The Godfather of AI: The Rise of NVIDIA

NVIDIA transformed from a fierce competitor in the 1990s 3D graphics market to the undisputed king of the AI era by relentlessly innovating with products like the GeForce 256 and surviving early near-collapses through strategic risks, such as the pivotal SEGA contract. Jensen Huang cemented the company’s "moat" by betting everything on CUDA, a software ecosystem that turned gaming GPUs into general-purpose processors, thereby laying the essential groundwork for the modern deep learning and AI revolution. Today, facing the physical limits of Moore's Law, NVIDIA is evolving beyond simple chip manufacturing into a platform for "physical AI" and the industrial metaverse, aiming to integrate digital intelligence directly with robotics and real-world manufacturing.