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The most valuable company in the history of the world does not make your phone. It does not make your car. It does not run a single website you use. It sells a chip, a chip most people have never seen and could not name. Its founder used to wash dishes on the night shift at a Denny's. In 1996, his company was 30 days from going out of business.
In 2008, Wall Street said his big idea was a waste of money. Today, that company is worth $5.6 trillion, more than Apple, more than any company that has ever existed. So, how does a company that sells one invisible part end up worth more than everything else? This is the story of Nvidia explained like you're five.
San Jose, California, 1993. Three engineers are sitting in a booth at a Denny's. Jensen Huang, Chris Malikowski, and Curtis P. Coffee, pancakes, and $40,000 between them. Jensen knows the place. At 15, he worked the night shift at a Denny's in Oregon. dishwasher, bus boy, waiter. At 9:00, he had been sent from Taiwan to a boarding school in Kentucky where they made him clean the toilets.
The idea in the booth is simple. Video games are about to go three-dimensional, and somebody has to make the chip that draws them. Three guys and $40,000. What's the company called? Nvidia. Sounds like a medicine. Their first chip comes out in 1995. It draws pictures out of four-sided shapes. Then Microsoft decides that every game on Windows will be drawn out of triangles.
Nvidia has spent 3 years drawing the wrong shape. They have one customer left. Sega, the game company, has paid them to build the chip for its next console. In 1996, Jensen realizes the chip will not work. He flies to Sega to say so. Nvidia is 30 days from going out of business. So you cannot build our chip and you would still like to be paid.
If you do not pay us, there is no company. Then I will not pay you. I will invest $5 million. $5 million. Nvidia fires half its staff and bets everything on one last chip, the Reva 128. They cannot afford to build a test version. So they simulate the whole chip on a computer and send the design straight to the factory.
They bet on a chip they had never held. In 1997, it ships. It works. It sells a million units in 4 months. Nvidia is alive. And Jensen starts saying a sentence he will repeat for 30 years. We are 30 days from going out of business. Santa Clara, California, 1999. In January, Nvidia sells shares to the public at $12 each.
The company is worth about $600 million. In October, it launches a card called the GeForce 256. It draws light and movement on the chip itself, so the main computer does not have to. Nvidia calls it the world's first GPU, a graphics processing unit. Nobody had used that word before. They invented it and it stuck.
You invented a word for a video game part. The word is worth more than the part. Gamers buy it by the millions. [cheering] Every year, Nvidia ships a faster one. Its rivals cannot keep up. In December 2000, the biggest of them, 3DFX, goes bankrupt. Nvidia buys what is left for about $100 million. Microsoft picks Nvidia to power the first Xbox.
By 2001, Nvidia has more than 80% of the market for graphics chips. It is a good business, a billion dollar business. And it has one problem. Its chip can only do one thing. Draw pictures. Santa Clara, 2006. A graphics chip is strange. A normal processor does one hard sum at a time. A graphics chip does thousands of easy sums at once because a picture is thousands of dots.
Jensen has a thought. Thousands of easy sums at once is not only pictures. It is weather, medicine, physics. So Nvidia builds CUDA, a way for any programmer to use the game chip for any kind of maths. It costs billions. It takes years and almost nobody uses it. You spent billions so scientists can borrow a game chip.
How many scientists bought one? Not many yet. In 2008, the financial crisis hits. Nvidia stock falls 85% from its high. Wall Street calls CUDA a waste of money. For 6 years, the stock goes nowhere. Then in 2012 in Toronto, three researchers enter a contest, show a computer a million photos, and make it say what is in each one.
They train their program on two GeForce gaming cards in a bedroom. It wins by a mile. It is called AlexNet and it is the moment deep learning stops being a theory. Every lab in the world reads the paper and every lab needs the same thing, Nvidia cards. In 2016, Jensen builds a computer just for this, the DGX1, and carries the first one into a small nonprofit in San Francisco himself.
Elon Musk signs the box. To the future of computing, where do I sign? The nonprofit is called Open AI. Nobody outside the building knows what those computers are for. Santa Clara 2018. Nvidia is suddenly selling every card it can make. Not to gamers, to Bitcoin miners who run them day and night in warehouses.
I need 400 more, whatever the price. Then Bitcoin crashes. The miners vanish overnight and dump their cards on the internet for half price. Nvidia's gaming sales fall 45%. The stock loses half its value in two months. Four years later, it happens again. Crypto crashes and Nvidia takes a charge of over a billion dollars for chips nobody wants.
Twice. You got fooled by the same magic coin twice. The chips still work. Somebody will want them. November 2022, a company releases a chatbot to the public. It is called Chat GPT. A 100 million people use it in two months and every answer it gives is computed on Nvidia chips. Suddenly every company on Earth wants its own.
Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, they all call the same phone number. The chip they want is the H100. It costs about $30,000 and there is a Q. In May 2023, Nvidia becomes worth $1 trillion. A year later, three Santa Clara, October 2025, Nvidia becomes the first company in history worth $5 trillion. In its last full year, it sold $216 billion of chips.
This summer alone, 96 billion in one quarter. Nearly all of it to data centers, warehouses full of Nvidia cards humming for the chat bots. 96 billion in a quarter for a game part. We stopped calling it that in 1999. Not everyone is allowed to buy. In April 2025, Washington bans the chips made for China and Nvidia writes off $4.5 billion of them.
In January 2026, the door opens again with a 25% tax on every chip that crosses. Nvidia keeps buying $20 billion for the technology of a rival called Grock in December. 13 billion for Hugging Face, the library where the world's AI models live this September. Yesterday, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the Grock deal.
The bus boy from Denny's owns about 4% of the company. That is roughly $ 160 billion. He wears the same black leather jacket to every meeting. 43,000 employees, one chip, $5.6 trillion. Here's the part nobody says out loud. Nvidia never had to guess which AI company would win. In a gold rush, the man selling shovels is paid by everyone before anyone finds gold.
Every chatbot answer you have ever read was computed on a rented Nvidia chip. You have never bought a thing from Nvidia. And you have already paid them through every subscription and every free app that is not really free. And the skeptic has one question left. What happens to the shovel seller when people stop digging?
Jensen has been answering that question since 1996. We are 30 days from going out of business. He has been wrong for 30 years so far. You just watched a whole video about a chip you will never see made by a company you will never buy from. At this point, subscribing is the least weird thing you have done today.
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