Who Owns Nvidia?

The top individual shareholder of NVIDIA is Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO of the company, with 87,521,722 shares giving him 3.50% ownership. Followed by Mark A. Stevens, venture capitalist and a partner at S-Cubed Capital, who was part of the NVIDIA board in 2008 and previously served as a director from 1993 to 2006, with 6,258,803 shares. Institutional investors comprise The Vanguard Group, Inc, with 196,015,550, owning 7.83%. BlackRock, Inc., with 177,858,484, owns 7.10%. And FMR LLC (Fidelity Institutional Asset Management) with 158,039,922, owning 6.31%.

Origin Story

Back in 1994, Sony used the term GPU as part of the launch of its PS1. Yet, by 1999 NVIDIA popularized the term with the launch of its GeForce 256.

The launch of the GeForce 256 was highly effective from a marketing standpoint. Indeed, defined as “the world’s first GPU,” it created a category in its own right.

Eventually, NVIDIA’s GPU would become a standard for various industries (from gaming to AI).

gpu — Graphics processing units (GPUs) were initially conceived to accelerate 3D graphic rendering in video games. However, more recently, they have become popular in artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) contexts. In fact, GPUs are critical components of AI Supercomputers, like Azure, which are powering up the current AI revolution.

By 2006, NVIDIA launched CUDA, a general-purpose programming model.

This accelerated the development of applications for various industries, from aerospace bio-science research to mechanical and fluid simulations and energy exploration.

NVIDIA has been the leader in the GPU space, starting with a focus on PC graphics.

The company focuses on 3D graphics due to the exponential growth in the gaming market.

At the same time, NVIDIA also represents the physical platform of entire industries.

From scientific computing, artificial intelligence, AI, data science, autonomous vehicles, AV, robotics, and augmented and virtual reality, NVIDIA gives us an understanding of how tomorrow’s industries will evolve based on the physical capabilities offered by its chips.

While GPU was initially applied primarily to gaming, running AI/ML algorithms that required massive computing power over the years became increasingly relevant.

Thus, GPU has become the basis for the most promising industries of this decade: AI, autonomous driving, robotics, AR/VR, and more.

While NVIDIA is a GPU design company, it has followed a platform strategy. In short, it has leveraged hardware and software (with its stack made of algorithms and libraries) with the ability to serve several industries and a few other promising industries of the future.

NVIDIA and the AI revolution

Thus, NVIDIA has found itself incredibly well-positioned for the AI revolution, which was spurred again by the meteoric rise of ChatGPT.

chatgpt-growth — ChatGPT’s meteoric rise saw the app grow from almost 37 million global searches per month in December to over 83 million global searches in January. By February, it passed almost 154 million searches.

Indeed, already by early 2023, the company has shifted most of its revenue generation from graphics (gaming) to computing and to network (AI).

nvidia-revenue-breakdown — NVIDIA generated almost $27 billion in revenue in 2023, of which $15 billion came from computing and networking and $11 billion from graphics. Opposite to 2022, where of $27 billion in revenue, over $15.8 billion came from Graphics and $11 billion from computing and networking. With the explosion of AI, the computing segment has become the main driver of NVIDIA’s growth.

This shift has happened because the current AI systems are built on top of AI supercomputers (capable of parallel computations), where the GPU has become the key ingredient.

In fact, a powerful AI supercomputer might require thousands of GPUs at once to enable the pre-training of large language models.

Below is the entire workflow of how ChatGPT went from pre-training to production, thanks to the AI supercomputer, which main component (the GPU) was provided by NVIDIA.