NVIDIA took its name from invidia, the Latin word for envy, and it wanted rival chipmakers to feel it. Three engineers founded it in 1993 to build graphics chips for personal computers. By the time it went public in January 1999, PC gamers wanted fast 3D graphics, and dozens of chip companies fought to supply them. NVIDIA filed its S-1 in March 1998 and waited ten months to sell a share.

Three Engineers and a Graphics Chip

Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem started NVIDIA in 1993. Their bet was that the PC would need its own chip for graphics, separate from the main processor. Games were the first market. Drawing a 3D scene takes millions of small sums done at once, and a graphics chip does that work in parallel. That same trick later made NVIDIA's chips useful for science, crypto mining and AI.

Twelve Dollars a Share

NVIDIA priced its IPO at $12 a share on January 21, 1999, and sold 3.5 million shares on Nasdaq. The offering raised about $42 million. Later that year it launched the GeForce 256, which it called the first GPU. Two decades later, researchers trained neural networks on its chips, and demand for AI turned the company into a giant. In July 2025 NVIDIA became the first company worth $4 trillion.

Cover: Invidia, plate 4 from The Seven Vices, Hieronymous Wierix. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for Envy personified (invidia, the root of the name).