NVIDIA is a Silicon Valley semiconductor company founded in 1993, originally focused on graphics processing for consumer gaming. The company's strategic pivot to data-center AI acceleration, begun in the early 2010s and fully realized through the 2020s, has made it one of the most commercially successful technology companies in history.
As of 2026, NVIDIA holds roughly 90 percent market share in frontier AI training GPUs and roughly 80 percent in inference GPUs. The data-center GPU line (A100, H100, H200, B100, B200) and the CUDA software ecosystem are the two pillars of the company's competitive position. CUDA in particular represents two decades of accumulated ecosystem investment that competitors have been unable to replicate.
NVIDIA's annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is the most-watched industry event for AI infrastructure, and the company's capital allocation decisions, production roadmap, and customer prioritization materially shape the capacity available to every other player in the AI industry.