TECH NEWS – In 1993, Jensen Huang put Nvidia together with two partners at a Denny’s table, fueled by unlimited coffee and a single obsessive idea: bringing impossible 3D graphics to the PC. Nvidia was born with videogames in mind, but as the industry evolved and Huang’s mindset shifted, he embraced a thesis that ultimately rewired the company’s future: if you accelerate graphics, you end up accelerating almost any kind of computation.

Six years later, the arrival of the GeForce 256 was pitched as the first “graphics card,” turning a marketing label into a cultural standard closely tied to PC gaming. The leap was not just brute force: it offloaded transformation and lighting work from the CPU with dedicated hardware, exactly what early 3D games were asking for.

In 1999, the same year the GeForce 256 launched, Nvidia faced its first “public exam”: an IPO at $12 per share. At the time, it was a small sign of how far the company still was from the giant it would become. Huang, however, quickly understood that the future was not simply selling cards, but building a platform where your tools and your software bind you to the ecosystem.

The Natural Evolution of Nvidia

In 2006 came CUDA, a defining move that turned the GPU line into a kind of universal calculator. With it, the company moved from pushing pixels to pushing science, AI, and simulations with the same underlying logic. The clever part of CUDA is almost pure narrative: Nvidia did not necessarily change its business, it changed how it explained what the chip’s brute force could do.

Over time, Nvidia’s CEO made it clear the company’s future was pointing toward data centers, networking, and large-scale computing. He never denied that gaming remained the core business, but it shifted from being the ceiling of the company to being its gateway. That is why the 2019 acquisition of Mellanox for €6.3 billion signaled what was coming, a move designed to keep AI from choking on network limitations.

Mellanox is not “gamer glamour,” and it does not try to be, but it is ideal data-center glue: fast interconnects that let thousands of GPUs behave like a single beast. That move also pulled Nvidia into a familiar regulatory drama, including a China investigation over alleged failures to meet anti-monopoly conditions.

A year later, Nvidia tried to buy Arm for €36.8 billion, the company that defines how your smartphone works even if you barely know it exists. After years of negotiations and market scrutiny, the deal collapsed in 2022 under regulatory pressure. The U.S. FTC even celebrated the fall of the agreement as a win for competition.

Jensen Huang’s Next Chapter

Even without Arm in the arsenal, Huang has kept the ambition alive through licensing, partnerships, and in-house CPUs so his AI does not always depend on someone else’s “house.” One of his biggest media talents is also turning every keynote into an event that blends tech with sports-show spectacle: leather jacket, stage lights, huge audiences, and a message that is easy to repeat across social feeds and specialized press.

History suggests Nvidia wins when the world is in a hurry, because selling “acceleration” works for games and for AI alike. But success creates enemies, and when your hardware becomes infrastructure, regulators, rivals, and governments start watching every move under a magnifying glass. There are fewer applause lines and far more critical readings.

If today’s Jensen Huang could speak to the Jensen Huang of 1993, he likely would not believe where the company ended up. More than 30 years ago, he wanted everything faster and trusted the promise of drawing polygons. In the end, the same “trick” that raised FPS also boosted AI horsepower, helping create a world where millions feel glued to chatbots, services, and other tools powered by artificial intelligence.

Source: 3DJuegos