How NVIDIA Went From Gaming Chips to the World's Most Valuable Company | Tech Studio #6

One paintball at a time, or eleven hundred at once? NVIDIA's whole story, as a video-game speedrun: a company planned at a Denny's, a chip built to draw game explosions, the CUDA "secret door", two gaming cards that kicked off modern AI, the great graphics-card shortage, a keynote from an oven... and the final boss: electricity. 0:00 Paintball Mona Lisa: CPU vs GPU 0:25 From game chip to $5 trillion 0:45 Level 1: A Denny's, a million pixels, a leather jacket 1:29 Level 2: CUDA (and can it run Crysis?) 2:12 Level 3: Two gaming cards beat the world 2:42 Side quest: where did all the graphics cards go? 3:07 Level 4: Shovels, an oven, "the more you buy" 3:54 Final boss: electricity 4:31 Measured in watts Sources: the MythBusters paintball demo at NVISION 08 (2008; timings reported differently, so "a fraction of a second"); NVIDIA's founding story (1993, planned at a Denny's); GeForce 256 marketed as "the world's first GPU" (1999); CUDA (2006-2007); Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton, AlexNet (2012: two GTX 580s, 15.3% vs 26.2% top-5 error); NVIDIA fiscal 2026 results (data center ~$193.7B of ~$215.9B revenue; gaming ~$16B); Bloomberg and Reuters on the first $5 trillion market value (Oct 29, 2025); NVIDIA's GTC 2020 kitchen keynote teaser; "the more you buy, the more you save" is Jensen Huang's long-running keynote joke; IEA, Energy and AI (2025): data centres ~415 TWh in 2024, ~945 TWh projected for 2030. The announcer and the game levels are fiction; "selling shovels" is a metaphor. Tech Studio: how the engines that move the world actually work. #NVIDIA #GPU #AI