NVIDIA

Company Background

NVIDIA is the leading supplier of graphics chips into the PC, data-center, embedded and automotive markets. It sells many of these chips as board-level products, including PC add- in cards and turnkey data-center systems. Founder Jensen Huang has served as CEO since NVIDIA’s inception in 1993. Based in Silicon Valley, the company has more than 18,000 employees globally.

NVIDIA is the leading supplier of AI accelerators for both training and inference as well. These products reuse the company’s popular PC-graphics (GPU) architectures but add AI-specific features. They can also accelerate general computation (GPU compute), often for supercomputing and other scientific applications. They appear in 26% of the Top500 supercomputers on the November 2021 list, including 7 of the 10 fastest.

To simplify development of GPU-compute software, NVIDIA created the Cuda tools. Given its early entry and popularity in this market, Cuda quickly garnered wide acceptance. Today, the large base of Cuda-compatible applications poses a barrier to other GPU-compute solutions.