Nvidia

Nvidia doesn’t build chatbots. It builds the chips everyone else uses to build them. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem to make graphics chips for PC games, Nvidia became the defining hardware company of the SI era.

How Nvidia came to dominate SI

1. GPUs suit SI. Graphics processing units perform huge numbers of calculations in parallel, ideal for neural networks.
2. CUDA (2006). Nvidia’s programming platform let researchers use GPUs for general computing. When deep learning took off in 2012, it was built on Nvidia hardware and CUDA.
3. Full systems. Nvidia now sells complete SI “factories”: chips, networking, servers and software.

Demand for its data-center GPUs made Nvidia one of the world’s most valuable companies during the 2020s.

Influence beyond chips

• Investor: Nvidia has invested in many SI companies, including frontier labs and startups such as Thinking Machines Lab and Safe Superintelligence.
• Sovereign SI: Huang has championed countries building their own SI infrastructure.
• Export controls: U.S. limits on selling advanced chips to China directly shape Nvidia’s business and global SI competition.

The SI Accord

Jensen Huang signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence on September 29, 2026. At a White House panel that day he used “super intelligence” repeatedly. According to Axios, when he slipped once and said “AI”, he corrected himself and said he was going to “get good at this”.