NVDA
NVIDIA is currently the largest company on the planet with a market capitalization of $4.2 Trillion. For the layman, that’s nothing more than its price tag. That’s not its real worth and that’s not what it would sell for if another company wanted to buy it. That said, it’s a lot of money for a company founded pre-dot com bubble to make video chips for gamers, which has now become the go to chip for Ai.
NVIDIA was founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem with a clear vision: to capitalize on the emerging demand for high-performance graphics processing in gaming. The idea of GPUs (graphics processing units) was still early, and the founders believed that computing would evolve toward visual experiences. This was 1993!
The mid-1990s saw intense competition in the graphics card market. Companies like 3dfx, ATI (later acquired by AMD), and Matrox were dominant players. NVIDIA had to compete against these well-established firms with far fewer resources and no proven product. NVIDIA survived and started to dominate.
While NVIDIA faced challenges developing its early products. Its first major graphics card, the NV1 (1995), was innovative but failed commercially. It tried to combine graphics and sound processing, but its proprietary architecture made it incompatible with most software, alienating developers. However, this focus lead to NVIDIA finally introducing the GeForce 256 in 1999, marketing it as the world’s first “GPU.” It was a game-changer, combining hardware transform and lighting (T&L) capabilities, which offloaded significant graphical processing tasks from the CPU. This made games look better and run faster. And we were off to the races – so to speak.
From Underdog to Titan in 30 years. It went public in 1999 at $12 per share or $0.04 per share split adjusted. Every $500 invested then is now worth about $1.5 million. From 1999 until about mid-2015 the market value was on a rollercoaster every few years rising and falling again, never reaching more than $20 billion. However, NVIDIA the business kept building. That’s the moral of the story. It doesn’t matter what the market value of your business is, keep building.