How a once-tiny research lab helped Nvidia become a $4 trillion-dollar company

Summary

When Bill Dally joined Nvidia’s research lab in 2009, it employed only about a dozen people and was focused on ray tracing, a rendering technique used in computer graphics. That once-small research lab now employs more than 400 people, who have helped transform Nvidia from a video game GPU startup in the nineties to a $4 trillion-dollar company fueling the artificial intelligence boom.Now, the company’s research lab has its sights set on developing the tech needed to power robotics and AI. And some of that lab work is already showing up in products. The company unveiled Monday a new set world AI models, libraries, and other infrastructure for robotics developers. Dally, now Nvidia’s chief scientist, started consulting for Nvidia in 2003 while he was working at Stanford. When he was ready to step down from being the department chair of Stanford’s computer science department a few years later, he planned to take a sabbatical. Nvidia had a different idea. Bill Dally / Nvidia David Kirk, who was running the research lab at the time, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, thought a more permanent position at the research lab was a better idea. Dally told TechCrunch the pair put on a “full-court press” on why he should join Nvidia’s research lab and eventually convinced him. “It wound up being kind of a perfect fit for my interests and my talents,” Dally said. “I think everybody’s always searching for the place in life where they can make the biggest, you know, contribution to the world. And I think for me, it’s definitely Nvidia.” When Dally took over the lab in 2009, expansion was first and foremost. Researchers started working on areas outside of ray tracing right away, including circuit design and VLSI, or very large-scale integration, a process that combines millions of transistors on a single chip. The research lab hasn’t stopped expanding since. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 “We try to figure out what will make the most positive difference for the comp...