DeepSeek vs NVIDIA: Founders, CEOs and History
DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng and is led by Liang Wenfeng. NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem and is led by Jensen Huang.
Company facts
Founders
DeepSeek
Liang Wenfeng
Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek in 2023. Leveraging the massive GPU clusters and algorithmic expertise he built at his quantitative trading firm, High-Flyer, he aimed to build a purely Chinese, open-source AI rival to OpenAI.
NVIDIA
Jensen Huang
Nvidia possesses a gritty, prescient founding story, rooted entirely in a specific, technical conversation at a well-known American diner, and driven by a CEO who possessed an unshakable conviction in an unproven computational theory.
Chris Malachowsky
Chris Malachowsky co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and became a central figure in the company's technical foundation.
Curtis Priem
Curtis Priem co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and served as one of the company's original architects.
CEOs and their tenures
DeepSeek
- Liang Wenfeng2023–present
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
As CEO, he utilized the massive, pre-existing compute infrastructure from his high-frequency trading firm to rapidly iterate on LLM architectures, bypassing the traditional venture capital funding cycle.
Source
NVIDIA
- Jensen Huang1993–present
CEO
Huang has been CEO for more than 33 years, which makes him one of the longest-serving founder-CEOs in the industry. Under him NVIDIA bet early on CUDA and deep learning, bought Mellanox for networking, and moved to a yearly architecture cadence.
Source - Chris Malachowsky1993–2024
Co-Founder
Chris Malachowsky co-founded Nvidia in 1993. As Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations, he played a critical role in developing the early graphics processing architecture and establishing Nvidia's robust engineering supply chain.
Source - Colette Kress2013–present
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
She has been CFO through NVIDIA's growth from about $4B of annual revenue to $215.9B in FY2026, and she leads its quarterly earnings communication with investors.
Source
Timeline: DeepSeek and NVIDIA side by side
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.
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.
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.
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.
2016NVIDIA
DGX-1 AI Supercomputer
Nvidia introduced the DGX-1 deep-learning supercomputer in 2016, its first system built specifically for artificial intelligence.
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.
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.
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.
2022NVIDIA
Hopper H100 Announced
Nvidia announced the Hopper-architecture H100 data-center GPU in March 2022.
2023DeepSeek
DeepSeek spun out of High-Flyer
High-Flyer announced an AGI lab in April 2023; it became the independent company DeepSeek on 17 July 2023.
2023DeepSeek
First open models
Released DeepSeek-Coder and DeepSeek-LLM 67B in November 2023.
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.
2024DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V2 introduces MLA
May 2024 release introduced Multi-head Latent Attention and DeepSeekMoE and triggered a Chinese API price war.
2024DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V3 launched
December 2024: 671B-parameter MoE model; final training run reported at ~$5.6M of H800 GPU time.
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.
2025DeepSeek
DeepSeek-R1 and chatbot launch
January 2025 reasoning model rivalled OpenAI o1; the app hit No. 1 on the US App Store and Nvidia fell ~17% in a day.
2025DeepSeek
V3.1 and V3.2
V3.1 added a hybrid thinking/non-thinking mode; V3.2 introduced sparse attention for long-context efficiency.
2026DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V4 family
24 April 2026: V4-Pro and V4-Flash released as MIT-licensed open weights with a 1M-token context; V4-Pro reached general availability in August 2026.
2026DeepSeek
First outside funding and IPO preparation
June 2026 Series A of ~50 billion yuan (~$7.4B) at a valuation near $50B; Bloomberg reported IPO preparations in July for a 2027 debut.
2026DeepSeek
Huawei Ascend software toolkit
30 September 2026: open-sourced programming tools for Huawei Ascend chips, an alternative to Nvidia's CUDA stack.
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
DeepSeek
No verified acquisitions are listed.
NVIDIA
- Groq (technology license and team)2025Undisclosed
- SchedMD2025Undisclosed
- Run:ai2024$700M
- Excelero2022Undisclosed
- Mellanox Technologies2020$6.9B
- Cumulus Networks2020Undisclosed
Questions about DeepSeek vs NVIDIA
Who is the CEO of DeepSeek and NVIDIA Corporation?
DeepSeek is led by Liang Wenfeng and NVIDIA Corporation is led by Jensen Huang. Both serve as the top executive responsible for the company's strategy, operations, and financial performance.
When was DeepSeek founded vs NVIDIA Corporation?
NVIDIA Corporation was founded in 1993 — 30 years before DeepSeek, which was founded in 2023. NVIDIA Corporation's longer operating history gives it a deeper track record but also potentially more institutional inertia compared to the younger DeepSeek.
How many employees does DeepSeek have compared to NVIDIA Corporation?
DeepSeek employs approximately 160 people, while NVIDIA Corporation employs approximately 42,000. NVIDIA Corporation has the larger workforce at 42,000 employees, compared to DeepSeek's 160. A higher headcount does not necessarily imply greater efficiency — it often reflects differences in business model (e.g., manufacturing vs. software).
Where are DeepSeek and NVIDIA Corporation headquartered?
DeepSeek is headquartered in China and NVIDIA Corporation is headquartered in United States. Their different home markets mean they may face different regulatory frameworks, tax regimes, and currency exposure.
Who founded DeepSeek and NVIDIA Corporation?
DeepSeek was founded by Liang Wenfeng. NVIDIA Corporation was founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem.
Which company has a longer operating history — DeepSeek or NVIDIA Corporation?
NVIDIA Corporation has been operating for approximately 33 years, making it the more established of the two companies. DeepSeek has been in operation for around 3 years. A longer operating history often signals greater institutional resilience and brand recognition, though it can also mean slower adaptation to new market conditions.
Figures come from each company's filings and the sources linked beside them. Amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Back to the DeepSeek vs NVIDIA overview