Nvidia outsourced their manufacturing, as did a lot of similar startups from the 90s. Even back then, VCs didn't want to invest in hardware companies that were

Nvidia outsourced their manufacturing, as did a lot of similar startups from the 90s. Even back then, VCs didn't want to invest in hardware companies that were going to actually build their own hardware because that's expensive, they wanted companies that designed their products in the USA and had them manufactured by other fabs. Nvidia got lucky by building a product that just happened to be amazingly well suited to a technology that would emerge 20 years after they were founded. Credit where it's due, they developed CUDA and gave universities gobs of cash/hardware to train students to leverage CUDA for machine learning and later, AI. But if not for AI, Nvidia would still be a video card designer with a market cap of maybe 5% of its current valuation. It's difficult to call them a hardware company in the sense that Intel is. They only do designs of hardware, and a lot of their value comes from the software they designed to leverage their hardware in ways beyond their initial purpose.