How Video Games Turned Nvidia Into A Tech Giant

Until quite recently, Nvidia wasn’t much of a household name outside of Silicon Valley or Wall Street. But times clearly have changed for the Santa Clara, California-based tech company with the easily mispronounced moniker. Across a growing range of technologies and gadgets, tiny chips made by Nvidia play an outsized role in our lives. And thanks to the explosion of artificial intelligence, perhaps our future as well.

But before Nvidia became the world’s most valuable chipmaker, the $3 trillion company had a more humble calling: making graphics cards for video game consoles. In the Bloomberg Originals mini-documentary How Nvidia Changed the Game, we show how a gargantuan technology company that’s held investors in its thrall got so big seemingly overnight. 

Nvidia didn’t have a great day on Wednesday (or today for that matter)-not because its $32.5 billion revenue projection for the third quarter was somehow terrible, but rather because it didn’t blow the doors off of analyst projections. However, none of the Wall Street handwringing that’s followed diminishes the story of how the company managed to succeed thanks to an incredible bit of long-term planning.

Today, Nvidia dominates the graphics industry. But when it started back in the 1990s, it was just one of many fledgling tech companies with similar ideas. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang chose to focus on an area where there was a lot of money to be made: video games. While using the cash that tumbled in to fund Nvidia’s research and development, he leveraged the company’s accelerating chip technology to branch out to a wider range of products and sectors.

In How Nvidia Changed the Game, Bloomberg Originals shows how this strategy eventually placed Nvidia at the heart of dual revolutions in cryptocurrency and-most importantly-artificial intelligence.