Did you know that several companies produce GPUs, but very few of them have mastered the craft? Nvidia is among the market leaders in designing advanced GPUs or graphics processing units.
Nvidia designs and sells GPUs. Graphics processing units account for approximately 87% of this company’s revenue!
GPU has become an essential component for many computing devices. Both individual users and businesses seek the most cutting-edge GPUs for better performance.
Top-performing GPUs have many applications, video rendering and graphics processing being two of the most popular ones.
Nvidia is the one producing top-performing GPUs. The company has been around for the last 29 years, and it has maintained the leading position for several years now.
How does Nvidia make money? What is Nvidia Business Model? What business strategies helped this company become the best GPU designer and producer? Continue reading to find answers to those questions.
What is Nvidia?
Nvidia Corporation is a USA-based GPU designing company that operates from Santa Clara, California, and designs GPUs and SoCs for gaming, the automotive market, mobile computing, and other applications.
GeForce, the flagship product of this company, competes with Radeon produced by AMD. This company had entered the gaming industry to make a profit and introduced handheld game consoles, such as Shield Tablet, Shield Portable, and Shield Android TV.
Those consoles did not become major competitors to Nintendo, but Nvidia’s cloud gaming service GeForce Now is drawing huge traffic!
Nvidia also specializes in designing a professional line of graphics processing units. Many devices used in engineering, architecture, automotive, media, entertainment, manufacturing design, and scientific research rely on Nvidia’s GPUs for flawless computation.
Along with designing and manufacturing GPUS, Nvidia also offers an API known as CUDA. This application programming interface helps users build highly parallel programs that use GPUs. And those programs can be used for supercomputing and resolving the toughest problems.
Nvidia has also entered the mobile computing market and is now designing Tegra mobile processors for mobile phones and tablets. Its automotive navigation systems have pleased many vehicle manufacturers.
The company is committed to delivering top-class technological solutions for new problems that businesses and users face.
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Nvidia History
Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded Nvidia in 1993. They believed graphics-based computing was the next big thing in computing. With this in mind, they saw the potential of solving issues that general-purpose computing was unable to carry out.
The three co-founders observed computational issues related to games. The skyrocketing sales volumes of games allured the Nvidia team to discover innovative solutions. They entered the gaming industry with these products and gained funding for their research.
The goal was to solve complex and time-consuming computational problems. Nvidia started small – the co-founders had only $40,000 in the bank when they established the company.
Later Sequoia Capital and some other investors provided a venture capital of $20 million to help this new firm. The company that later became a market leader had no name at first. All the files created by co-founders were named NV.
They started reviewing many names containing NV words and, in the end, chose Nvidia! The inspiration came from the Latin word “invidia”, which means “envy”.
Partnerships and Major Achievements
Nvidia collaborated with SGS-Thompson in 1994 to produce its single-chip graphical user interface accelerator. These chips were installed on Diamond Multimedia Systems’ multimedia accelerator boards.
After a year, the company introduced its first product NV1. Sega’s Virtual Fighter was the first 3D game that used Nvidia graphics to improve performance.
Another year later, Nvidia launched Microsoft DirectX drivers that supported Direct3D to render 3D graphics.
In 1997 the company introduced RIVA 128 3D processor. This 128-bit processor was the first of its kind, and within four months, Nvidia had sold over 1 million units!
In 1999 came a major announcement that reshaped the industry – Nvidia launched GeForce 256. This single-chip GPU offered integrated lighting, transform, rendering engines, and triangle clipping. It was the first processor to process at least 10 million polygons per second!
The company has gone a long way since then. Its latest processors can process above 7 billion polygons per second.
In 2000 Nvidia acquired 3dfx, one of the leading graphics technology companies. This merge became an important step forward for Nvidia.
The company launched its nForce motherboard chipset in 2001. It was originally intended for AMD Athlon and Duron, but the later company also offered support for Intel processors.
Nvidia reached new horizons within a year, and in 2002 it was named the fastest-growing company in the USA. It continued to invent new chipsets to make graphics processing more feasible.
And today, Nvidia serves as the most trusted GPU designing and manufacturing company. It has more than 22,473 employees working tirelessly to invent new GPU units for the company.
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Nvidia Business Model
Nvidia mainly serves the GPU market intending to overcome the world’s visual computing challenges. The company produces GPUs that target issues related to the most stimulating technology issues.
And it offers high-performance processors capable of producing interactive and realistic-looking graphics on notebooks and personal computers.
Gaming pros and professional designers recommend Nvidia’s processors to produce impressive 3D graphics. This company has multi-faceted value propositions and supplies products for several enterprise industries.
Many multi-national companies are Nvidia’s customers and rely on its top-performance GPUs. And a lot of startups and small-size businesses also use Nvidia’s products to enhance the performance of their devices.
The underlying technology of processors never changes. However, this company customizes processors to meet the work demands of specific clients.
