Nvidia’s Successful Bet On Artificial Intelligence
Founder and CEO Jensen Huang had an early belief in using graphics processing units for other computationally intensive tasks. Nvidia’s bet on this idea has been borne out so far.

As of December 2022, the U.S. computer chip designer Nvidia is the most valuable semiconductor company in the world, with a market capitalization of $450 billion.1 Despite a relatively small workforce of just 22,500 employees, Nvidia is more valuable than Taiwan’s TSMC, which has a market cap of $417 billion, and is significantly more valuable than Samsung, Intel, or AMD. The core of Nvidia’s business is designing and selling graphics processing units (GPUs), which are computer chips specially designed to render visuals, especially for the $180 billion global video game industry.2 Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Nvidia has also rapidly grown in the last decade to become one of the most important companies for the future of artificial intelligence. In 2012, Nvidia’s revenue was just about $4 billion, but reached $27 billion by 2021. As of 2022, Nvidia chips are the most commonly used in AI research papers by a wide margin.3