Nvidia should have died in 1997. A $1 million fake chip saved it.
The man who bought it resigned from Nvidia this week. His name is Jensen Huang.
In 1996, Nvidia was dying. Its first chip, the NV1, flopped. A second chip for Sega was abandoned. Jensen cut the company from about 100 people to around 40.
He had one more shot. It was called the RIVA 128.
Normally you design a chip, pay to build a physical prototype, test it, fix it, and build another. That takes months. He didn't have months.
So he bought a hardware emulator from a struggling company called IKOS for about $1 million. A fake chip built in code, the size of a refrigerator.
It was so slow the team sat waiting for a single frame of Windows to draw. They moved the ping-pong table so it would fit in the break room.
> They ran every game and driver they had on it
> They caught the bugs before any real chip existed
> Then Jensen skipped the prototype and went straight to mass production
> No one in the industry had done that before
If the first chips came back broken, Nvidia was finished.
They worked.
The RIVA 128 shipped in August 1997 with about one month of payroll left. It sold about a million units in four months. Nvidia went public in 1999.
For years, Jensen opened internal presentations with the same line: "Our company is thirty days from going out of business."
On November 12, 2026, Nvidia announced his resignation. He left a company worth about $4 trillion.
Most people wait for a perfect prototype before they ship anything. The company that powers AI exists because one founder couldn't afford to.
Would you have bet the company on the fake chip? Yes or no.