NVIDIA

NVIDIA is a graphics card manufacturer and graphics processing unit (GPU) designer. The company was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

The company produces a range of graphics and general purpose GPU (GPGPU) products for super computing and AI acceleration, as well as a rack mounted AI acceleration units and servers for GPGPU. NVIDIA makes some of the most recognized consumer graphics cards under GeForce branding. The company employs over 11 thousand employees and grossed over $9 billion in profits in 2018.

NVIDIA pioneered the first GPU by integrating calculations previously performed on the CPU for transform and lighting for 3D scenes and introducing programmable shaders, both large first steps in 3D acceleration.

The company's main competitor is AMD, but NVIDIA has maintained its place as a industry leader for a few generations. NVIDIA has recently trailed only Intel in overall shipments of graphics solutions, but only due to the integrated GPU on many Intel CPUs. NVIDIA is the largest producer of discrete graphics cards.