Nvidia Was 30 Days From Dying. Now It's Worth $5 Trillion

In 2005, Intel had the chance to buy Nvidia for $20 billion. The board said no. Today Nvidia is worth more than $5 trillion, and Nvidia ended up investing in Intel. This is the full story of Nvidia and Jensen Huang: from a 9-year-old cleaning toilets at a Kentucky boarding school, to a startup planned in a Denny's, to three near-death moments, the CUDA bet Wall Street hated, AlexNet, ChatGPT and the AI gold rush that made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world. And the other side of the story: how Intel, the king of chips, passed on Nvidia, the iPhone and OpenAI, and fell. Chapters 0:00 The $20 billion "no" 1:17 The toilet cleaner: Jensen Huang's childhood 3:19 Three guys in a Denny's: how Nvidia started 5:24 Thirty days from going out of business 8:11 Intel, the king of chips 9:51 The $20 billion mistake 11:58 CUDA: the bet nobody wanted 14:48 The fall of Intel and the AI gold rush 17:26 The twist Sources The New York Times, "How Intel Got Left Behind in the A.I. Chip Boom" (Oct 2024) Reuters, Intel and OpenAI stake talks (Aug 2024) Intel Q4 and full-year 2024 results (Jan 30, 2025) Intel / Nvidia private placement filing (Dec 2025) Fortune, Jensen Huang interviews (2024, 2025) The Atlantic, Paul Otellini interview (2013) Krizhevsky, Sutskever & Hinton, "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks" (2012) Tae Kim, "The Nvidia Way" (2024) Photo credits (Wikimedia Commons; public-domain and CC0 images not listed): Coolcaesar (CC BY-SA 4.0) ×4; Rama & Musée Bolo (CC BY-SA 2.0 fr); Daniel L. Lu (user:dllu) (CC BY-SA 4.0); Cmglee (CC BY-SA 3.0); Don Christie (CC BY-SA 4.0); яіску ѕнояє (CC BY 2.0); Lugab89 (CC BY 3.0); Nvidia (Apache License 2.0) ×2; Robert.Harker (CC BY-SA 3.0) ×2; PJeganathan (CC BY-SA 4.0); [Web Summit https://www.flickr.com/people/7471124...] (CC BY 2.5); Staff photographer (CC BY-SA 3.0); Intel Free Press (CC BY-SA 2.0) ×5; 极客湾Geekerwan (CC BY 3.0) ×2; Arthur Petron (CC BY-SA 4.0); neepster (CC BY-SA 2.0); ArnoldReinhold (CC BY-SA 4.0); Photographer: Peter Dasilva (CC BY 4.0); Anderseidesvik (CC BY-SA 4.0); Ben Stanfield from Rockville, MD, USA (CC BY-SA 2.0); Joseph Zadeh (CC BY-SA 4.0); Robert Scoble (CC BY 2.0); Myself User:ZyMOS (CC BY-SA 4.0); Sonic8400 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Ashley Pomeroy (CC BY-SA 4.0); Maryland GovPics (CC BY 4.0); Jasper Reichardt (CC BY-SA 4.0); Max Roser (CC BY 4.0); Ser Amantio di Nicolao (CC BY-SA 3.0); Steve Jurvetson from Menlo Park, USA (CC BY 2.0) ×2; ajay_suresh (CC BY 2.0); James Thompson (CC BY 2.0); HaeB (CC BY-SA 4.0); Oregon State University (CC BY-SA 2.0); Tumbenhaur (CC BY-SA 3.0); Paul Seymour (CC BY-SA 4.0); Raimond Spekking (CC BY-SA 4.0); Timothy Borkowski (CC BY-SA 3.0); Oskar Alexanderson (CC BY-SA 2.0); richiec (CC BY-SA 2.0); TarkusAB (CC BY-SA 4.0); NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Slovinský (CC BY 4.0); Tadd and Debbie Ottman (CC BY 2.0); Dennis van Zuijlekom (CC BY-SA 2.0); The wub (CC BY-SA 4.0); Zinskauf (CC BY-SA 4.0); 4300streetcar (CC BY 4.0); Jphillips23 (CC BY-SA 3.0); Patrick Nouhailler (CC BY-SA 2.0); Steve Jurvetson (CC BY 2.0); Naotake Murayama from Los Altos, CA, USA (CC BY 2.0); Pedro Cambra (CC BY 2.0); Xbox México (CC BY 3.0). Curtis Priem portrait: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (used for commentary). Map: Natural Earth. Music: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0: Impending Boom, Lightless Dawn, Unanswered Questions, Return of Lazarus, Industrial Cinematic, Constance, I Can Feel it Coming, Black Vortex, Heroic Age. Foundedly tells the stories behind the world's biggest companies: the founders, the near-deaths, the rivalries and the mistakes that cost billions. Subscribe for a new documentary every week. #Nvidia #JensenHuang #Intel