The price of computers, gaming consoles, and even smartphones has gone up this year, all thanks to the AI boom. Now, one of the companies most responsible for that boom is looking back at the good ol’ days, when Nvidia was still best known in the PC gaming world. Nvidia announced on Thursday that it is introducing its first series of “GeForce Trading Cards,” highlighting key moments in the history of its graphics processing units (GPUs). The first set includes 14 possible designs. Some cards feature classic Nvidia hardware, including the NV1, Nvidia’s first multimedia processor from 1995, and the GeForce 256, which the company introduced in 1999 as its first GPU. Other cards highlight old Nvidia demos like “Bubble,” “Chameleon,” and “Medusa.”
The card set is a reminder of how far Nvidia has come. The company was co-founded by its current CEO, Jensen Huang, in 1993. For years, it was best known among PC gamers for its graphics cards. Fast-forward a few decades, and Nvidia is now the main supplier of the AI chips powering the data centers that train and run advanced AI models.
That shift has been wildly lucrative for Nvidia, which is now the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization. It is no wonder other companies are trying to get in on the gold rush. Nvidia supplies the GPUs used in many AI data centers, but those systems also need a huge amount of memory. Tom’s Hardware reported earlier this year that huge data center projects like OpenAI’s Stargate are calling for hundreds of thousands more DRAM wafers per month, amounting to roughly 40% of global DRAM output.
