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Duration 15:00

In April 1993, three engineers met in a booth at a Denny's in San Jose to plan a chip that would make video games look real. Four years later, their company had about one month of payroll left. Today it is worth about 5 trillion dollars, it was the first company ever to reach that mark, and the US government decides who may buy its chips.

This animated documentary tells how NVIDIA got there: Jensen Huang's road from a Kentucky reform school and a Denny's dish pit, the NV1 that bet on the wrong shapes, Sega's 5 million dollar lifeline, the RIVA 128 that went straight into production, the GeForce 256 and "the world's first GPU", the 3dfx war and the Xbox, the CUDA bet Wall Street ignored, AlexNet trained on two gaming cards in a bedroom, two crypto booms and busts, the failed 40 billion dollar Arm deal, the ChatGPT moment and the H100 shortage, the China export wall, the DeepSeek shock, and the climb to 5 trillion.

Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:46 The Booth at Denny's 2:17 Thirty Days From Death 3:56 Inventing the GPU 5:11 The CUDA Bet 6:24 The Big Bang 7:32 Boom and Bust 9:01 The ChatGPT Moment 10:18 The China Wall 11:39 Five Trillion 13:15 From Gaming Chips to the AI Revolution

Every major claim is fact-checked against NVIDIA's filings and announcements, SEC and FTC documents, the Computer History Museum and ImageNet, and major news reporting; disputed and personal accounts are attributed. Figures are as of October 2026. Real people are shown as stylised illustrations, and no company logos are used.

This video includes burned-in English subtitles.

Next on Then To Tomorrow: Coca-Cola: How a $5 Formula Became a Global Beverage Empire.

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