Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang returned to Japan on Wednesday to thank Sega for the $5 million investment that saved his company from bankruptcy in 1995. At the time, Nvidia was running out of cash after a failed graphics chip project threatened its future.
Sega’s investment gave Huang six more months to rebuild the company. That lifeline preserved what would later become the world’s most valuable chipmaker, now worth over $3 trillion and powering the global AI boom.
The moment serves as a reminder of how close the AI industry’s dominant hardware supplier came to never existing. Huang’s visit underscores the long arc of technology bets that seem small at the time but reshape industries decades later.
