NVIDIA
CUDA as a decade-early bet that became the entire AI moat.
Latest filing on file · 2026-01-25
Overview
Business model and origins
Programmable graphics accelerators for PC gaming — and, by Jensen's stated bet at the founding, eventually a wedge into general-purpose accelerated computing.
Origin
Three engineers from Sun, AMD, and IBM met repeatedly at a Denny's near 280 in San Jose because nobody had an office. The bet: gaming would drive demand for compute that CPUs couldn't deliver, and the same architecture would later serve other parallel workloads. They survived two near-death moments — the NV1 failure in 1995 and the cancelled Sega contract in 1996 — before the RIVA 128 (1997) finally established product-market fit. Jensen has run the company for 33+ consecutive years; founder-CEO continuity at this duration is itself a strategic asset.
Hooks from these episodes
Jensen Huang has been NVIDIA's CEO since 1993 — through four near-death pivots, the financial crisis, crypto crashes, and the AI boom. The CUDA bet predates the use case by more than a decade.
Long tenure compounds in ways quarterly thinking can't.