Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nvidia was founded on the 5th of April 1993, by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The three engineers agreed to start the company in late 1992 during a meeting at a Denny's diner on Berryessa Road in East San Jose, California.
CUDA is a software platform and programming interface that Nvidia developed in the early 2000s, investing over a billion dollars in the effort. It enables GPUs to run massively parallel programs, which made Nvidia chips central to the deep learning boom. By 2025, Nvidia controlled more than 80% of the market for GPUs used in training and deploying AI models.
Sega's president Shoichiro Irimajiri invested $5 million in Nvidia after informing Jensen Huang that Sega had chosen another vendor for the Dreamcast console. Huang later said that funding was all that kept Nvidia alive. The company also released the RIVA 128 in August 1997, selling roughly a million units within four months and generating the revenue needed to continue operations.
Nvidia surpassed Microsoft and Apple to become the world's most valuable company on the 18th of June 2024, when its market capitalization exceeded $3.3 trillion. It went on to become the first company in history to reach $4 trillion on the 10th of July 2025, and the first to reach $5 trillion on the 29th of October 2025.
Nvidia's GeForce Partner Program was a marketing initiative first announced on the 1st of March 2018, that offered partner companies benefits including public relations support and marketing funds. It drew complaints as a potentially anti-competitive practice and was canceled on the 4th of May 2018, just over two months after its launch.
In September 2020, Nvidia announced it would buy Arm from SoftBank Group for $40 billion. The deal faced significant regulatory challenges, including competition concerns raised by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority and an investigation opened by the European Commission. SoftBank and Nvidia announced in early February 2022 that they had agreed not to proceed with the transaction due to those regulatory obstacles.