Founders
Denny's Booth to $3 Trillion: The Jensen Huang Story
In 1993, three engineers met at a Denny's in San Jose to draft the business plan for what would become Nvidia. They almost ran out of money twice.
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The Denny's at 2484 El Camino Real, in East San Jose, has a brass plaque now. It marks the booth where, in April 1993, Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem mapped out a company that would design graphics chips for the then-nascent PC gaming market.
Nvidia almost died twice. In 1996, the company's first chip, the NV1, was a commercial flop — Sega bailed on a partnership, and the headcount was cut to 40. In 2008, after a manufacturing defect in mobile GPUs cost Nvidia $475 million, the stock fell 80 percent and analysts wrote it off.
Huang's response, in both cases, was the same: invest harder into the next generation. CUDA — the parallel-computing platform that made Nvidia chips the universal backbone of modern AI — was released in 2007, when the market saw no reason it should exist. Fifteen years later, that single architectural bet would deliver a $3 trillion company.
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