NVIDIA

NVIDIA was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It began as a graphics chip company for PC gaming and still ships the GeForce line.

Its data-centre business is now the larger story. NVIDIA's accelerators, together with the CUDA programming platform it has built up since 2006, are what most large AI models are trained and served on, which has made its supply the practical limit on how fast the field can move.

Because of that position it also drives a policy story - export controls on advanced chips, and who is allowed to buy how many of them.