Acquired · NVIDIA · History
History
NVIDIA was founded in 1993 (Denny's diner, San Jose, California (founded over coffee)). The timeline below traces every inflection point Acquired identified — founding, leadership changes, strategic pivots, crises, cultural moments.
The story
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.
Inflection points · grouped by decade
1990s
- 1993founding
NVIDIA founded at Denny's, San Jose
Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem incorporate the company. Initial $200K funding from Sequoia (Don Valentine).
[Acquired episode I]
- 1995product launch
NV1 ships — and fails
First product uses quadratic texture mapping instead of triangles. Microsoft's Direct3D standardises on triangles; NV1 becomes obsolete on arrival.
[Acquired episode I]
- 1996crisis
Sega cancels the NV2 contract
Sega had paid $7M for NV2 chip development for the Dreamcast. Mid-development they cancel and move to PowerVR. NVIDIA has months of runway left.
[Acquired episode I]
- 1997product launch
RIVA 128 saves the company
Triangle-based GPU shipped with $80M in sales the first year. Validates Jensen's pivot and the architectural choice. The company survives.
[Acquired episode I]
- 1999ipo
NVIDIA IPO + GeForce 256 launch
IPO at $12/share on NASDAQ. GeForce 256 is the first product marketed as a 'GPU'; introduces hardware T&L.
[Acquired episode I + NVIDIA S-1]
2000s
- 2006strategic shift
CUDA launches
General-purpose compute API for NVIDIA GPUs. The bet: someday someone will need parallel compute for non-graphics workloads. Decade-early — nobody believes for years. Becomes the core moat.
[Acquired episode II]
2010s
- 2012cultural moment
AlexNet wins ImageNet on GeForce GPUs
Hinton, Krizhevsky, Sutskever train an 8-layer CNN on two GeForce GTX 580s. Crushes ImageNet by 10+ points. The deep-learning era begins on NVIDIA hardware. CUDA bet pays off.
[Acquired episode II]
- 2016product launch
DGX-1 — AI supercomputer in a box
First purpose-built deep-learning system. Jensen personally hand-delivers serial number 0001 to Sam Altman at OpenAI.
[Acquired episode II + 2017 OpenAI blog]
- 2019acquisition
Acquires Mellanox for $6.9B
Buys high-speed networking (InfiniBand). Locks in the data-center bandwidth layer that AI clusters depend on. Becomes the second moat alongside CUDA.
[Acquired episode II]
2020s
- 2022-11market shift
ChatGPT releases — every cloud needs more GPUs
OpenAI ships ChatGPT. Hyperscalers panic-buy NVIDIA. The 16-year CUDA bet compounds in 18 months.
[Acquired episode III]
- 2024-03product launch
Blackwell architecture announced at GTC
B100/B200 chips + NVL72 rack-scale system. Jensen markets it not as a chip but as 'one giant GPU' (72 GPUs in a single coherent memory domain).
[Acquired episode III + NVIDIA GTC 2024 keynote]
- 2024-06market shift
NVIDIA briefly becomes world's most valuable company
Market cap touches $3.6T, passing Microsoft and Apple. The CUDA + system bet is fully repriced.
[Public market data]
- 2026-01episode release
Acquired Part III — The Dawn of the AI Era
Ben and David's third NVIDIA episode crystallises the strategy through the AlexNet → ChatGPT arc.
[https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-dawn-of-the-ai-era]
Major events · 1993–2026