Jensen Huang: 'Nvidia was founded because of Windows'

Nvidia ( NVDA ) CEO Jensen Huang says the world's most valuable company might not exist without Microsoft ( MSFT ).

"Nvidia was founded because of Windows," Huang said Wednesday alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at an event unveiling a laptop that runs on Nvidia's RTX Spark chip (video above). "If not for Windows, Nvidia wouldn't have been founded."

Huang detailed how the idea for Nvidia took shape in late 1992, around the time of Windows 3.1, when he and his co-founders imagined a personal computer with 3D graphics that could run games and serve as a design workstation. Nvidia started in 1993.

When Nvidia went public in January 1999, Microsoft, which had gone public in 1986 , was worth about $390 billion (roughly $800 billion in today's dollars), and Nvidia was worth less than $1 billion (roughly $1.2 billion today).

Nvidia first surpassed Microsoft in market value on June 18, 2024, and has remained ahead on every trading day since June 25, 2025.

Huang explained that Nvidia evolved alongside Microsoft's software. Microsoft's Windows 95 let a graphics chip connect to a PC; DirectX opened those chips to applications; and DirectX 8 marked the point when the two companies co-invented the first programmable GPU.

That work later became CUDA, Nvidia's software for programming its chips.

"If not for Windows, there would be no GeForce," Huang said. "If no GeForce, CUDA wouldn't have come to the world."

Without CUDA, he added, AI pioneers would not have "found a computer to do deep learning."

At the end of the explanation, Nadella quipped: "Jensen is now going to do a little transfer of market cap back to me."

Internal AI tools help analyze interview transcripts and draft. Editors reviewed, edited, and fact-checked this post before publication.