In June 2024, news broke that NVIDIA briefly passed Apple and Microsoft in its market cap.
Yet, according to CNBC, it remains a "little-known brand".
Thankfully, Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, offers an introduction to NVIDIA for those looking to dive deeper.
In the video below, he also highlights what's driving NVIDIA's success, its impact on the customer experience market, and notable big tech partnerships.
A written rundown of these critical points is also available below.
What Exactly Does NVIDIA Do?
Most people consider NVIDIA a GPU (graphics processing unit) manufacturer. Yet, that's a bit of a misnomer now because their applications extend far beyond graphics.
For example, it also develops software libraries and programming languages, like CUDA, which serve as interfaces for their hardware.
Such an integrated approach sets NVIDIA apart as more of a systems company rather than just a hardware manufacturer.
In addition, the business builds pre-configured systems for specific applications. These include NVIDIA Drive for autonomous vehicles, Clara for healthcare, Maxine for unified communications, and Omniverse for 3D lifelike digital twins.
These developments highlight NVIDIA's rapid transformation from a company founded to handle workloads that CPUs (central processing units) - like those from Intel or AMD - aren't efficient at.
Yet, in building that foundation, NVIDIA became an essential part of video processing, gaming, autonomous vehicles, AI, AR/VR, and other compute-intensive tasks.
Since then, its software libraries, preconfigured systems, and programming languages have blossomed.
What Is Driving NVIDIA’s Success?
NVIDIA delivers both the hardware and ecosystem for developers. That differentiates the company.
Alongside that, CEO Jensen Huang's vision is significant, and reminiscent to that of John Chambers, who led Cisco during the early days of the internet.
Indeed, Huang talks about how AI will change the world in various sectors, such as drug discovery, patient analysis, autonomous vehicles, and robotics.
NVIDIA then provides the technology to make that vision a reality.