By Dan Caplinger
Publication Date: 2026-02-02 17:07:00
The chip giant’s path to success is worth knowing.
Hindsight is perfect. It’s easy now to look back and think that artificial intelligence chip pioneer Nvidia (NVDA 0.93%) was always destined for greatness, given that it now has the largest market capitalization of any company worldwide. Many analysts believe that Nvidia can do no wrong, and that its colossal past success warrants an unwavering belief that a prosperous future for Nvidia stock is assured.
But to understand where Nvidia is now, it’s valuable to look back to where it got its start and the path it took to get here. That’s a core philosophy of my new Voyager Portfolio, which has been looking at a variety of different companies to assess their history, the current state of their businesses, and their prospects for the future. In this three-part series, you’ll get a more complete picture of Nvidia’s past, learning how it gradually evolved from being a niche player in a relatively small part of the technology sector to expand into the colossus it is today.
Image source: Getty Images.
Painting a prettier picture
Nvidia got its start in 1993, when current CEO Jensen Huang joined forces with a pair of fellow co-founders to create the company. At the time, artificial intelligence was the province of science fiction, and Huang’s ambitions were of much more limited scope. Nvidia spent most of the time during the tech boom of the 1990s trying to create technology that would push the video gaming and multimedia…
