In 2024 NVIDIA briefly became the most valuable public company in the world, overtaking Apple and Microsoft — driven almost entirely by demand for its AI chips.

NVIDIA has had only one chief executive in its entire history — Jensen Huang has run the company since he co-founded it in 1993.

NVIDIA spent its first two decades making graphics chips for video games. The same parallel-computing hardware turned out to be ideal for AI — and today datacenters, not gamers, drive most of its revenue.

As NVIDIA’s price kept climbing, it split its stock to keep shares affordable — a 4-for-1 split in 2021 and a 10-for-1 split in 2024, turning one pre-split share into 40.