Baker Hughes vs NVIDIA: Founders, CEOs and History

Company facts

Founders

CEOs and their tenures

Timeline: Baker Hughes and NVIDIA side by side

1. 1907Baker Hughes

   Reuben C. Baker patents the Well Casing Shoe

   On July 16, 1907, Reuben Carlton Baker was granted U.S. Patent No. 860,115 for the Well Casing Shoe, a device that kept oil flowing while casing was run into a well.

2. 1909Baker Hughes

   Howard R. Hughes Sr. patents the two-cone roller drill bit

   Howard R. Hughes Sr., working with Walter B. Sharp, tested a dual-cone roller bit on a rig at Goose Creek, Texas, and was granted U.S. patents on August 10, 1909.

3. 1913Baker Hughes

   Baker Casing Shoe Company founded in Coalinga, California

   Baker created the Baker Casing Shoe Company to manufacture and license his casing accessories. The design of the Baker casing shoe stayed essentially unchanged for about 40 years and the business became a pillar of the emerging oilfield service sector.

4. 1915Baker Hughes

   Sharp-Hughes renamed Hughes Tool Company

   Walter B. Sharp died in 1912 and Hughes acquired his partner stake. The business was renamed Hughes Tool Company in 1915. Its rock bits funded the fortune later inherited by Howard Hughes Jr.

5. 1928Baker Hughes

   Baker Casing Shoe Company renamed Baker Oil Tools

   The company was renamed Baker Oil Tools, Inc. as it widened its range from casing shoes into well completion and production equipment.

6. 1976Baker Hughes

   Baker Oil Tools reorganised as Baker International Corporation

   The Baker businesses were reorganised under the Baker International Corporation holding company, the entity that would merge with Hughes Tool eleven years later.

7. 1987Baker Hughes

   Baker International and Hughes Tool merge to form Baker Hughes Incorporated

   The merger was formally completed in early April 1987 once a Justice Department consent decree was signed and filed, and the Los Angeles Times reported the combination at about $1.2 billion. James D.

8. 1990Baker Hughes

   Baker Hughes buys Eastman Christensen

   Baker Hughes acquired Eastman Christensen, a specialist in directional drilling equipment and measurement-while-drilling tools. The capability became the core of what is now the Well Construction product line.

9. 1993NVIDIA

   Founding in Santa Clara

   Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded NVIDIA on April 5, 1993, with a focus on 3D graphics for gaming and multimedia. The founding set the company on a parallel-processing path long before AI infrastructure became the main market.

10. 1998Baker Hughes

    Baker Hughes acquires Western Atlas in a $5.5 billion merger

    Baker Hughes and Western Atlas signed a definitive merger agreement valued at $5.5 billion in May 1998, adding seismic acquisition, wireline logging and reservoir evaluation. The Western Atlas wireline division became Baker Atlas.

11. 1999NVIDIA

    GPU Category Defined

    NVIDIA introduced the graphics processing unit concept in 1999. The milestone mattered because it framed graphics hardware as a specialized processor, a technical idea that later carried into accelerated computing and AI workloads.

12. 2000Baker Hughes

    Michael E. Wiley becomes chairman, president and chief executive

    After Max L. Lukens resigned in January 2000 and director Joe B. Foster served as interim chairman, president and chief executive, Baker Hughes named former ARCO executive Michael Wiley as president, chairman and chief executive effective August 14, 2000.

13. 2006Baker Hughes

    Baker Hughes exits the WesternGeco seismic joint venture

    Schlumberger bought the Baker Hughes 30% interest in the WesternGeco seismic joint venture for $2.4 billion, ending the partnership formed in 2000 and removing seismic acquisition from the Baker Hughes portfolio.

14. 2006NVIDIA

    CUDA Opens GPUs to General Computing

    CUDA opened GPU parallel processing to scientists, researchers, and developers outside graphics. It became the software foundation that made NVIDIA hardware useful for machine learning, simulation, and other compute-heavy workloads.

15. 2007Baker Hughes

    Baker Hughes pays $44.1 million to settle Kazakhstan bribery charges

    On April 26, 2007, subsidiary Baker Hughes Services International pleaded guilty to Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations and paid an $11 million criminal fine for payments routed to an official in connection with the Karachaganak field in Kazakhstan.

16. 2010Baker Hughes

    Baker Hughes completes the $5.5 billion BJ Services acquisition

    Baker Hughes closed its cash-and-stock acquisition of pressure pumping and cementing company BJ Services on April 28, 2010. The Justice Department required the divestiture of BJ vessel-based stimulation assets in the U.S.

