NVIDIA

NVIDIA is the dominant designer of graphics processing units (GPUs) and the company whose chips have become the essential infrastructure of the AI revolution. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, NVIDIA evolved from a gaming graphics company into the most important semiconductor firm of the AI era — with a market capitalization that has at times exceeded $3 trillion.

The GPU Monopoly

NVIDIA's dominance in AI compute is extraordinary. Its H100 and successor Blackwell GPUs power the vast majority of large language model training worldwide. The CUDA software ecosystem — NVIDIA's proprietary parallel computing platform — has created a moat that competitors like AMD and Intel struggle to breach, because decades of AI research tooling has been built on CUDA. Every major AI lab — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta — depends on NVIDIA silicon.

AI Infrastructure Provider

NVIDIA has expanded from chip design into a full AI infrastructure stack: DGX systems for data center AI, networking (InfiniBand and NVLink), software frameworks (TensorRT, NEMO), and cloud partnerships with every major cloud provider. The company's inference platform is becoming critical as AI shifts from training to deployment — making NVIDIA central to the economics of the agentic web.

3D and the Metaverse

NVIDIA's Omniverse platform is a USD-based (Universal Scene Description) collaboration and simulation platform for 3D content and digital twins. Combined with RTX ray-tracing technology that brought real-time cinematic rendering to consumer GPUs, NVIDIA provides both the real-time rendering pipeline and the industrial simulation infrastructure for the metaverse.

Compute Capital

NVIDIA GPUs have become a form of capital — access to H100 clusters determines who can train frontier AI models. This dynamic has spawned an entire industry of GPU cloud providers like CoreWeave and shaped the compute capital markets that Jon Radoff has analyzed.