According to reports shared by the company, its revenue comes from two segments, Tegra processors and GPUs. It sells graphics processing units for consumer PCs, data centers, and professional PCs.
Clients treat Nvidia as the most trusted technology company for cutting-edge GPUs, causing the company’s GPU sales to increase with every passing year.
Nvidia creates products that use Tegra SOC and other latest processor technologies. Gaming devices, automotive products, etc. rely on the Tegra Processor to work smoothly.
Tegra Processors represent the revenue from products based on Tegra SOC (system-on-chip) and modem processor technologies, which include Tegra for automotive, infotainment, and navigation systems and gaming devices.
Who are Nvidia’s Major Customers?
Companies producing personal computers, notebooks, and other such devices are Nvidia customers. Dell, Toshiba, HP, and Sony are some renowned brands buying graphics processing units from this company. Its B2B business plays a vital role in increasing the company’s annual revenue.
However, Nvidia also delivers top-performance GPUs directly to buyers. Renowned technology product retailers act as a middleman between this company and individual customers seeking top-quality graphics cards.
This company has also established a data center division that serves clients, such as Tesla and other companies utilizing the latest chipset to develop more advanced AI devices.
Nvidia is earning from every company which uses GPUs, bulk data, and machine learning to develop devices for the future.
Nvidia Financials
Nvidia’s revenue has increased by 50.3% year over year, and the firm has reported a record income of $7.1 billion! Its operating income has also increased by 91.1% year over year to $2.7 billion.
The company currently targets five major markets that include data center, gaming, automotive, professional visualization, and original equipment manufacturer. And has a shared revenue breakdown for each market.
The gaming market revenue makes up 45% of Nvidia’s total revenue. The data center market accounts for 41%. Automotive revenue makes up 2%, and the professional visualization market makes for 8% of the company’s total revenue.
Nvidia serves customers from other markets as well, and they account for 3% of the company’s total revenue.
The Covid-19 pandemic was not able to come in the way of Nvidia. While other companies failed to report any profit during this period, Nvidia grew its business efficiently. People were demanding top-performing devices to work from home or enjoy better games, and demands were high for top-performing GPUs and chipsets.
And Nvidia delivered what clients demanded, growing their dependence on this company. Due to its improved performance in several markets, investors also found Nvidia’s stocks more lucrative. As a result, the company has become one of the most trusted businesses for investments and technology!
How Does Nvidia Serve Cloud Services and Data Centers?
Major data centers demand extremely efficient graphics processing units. The leading cloud platforms, such as Alibaba, Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud, etc. are major clients in this market.
Since Nvidia delivers the most reliable GPUs, it follows a platform strategy. If a client buys the company’s product, it delivers both software and hardware as a set. Nvidia also provides a set of tools and services to improve the performance of its GPUs.
Nvidia provides API frameworks, software development kits, and software libraries to ensure the client’s machine learning models operate efficiently and smoothly.
Cloud computing service providers demand such high-performance processors! It helps them serve AI and machine learning industries with all the features they promise to deliver.
The entire software as a service industry relies on data cloud providers. Platforms, such as Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, and other renowned streaming services use cloud computing to offer a seamless streaming experience.
If Nvidia does not deliver flawless graphics processing units to process massive amounts of data, cloud services won’t be able to meet their clients’ needs.
Therefore, Nvidia’s employees take their job quite seriously and emphasize improving efficiency and performance with the launch of new processors.
Clients get Nvidia programming models along with GPUs and chipsets. Such solutions make their jobs easier, and they do not explore alternative solutions.
Nvidia has the best products to maintain its top position and will be the first choice of leading cloud computing companies until some firm introduces better GPUs!
Does Nvidia Produce Its Chipsets?
Although Nvidia is often attributed as a chipset designer and manufacturer, this company does not manufacture its chipsets. It outsources the production of GPUs and chipsets after designing them and eliminates all risks related to manufacturing.
GPU and chipset designs are this company’s core technological assets. It sources materials for all the products and ensures the manufacturer maintains top-notch quality.
Nvidia Business Strategies
Nvidia is consistently improving its “accelerated computing platform” to overcome more complex challenges in a time-saving manner. It tries to make the core product perform better to please enterprise clients.
The Nvidia platform offers a variety of tools that can integrate with enterprise partners. It improves the client’s reliance on the Nvidia platform, its applications, and its processors. Thus, they get no other option but to choose Nvidia’s products and services.
The CUDA programming language, interconnects, algorithms, systems, libraries, and other programs help clients personalize GPUs according to use cases. Other companies cannot match the support Nvidia offers to please clients!
Conclusion
Nvidia spends a large sum of money on research and development of future chipsets, aiming to drastically improve the user experience. It is involved in the development of more reliable chipsets for autonomous vehicle platforms.
The company has a great track record of delivering cutting-edge GPUs and processors for emerging technologies. Therefore, Nvidia can also succeed as the developer of the world’s most advanced processors for automotive platforms!
