Technology

Nvidia Founder Credits Microsoft’s Windows for Company’s Birth and AI Success

By TOI Tech Desk

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told an audience at Microsoft’s Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on October 7 that his company was founded because of Windows. He traced the line from Windows 3.1 in 1992 to the GPUs that now power much of the AI industry. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, sitting next to him, joked, "If you could just do a little transfer of market cap back to me," to which Huang replied, "I do that every day." The conversation, hosted by former White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan, followed Microsoft’s unveiling of the Surface Laptop Ultra and laptops built on Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip. Huang explained that Windows 95 and DirectX enabled Nvidia’s GPUs to enter the PC market. He recalled that in late 1992 he and his co‑founders imagined a PC with 3D graphics that could play games, serve as a workstation, and be used for design. Windows 95 made it possible to connect a GPU to a PC, and DirectX’s Direct3D API let applications use the GPU. With DirectX 8, Nvidia and Microsoft co‑invented the first programmable GPU with programmable shaders, a step that evolved into CUDA, Nvidia’s parallel computing platform. "If not for Windows, there would be no GeForce," Huang said. "Without GeForce, there would be no CUDA, and AI researchers like Andrew Ng would not have found a computer to do deep learning on." He noted that a four‑year conversation with Nadella led to RTX Spark. Nadella described the story as "the history of computing in some sense" and credited Huang as a consistent voice on accelerated computing. He recalled an early Azure deal to scale high‑performance computing in the cloud, which led Microsoft to build the supercomputer it later offered to OpenAI. When Sam Altman asked if Microsoft had the compute, Nadella answered, "yeah, maybe." That partnership eventually brought the two back to the PC. Huang said they discussed putting major tools such as Blender, Adobe and Autodesk apps on the same machine as AI agents. "By the way, took four years," Nadella added. The result is RTX Spark, which Huang said took over 4,000 engineering years and has been tested on more than 1,200 applications. RTX Spark laptops from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Microsoft’s own Surface are now available for preorder and will begin shipping on October 16. As the session concluded, Huang summed up the relationship: "Windows has been with me for 34 years, it looks like it’s going to be with me for 34 more."