The New Intel

Graphics-chip Specialist Nvidia’s Almost Accidental Dominance of the Market for Artificial-intelligence Processors Has Propelled Its Stock to New Heights in the Past Five Years. but Its Decades-long Conscientious Policy of Treating Its Employees Well Is Why It Ranks First Among Its Peers on the New Just 100 List of America’s Best Corporate Citizens.

- Aaron Tilley

Nvidia cofounder Chris Malachowsky is eating a sausage omelet and sipping burnt coffee in a Denny’s off the Berryessa overpass in San Jose. It was in this same dingy diner in April 1993 that three young electrical engineers—Malachowsky, Curtis Priem and Nvid ia’s current CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang— started a company devoted to making specialized chips that would generate faster and more realistic graphics for videogames. East San Jose was a rough part of town back then—the front of the restaurant was pocked with bullet holes from people shooting at parked cop cars—and no one could have guessed that the three men drinking endless cups of coffee were laying the foundation for a company that would define computing in the early 21st century in the same way that Intel did in the 1990's.

“There was no market in 1993, but we saw a wave coming,” Malachowsky says. “There’s a California surfing competition that happens in a five-month window every year. When they see some type of wave phenomenon or storm in Japan, they tell all the surfers to show up in California, because there’s going to be a wave in two days. That’s what it was. We were at the beginning.”