Nvidia hits $4 trillion: 7 lesser-known things about the AI superpower
As crossed the $4 trillion market cap milestone, it’s worth going beyond the headlines. While the world now knows it as the engine room of the AI boom, there’s far more to Nvidia’s story than GPUs and stock surges. Here are seven lesser-known things about the chip giant you probably didn’t know:
Nvidia didn’t start in AI—or gaming Back in 1993, Nvidia was founded to focus on graphics acceleration for multimedia PCs, not video games or data centres. The company’s first product was a multimedia card called the NV1, which flopped spectacularly. AI wasn’t even on the radar.
Its original codename was “Project X” Before it became Nvidia, the founders—Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem—referred to the company as “Project X.” The name Nvidia comes from “invidia,” the Latin word for envy. Fitting for a firm now sparking GPU envy across the globe.
Nvidia nearly went bankrupt in the late ’90s The company’s early years were turbulent. After multiple failed products, Nvidia was on the brink of collapse until it launched the RIVA 128 GPU in 1997, followed by the game-changing GeForce 256—marketed as the world’s first GPU.
It was Apple, not Microsoft, that helped Nvidia rise While Nvidia is now closely associated with AI and Windows-based systems, Apple was an early Nvidia customer. The company’s GPUs powered early MacBook Pros in the mid-2000s, helping it gain credibility in the high-performance computing space.
It once tried (and failed) to buy ARM In 2020, Nvidia attempted to acquire British chip design firm ARM for $40 billion. But after regulatory pushback in multiple countries, the deal fell through. It would’ve made Nvidia a dominant force in mobile and IoT chips.
Nvidia is quietly powering your favourite AI apps Whether you’re using ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Google Gemini, chances are they’re running on Nvidia hardware—specifically the H100 or A100 GPUs that dominate the AI training and inference market.
Nvidia is quietly powering your favourite AI apps Whether you’re using ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Google Gemini, chances are they’re running on Nvidia hardware—specifically the H100 or A100 GPUs that dominate the AI training and inference market.
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