How Nvidia, a company richer than Canada, hired a leader from Toronto

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There are four companies on Earth with a market cap value of more than US$2 trillion. Three of them you’ve probably heard of — Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet (a.k.a. Google).

The fourth is Nvidia, which hit the benchmark last Friday after a year of unprecedented growth. Its market cap value, currently sitting at about US$2.7 trillion, is higher than the GDP of Canada, which at US$2.14 trillion is the ninth highest (for a country) in the world.

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What is Nvidia?

Nvidia is, perhaps not surprisingly, a tech company, specializing in both hardware and software. It was founded in 1993 by Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem and Jensen Huang, who remains its president and CEO today.

What sets it apart?

Nvidia has long been a leader in GPUs, or graphics processing units, the computer chips that help drive video games. After a somewhat bumpy start — it butted heads with Microsoft over the type of GPU that computers would use, and lost a contract to produce the chip for Sony’s Dreamcast video game console — Nvidia started to see success, and in 2007 it was named Company of the Year by Forbes.

In 2013, the company announced its new headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., would be triangle-themed since, as Huang explained in a blog post, the triangle is “the fundamental building block of computer graphics.” The irony is that the company’s first stab at a GPU had been based on quadratics rather than triangles. An additional building in 2022 was less overtly triangular in design.

What’s the Canadian connection?

There are many — after all, Nvidia employs some 30,000 people worldwide — but one of the key players is Sanja Fidler, a Slovenian-born University of Toronto professor who heads up the company’s Toronto-based research lab, sometimes hiring and/or working alongside her former students.

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Fidler was handpicked by Huang in 2018 after meeting him at a computer-vision conference in Hawaii right after she had won an award for a paper. She elbowed up to the open bar at a reception Nvidia was hosting and fell into a conversation with her future boss, who followed up later with a phone call and a job offer.

“Imagine being handpicked by Santa Claus to guide his sleigh at night, and you get a sense of the magnitude of the assignment,” Joe O’Connor wrote in a profile of Fidler in the Financial Post.

Was Nvidia hurt by the pandemic?

Far from it. In addition to garnering goodwill by developing an open-source ventilator in May of 2020 that could be easily manufactured from simple parts, Nvidia was well placed to profit from the massive surge in demand for GPUs both during the pandemic (think of all those people at home playing video games) and even after, as those same people stayed at home to work remotely.

In September of 2023, with its products in sharp demand from other tech giants, Nvidia celebrated its arrival as a US$1-trillion company, unveiling a plaque at the Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, Calif., where the founders had agreed to start the company. In just 180 days (compared to more than 500 for Apple and Microsoft) it would reach a value of more than US$2 trillion.

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What about the boom in AI?

Nvidia turned out to be perfectly placed for that too. “Researchers discovered that the graphics chips that Nvidia was developing… lent themselves very well to running AI algorithms,” Emil Savov, managing director of Ontario’s MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, told the CBC in a recent profile on company. “That gave them a really big head start.”

As an example, in 2012, an image-recognition program called Alexnet, which had been trained using two of Nvidia’s GPUs, took top spot at the annual ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, with an error rate almost 11 per cent lower than the next runner-up.

More recently, ChatGPT was trained using 10,000 Nvidia GPUs clustered together in a supercomputer belonging to Microsoft. “What Nvidia is to AI is almost like what Intel was to PCs,” Dan Hutcheson, an analyst at TechInsights, told the BBC in a profile on the company last year.

What’s next for Nvidia?

The headline in a VentureBeat article last year — “How Nvidia dominated AI — and plans to keep it that way as generative AI explodes” — says a lot about how the company and the world see its future.

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While there are no guarantees in the tech biz — think of the fates of former juggernauts like Blackberry and Yahoo — the chip-maker is still several steps ahead of its competitors, and its products are in high demand, especially as AI continues to expand and dominate across industries. For now, at least, Nvidia’s success story continues.

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