Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Credits Sega's $5 Million Investment for Saving Company from Bankruptcy
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang traveled to Tokyo to personally thank former Sega President Shoichiro Irimajiri for a $5 million equity investment in 1995 that saved the struggling chipmaker from bankruptcy. At the time, Nvidia had only 30 days of cash remaining after its first graphics processor, the NV1, failed due to using curved surface rendering instead of the triangle-based method adopted by Microsoft's DirectX. A follow-up chip developed with Sega was canceled. Huang proposed converting Sega's contractual debt into equity, warning the investment would likely be lost. Irimajiri convinced Sega's board to approve the deal, giving Nvidia six months to develop the RIVA 128, a triangle-based chip that sold 1 million units in four months and turned the company around. Nvidia went public in 1999, and Sega later sold its stake for $15 million. Today, Nvidia is the world's most valuable company with a market cap of $5.14 trillion.
Editorial responsibility
- No named human review is recorded for this page.
- Reports are grouped by semantic similarity and deterministic rules. Language models may assist titles, summaries, translation and cross-source analysis; the page itself is projected from evidence records.
- Current automated evidence projection