Nvidia: From Tesla to Google… 40 thousand companies depend on its chips
If CPU or processor is the brain of computers and laptops, then GPU or graphics processing units are the brain of AI. With the help of these state-of-the-art chips, supercomputers, robots and self-driving cars around the world are being operated. And the company that makes this chip is Nvidia. The supercomputer on which ChatGPT, which shook the world in the year 2022, was trained, had ten thousand GPUs of Nvidia slugged in it. A total of 40 thousand companies including giants like Tesla, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon depend on Nvidia’s chips for their AI projects. How did this company with a market cap of Rs 183 lakh crore reach this position in three decades, read the whole story.
Nvidia is the third largest company in the world after Microsoft and Apple
Beginning: Three gaming-loving friends got the idea in a restaurant
In 1993, three friends Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowski and Curtis Prem were sitting and drinking coffee in Danny’s Restaurant in California. All three were electrical engineers and were interested in gaming. A series of conversations began and a consensus was reached on starting a startup to bring 3D graphics in the gaming-multimedia market. At that time, these chips were like a card, which game players used to insert in the computer’s motherboard. This improved 3D graphics. Malachowski says, there was no market for graphics processing in 1993. But we could see that its wave was coming in the coming times. The company launched the NV-1 chip in 1995. But it proved unsuccessful and it even reached the point of bankruptcy.
• Nvidia became most famous for the GPUs used in Microsoft Xyonks and Sony PlayStation video game consoles.
It has earned Rs 50 lakh crore in this financial year, has a market cap of Rs 183 lakh crore
45 lakh developers and a total of 40 thousand companies use Nvidia’s services
Years of experiments: Graphic cards were the USP, failed in mobile chips
The golden era of personal computers started in 1990. Intel processors ruled the roost. But Nvidia, sensing the future, continued to invest in GPUs. In 1999, the first graphics processing unit (GPU) named ‘GeForce 256’ was introduced in the market. This made parallel computing easy. In 2006, Stanford University found in a research that GPUs can speed up the math operations of computers as compared to regular chips. After this, Nvidia introduced a programming language named CUDA and through this showed the market the power of its graphics cards. In 2012, AlexNet, an AI tool for classifying images, came into the market. It used Nvidia’s GPU.
• Nvidia also took a chance on mobile processor chips. But due to high battery usage, its processors failed in mobiles.
Of the three founders of Nvidia, Jensen Huang has been the face of the company for the past two decades. Curtis retired in 2003 citing personal reasons. Malachowski, on the other hand, holds a senior position in the company. This picture of CEO Jensen Huang (net worth Rs 6.52 lakh crore) is from a recent event where he is showing a new chip. The company has launched special graphic processors for AI. The price of one processor can be between 30 and 40 thousand dollars. Market: 40 percent of Nvidia’s earnings come from tech giants and Meta. These companies, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, Nvidia’s biggest customer, started buying Nvidia chips for data centers before 2016. Nvidia’s chips are being used in Google’s Chromebooks since 2014. Tesla’s self-driving cars have Nvidia’s AI chips. Apart from this, Tesla also uses Nvidia hardware.
Meta is buying 6 lakh GPUs (H100) from Nvidia for its AI projects. It is using Nvidia’s chips. According to a report by CB Insight, 90 percent of the GPUs used by Microsoft in machine learning in its various products are from Nvidia.
• The company is earning the most from data centers. After this, the company earns the most from gaming and then professional visualization.