By Michael B. Kelley
Publication Date: 2026-10-08 11:18:00
Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang says the world’s most valuable company might not exist without Microsoft (MSFT).
“Nvidia was founded because of Windows,” Huang said Wednesday alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at an event unveiling a laptop that runs on Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip (video above). “If not for Windows, Nvidia wouldn’t have been founded.”
Huang detailed how the idea for Nvidia took shape in late 1992, around the time of Windows 3.1, when he and his co-founders imagined a personal computer with 3D graphics that could run games and serve as a design workstation. Nvidia started in 1993.
When Nvidia went public in January 1999, Microsoft, which had gone public in 1986, was worth about $390 billion (roughly $800 billion in today’s dollars), and Nvidia was worth less than $1 billion (roughly $1.2 billion today).
Nvidia first surpassed Microsoft in market value on June 18, 2024, and has remained ahead on every trading day since June 25, 2025.
Huang explained that Nvidia evolved alongside…
