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The Rise of NVIDIA — A 20-Part Series

The Rise of NVIDIA

How did a company that started in a Denny's booth — and came within thirty days of bankruptcy — end up building the engines of the entire AI revolution and becoming the most valuable company on Earth?

This is The Rise of NVIDIA, a 20-part series tracing the whole arc: from a doomed first chip, through inventing the GPU, the CUDA bet nobody understood, the AlexNet spark, and the ChatGPT explosion that made it a multi-trillion-dollar giant. A new part publishes regularly — bookmark this page to follow along.

The full series

  1. Part 1: A Booth at Denny's — 1993: three engineers bet their careers on 3D graphics
  2. Part 2: The Chip That Almost Killed Us — 1995: the NV1's fatal flaw and the Sega gamble
  3. Part 3: Thirty Days from Death — 1997: betting the whole company on the RIVA 128
  4. Part 4: Inventing the GPU — 1999: the GeForce 256, a brand-new word, and the IPO
  5. Part 5: The Xbox Gamble — Powering Microsoft's first console — and the fallout
  6. Part 6: The Dustbuster — The GeForce FX flop and the war with ATI
  7. Part 7: CUDA — 2006: the bet that a graphics chip could compute anything
  8. Part 8: A Supercomputer in Every Lab — GPUs escape the game and enter science
  9. Part 9: The AlexNet Moment — 2012: two gaming cards ignite the deep-learning era
  10. Part 10: All In on AI — cuDNN, DGX-1, and a box hand-delivered to OpenAI
  11. Part 11: Dig for Gold, Sell the Shovels — The crypto mining boom, bust, and the lesson
  12. Part 12: Ray Tracing — 2018: RTX, tensor cores, and faking the speed of light
  13. Part 13: Buying the Plumbing — The Mellanox deal and the data-center pivot
  14. Part 14: The $40 Billion That Got Away — The Arm acquisition regulators killed
  15. Part 15: When Data Center Ate Gaming — The business quietly flips to the cloud
  16. Part 16: Hopper — The H100 — an architecture built for transformers
  17. Part 17: ChatGPT Changes Everything — 2023: the AI gold rush and the H100 shortage
  18. Part 18: One Trillion Dollars — The first chip company to cross the milestone
  19. Part 19: The AI Factory — Blackwell, Jensen the rock star, and selling the future
  20. Part 20: The Most Valuable Company on Earth — 2026: the CUDA moat and what comes next

New chapters drop regularly. Start with Part 1.

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