17. 2012NVIDIA

    AlexNet Shows GPU Value for Deep Learning

    The AlexNet breakthrough used NVIDIA GPUs to win the ImageNet competition. The event helped convince researchers and engineers that GPUs could accelerate neural-network training at a scale CPUs could not match.

18. 2014Baker Hughes

    Halliburton agrees to buy Baker Hughes for $34.6 billion

    On November 17, 2014, Halliburton and Baker Hughes announced a definitive stock-and-cash agreement valued at $34.6 billion. The deal drew antitrust review in the United States and Europe almost immediately.

19. 2016Baker Hughes

    Halliburton deal abandoned and Halliburton pays a $3.5 billion fee

    The Justice Department sued on April 6, 2016, to block the combination. The companies terminated the merger agreement on May 1, 2016, and Halliburton paid Baker Hughes the $3.5 billion termination fee by May 4, 2016.

20. 2016NVIDIA

    DGX-1 AI Supercomputer

    Nvidia introduced the DGX-1 deep-learning supercomputer in 2016, its first system built specifically for artificial intelligence.

21. 2017Baker Hughes

    Baker Hughes combines with GE Oil and Gas; Lorenzo Simonelli becomes CEO

    The combination closed on July 3, 2017, creating Baker Hughes, a GE company. Baker Hughes shareholders received a special cash dividend of $17.50 per share and 37.5% of the new company, with GE holding 62.5%.

22. 2018NVIDIA

    RTX Brings Real-Time Ray Tracing to Graphics

    NVIDIA RTX brought real-time ray tracing into the company's graphics roadmap. The product line kept gaming and professional visualization tied to AI-enhanced rendering while Data Center was becoming more important.

23. 2019Baker Hughes

    Company renamed Baker Hughes Company and GE drops below a majority stake

    GE sold shares in September 2019 for about $2.7 billion in net proceeds, cutting its holding to roughly 38.4%.

24. 2020NVIDIA

    Mellanox Acquisition Adds Networking

    NVIDIA completed the Mellanox acquisition for about $7 billion. The deal mattered because large AI and high-performance-computing clusters depend on fast networking between accelerators, not only on individual GPU speed.

25. 2021Baker Hughes

    Stock listing moves from the New York Stock Exchange to Nasdaq

    Baker Hughes announced on October 27, 2021 that it would move its Class A common stock and listed bonds to the Nasdaq Global Select Market, and trading there began on December 7, 2021 under the same BKR ticker.

26. 2022Baker Hughes

    GE ownership ends and Baker Hughes suspends most Russian activity

    The 2022 Form 10-K states that GE no longer had an economic interest in Baker Hughes Holdings LLC as of December 31, 2022, down from 11.4% a year earlier.

27. 2022NVIDIA

    Arm Acquisition Terminated

    NVIDIA and SoftBank terminated the proposed Arm acquisition because of significant regulatory challenges. The failed deal showed how closely governments watch control points in semiconductor architecture.

28. 2022NVIDIA

    Hopper H100 Announced

    Nvidia announced the Hopper-architecture H100 data-center GPU in March 2022.

29. 2023NVIDIA

    Grace CPU Enters Data Center Roadmap

    NVIDIA introduced its first data-center CPU, Grace, for large-scale AI and high-performance computing. The milestone expanded the platform from GPUs and networking into CPU-GPU system design.

30. 2024NVIDIA

    Blackwell Architecture Launched

    NVIDIA launched Blackwell as a data-center-scale architecture combining GPUs, CPUs, DPUs, interconnects, switch chips, systems, and networking adapters. The architecture became central to FY2026 Data Center demand.

31. 2025Baker Hughes

    Record FY2025 adjusted EBITDA, orders and free cash flow

    Revenue was $27.733B, roughly flat against $27.829B in 2024, with attributable net income of $2.588B. Adjusted EBITDA reached a record $4,825M, orders a record $29,585M including a record $14,871M at IET, and free cash flow a record $2,732M.

32. 2026Baker Hughes

    Chart Industries acquired and two businesses divested

    Baker Hughes completed its $13.6 billion acquisition of Chart Industries on July 16, 2026 and set it up as a third reporting segment led by senior vice president Jim Apostolides, targeting $325 million of annualised cost synergies within three years.

33. 2026NVIDIA

    $215.9B FY2026 Revenue

    NVIDIA reported $215.9 billion of FY2026 revenue, $193.7 billion of Data Center revenue, and $120.1 billion of net income. The result showed how far AI infrastructure had moved the company beyond its original PC graphics market.

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