It is undeniable that today NVIDIA is one of the most successful technology companies. Their shares have grown by more than 2,510% in five years, they have become the main reference when we talk about hardware designed for computing with artificial intelligence, it is rare that a week goes by in which they do not surprise us with a new idea (whether paper , new technology, prototype, etc.), its market share in the PC segment is staggering… come on, we’re talking about a company that has peaked and yet is still growing.

So much so that from today’s point of view imagine NVIDIA flirting with bankruptcy and disappearing It may sound like science fiction, something unthinkable, certainly the result of the extreme imagination of someone who, for whatever reason, does not feel a particular sympathy for technology. And yet it happened. There was a time, in the late nineties, when the barely five-year-old company was on the verge of extinction.

A story picked up by TechSpot today reminds us that Sega was considering a very risky bet. entrust NVIDIA to manufacture the chip that would be in charge of the Dreamcast’s graphics, the company’s latest console. At that time, NVIDIA had already launched its first graphics accelerator NV1, which went unnoticed, but they were already working on its second development, NV2, which was at one time a candidate for driving graphics. remembered console section.

Sega knew what was at stake with this generationand they wanted to go big. Thus, two options were soon established, one led by Shoichiro Irimajiri, who was the head of Sega in the United States at the time, and the other led from Japan and executed in Asia by Hideki Sato. Irimajiri chose NVIDIA for the Dreamcast GPU and the company spent a year working on the project.

NVIDIA NV1 chip. Image: Fritzchens Fritz

However, as Irimajiri recently recalled, after that first year NVIDIA assumed it could not meet Sega’s needswith that plus Even if he abandoned the project, he wouldn’t survive on the market either.. In other words, there was no good solution. At that time, Irimajiri transferred his project to 3DFX (which was partially absorbed by NVIDIA years later) and anyway Hideki Sato’s design (Hitachi CPU and PowerVR GPU) eventually won.

So with NVIDIA in an unviable situation, what happened to finally get them out of the hole? Here comes the friendly relationship that Jen-Hsun Huang and Shoichiro Irimajiri already had, along with their good eye that continued to see “something” in the young tech woman. And so, even though they were ultimately left out of the Dreamcast project, Sega invested $5 million in NVIDIAa ball of oxygen that allowed the company to recover and then start making history in graphics chips.

It was a short-term investment, yes, because Irimajiri, who was later promoted to CEO of Sega, resigned in 1998, and then Sega decided to sell the stake in NVIDIA that Irimajiri formalized. Of course, his initial contribution of $5 million changed to a $15 million refundbecause at that time the situation of NVIDIA, which had already launched RIVA TNT, was much better, although nothing against what it is now.

Which prompts us to ask two questions. The first is of course the most obvious, What would happen to NVIDIA without Sega’s investment? But also, What would happen to Sega if it kept its stake in NVIDIA? What do you think?

Featured Image: Evan-Amos