Berkshire Hathaway vs NVIDIA: Founders, CEOs and History

Company facts

Founders

CEOs and their tenures

Timeline: Berkshire Hathaway and NVIDIA side by side

1. 1839Berkshire Hathaway

   Valley Falls Company Founded

   Oliver Chace founds the Valley Falls Company in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, as a cotton textile manufacturer. Chace had learned the trade working with Samuel Slater and built his first mill in 1806.

2. 1955Berkshire Hathaway

   Berkshire Fine Spinning and Hathaway Manufacturing Merge

   Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates and Hathaway Manufacturing combine and take the Berkshire Hathaway name.

3. 1962Berkshire Hathaway

   Buffett Partnership Buys Its First Berkshire Shares

   Buffett Partnership Ltd. buys its first Berkshire Hathaway shares in December 1962. Buffett was drawn to the pattern of Berkshire closing plants and using the liquidation proceeds to repurchase its own stock.

4. 1964Berkshire Hathaway

   Tender Offer Dispute With Seabury Stanton

   Berkshire president Seabury Stanton asks Buffett at what price Buffett Partnership would sell, agrees to $11.50 a share, then mails a tender offer at $11.375.

5. 1965Berkshire Hathaway

   Buffett Takes Control and Names Ken Chace President

   Buffett Partnership takes control of Berkshire Hathaway in May 1965 and Stanton leaves. Buffett selects Ken Chace, a long-time employee, as president to run the textile operation, and the cash it generates is pointed at other industries.

6. 1967Berkshire Hathaway

   Entry Into Insurance With National Indemnity

   Early in 1967 Berkshire pays $8.6 million to buy National Indemnity Company and a small sister insurer from owner Jack Ringwalt.

7. 1972Berkshire Hathaway

   See's Candies Bought for $25 Million

   Blue Chip Stamps, controlled by Buffett and Munger and later merged into Berkshire, buys See's Candies for $25 million.

8. 1985Berkshire Hathaway

   Textile Operations Closed

   Buffett decides in July 1985 to close Berkshire's textile operation and the shutdown is largely complete by year end. He described it as finally throwing in the towel after twenty years of unremitting struggle with the business.

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. 1996Berkshire Hathaway

    GEICO Becomes Wholly Owned and Class B Shares Created

    Berkshire buys the remaining 49% of GEICO on January 2, 1996, having held 51%, and GEICO becomes a wholly owned subsidiary. Shareholders also approve a recapitalization creating Class B shares with the economic rights of one thirtieth of a Class A share.

11. 1998Berkshire Hathaway

    General Re and Executive Jet Acquired

    Berkshire acquires reinsurer General Re and fractional-aircraft operator Executive Jet.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 2010Berkshire Hathaway

    BNSF Railway Acquired

    Berkshire completes its purchase of Burlington Northern Santa Fe in the first quarter of 2010.

15. 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.

16. 2016Berkshire Hathaway

    Precision Castparts Acquired

    Berkshire completes the purchase of Precision Castparts, an aerospace and industrial components maker, for $235 a share in cash.

17. 2016NVIDIA

    DGX-1 AI Supercomputer

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

18. 2018Berkshire Hathaway

    Abel and Jain Named Vice Chairmen

    Berkshire's board expands from twelve to fourteen directors and elects Greg Abel and Ajit Jain.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 2022Berkshire Hathaway

    Alleghany Corporation Acquired

    Berkshire completes the acquisition of insurer Alleghany Corporation on October 19, 2022, paying $848.02 a share in cash for a total equity value of about $11.6 billion and adding the TransRe reinsurance business.

22. 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.

23. 2022NVIDIA

    Hopper H100 Announced

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

24. 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.

25. 2024Berkshire Hathaway

    Market Value Tops $1 Trillion

    Berkshire's market capitalization passes $1 trillion on August 28, 2024, making it the first US company outside the technology sector to reach that level.

26. 2024Berkshire Hathaway

    Pilot Travel Centers Fully Owned

    Berkshire acquires the remaining 20% of Pilot Travel Centers on January 16, 2024 and takes full ownership. It had bought 38.6% in 2017 and a further 41.4% for about $8.2 billion in January 2023.

27. 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.

28. 2025Berkshire Hathaway

    Board Approves Abel as CEO From January 2026

    Berkshire announces in May 2025 that Greg Abel will become President and Chief Executive Officer on January 1, 2026, with Warren Buffett remaining Chairman of the Board.

29. 2026Berkshire Hathaway

    Abel Becomes CEO and Buffett Becomes Chairman Emeritus

    Abel takes over as CEO on January 1, 2026 and Berkshire completes the $9.7 billion purchase of OxyChem from Occidental on January 2. On September 18, 2026 Buffett is named Chairman Emeritus and remains a director, and his son Howard G.

30. 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.

Acquisitions

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