Nvidia, the kind of company that makes others invidious…

Nvidia Corporation was founded 30 Years ago, in April 1993, in Sunnyvale, California, and went public in 1999. One of its founders, Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang, a Taiwanese immigrant who came to the United States at the age of nine, is the company’s CEO and president, and owns 3.6% of its stock.

The company has gone through many ups and downs. Its first major contract for the development of a 3D chip was with Japan’s Sega. After a year, Huang realized that his architecture wouldn’t work, and recommended that Sega look for another partner, but asked its president to pay the full amount of the stipulated contract, because if he did not, given the magnitude of the investment made, his company would go bankrupt: Sega’s president considered it ethically appropriate, and the company was able to save itself.

In 2007, the company launched CUDA, a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that enabled software to use graphics processing units (GPUs) for general-purpose processing. That approach, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), was considered a misguided strategy by most analysts, who thought that development and adoption of a new platform would be extremely difficult take too many years to reach significant adoption. The company, which decided to persevere with its…