Blackwell. The company is also focusing on robotics and autonomous vehicles through its Cosmos AI models and partnerships with automakers like Toyota. Additionally, Nvidia has introduced Project Digits, a desktop computer designed for AI researchers and data scientists.
PART-3: ARE WE IN A TECH BUBBLE?
The Magnificent 7 of the Tech Industry and NVIDIA’s growth
Bank of America analyst Michael Hartnett coined the phrase in 2023 when commenting on the seven companies commonly recognized for their market dominance, their technological impact, and their changes to consumer behavior and economic trends: Alphabet (GOOGL; GOOG),Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), NVIDIA (NVDA), and Tesla (TSLA).
These companies stand at the top of the tech industry, their contributions throughout the years have been revolutionary, and another stage of development is upon us. Artificial Intelligence as previously mentioned is a massive sphere of modern tech activity, the entire world is in a race to be the best in this new and exciting avenue. These 7 companies have seized this opportunity. The performance of the Magnificent Seven stocks is driven by technological innovation, market dominance, financial performance, brand equity, research and development, and global economic conditions so it comes as no surprise that they gained a massive foothold in AI.
Open AI has also made great strides and is supported by NVIDIA AI hardware and software indirectly, as previously discussed NVIDIA has been a global leader of high performing GPUs and hardware dealing with computing power important for AI development. Thus, it is no surprise that NVIDIA share prices have rallied to new heights in the past year. We should also keep in mind that NVIDIA isn’t just a supplier but a key contributor to AI development through their own AI models and software.
Open AI is supported by Microsoft Azure (a cloud computing platform and a suite of services offered by Microsoft) which in turn relies heavily on NVIDIA GPUs. So we can see how tech developments in the magnificent seven facilitate further development as well as create a competitive atmosphere, which is why many say that a tech bubble of R&D is formed which is hard to penetrate for other global competition.
News of advancements in cloud computing, electric vehicles, AI is common nowadays, at the forefront of all this is NVIDIA, be it electric vehicles or the Omniverse in some way or the other NVIDIA stands to benefit from this tech revolution due to its cutting-edge advancements that support this tech infrastructure as well as their own research and development.
Deepseek’s Disruption: A threat or a boost for NVIDIA?
In late January 2025, the release of a low-cost Chinese AI model threatened the dominance of AI leaders in the Magnificent 7, presented a break in the tech bubble and evaporated $593 billion of NVIDIA’s market value. This created a record for any company on Wall Street
While the industry leaders in America focused on better training of AI models and high-volume stock of GPUs, the Chinese AI model displayed better results with a far lower apparent cost. It led to global investors shying away from these stocks & led to NASDAQ falling 3.1% in one day. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives pegged DeepSeek’s model cost at only $6 million. By comparison, OpenAI, Google and other major U.S. companies are on track to invest a total of roughly $1 trillion in AI over the coming years, according to Goldman Sachs.
This event shook investor faith and all tech stocks [including but not limited to Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Microsoft] took price hits. Although share prices made a great recovery this event is going to have massive consequences going forward.
It might lead to a future where the demand for NVIDIA chips falls dramatically from the previous estimations but the future is uncertain and competition in AI might turn out to be a boon for NVIDIA.
The bubble has burst and global competition might very well reduce stock prices in the short run but NVIDIA is poised to come out as a tech leader in the long run. It remains a massive player in the tech industry and new development should take it to greater heights.
BY KISLAY AND RANVEER
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