Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang credited a $5 million investment from Sega in 1995 for saving the company from bankruptcy during a visit to Tokyo this week. Huang met with former Sega President Shoichiro Irimajiri to express gratitude for the funding that provided Nvidia with roughly six months of operating capital. The investment came after Nvidia's first graphics processor, the NV1, failed due to its reliance on curved surfaces instead of the industry-standard triangle-based rendering adopted by Microsoft Corp for DirectX.

The failed technology left Nvidia with only about 30 days of cash remaining. Huang proposed converting the money Sega owed under an existing contract into equity, warning Irimajiri that the investment would likely be lost. Irimajiri convinced Sega's board to approve the deal, which ultimately allowed Nvidia to develop the RIVA 128. This triangle-based graphics chip launched in 1997 and sold approximately 1 million units within four months, marking the company's turnaround.

Financial Impact and Growth

The strategic pivot funded by Sega's investment set Nvidia on a path to becoming the world's most valuable company. Sega later sold its stake for roughly $15 million. Nvidia's current market capitalization stands at about $5.14 trillion.

Recent Stock Performance

Nvidia shares closed Wednesday at $212.50, up 0.33%. In after-hours trading, the stock slipped 0.58% to $211.28. According to Benzinga Edge Rankings, Nvidia ranks in the 98th percentile for Growth, reflecting strong short, medium, and long-term price trends.

Japanese enterprises, startups, and research institutions are building industry-specialized AI models and applications with NVIDIA Nemotron open models, data, and libraries. This development accelerates the creation of AI tailored to Japan’s language, industries, and workforce. The adoption of open models allows organizations to customize, deploy, and govern AI they control, which is increasingly important as Japan addresses an aging population and workforce transition.

Institute of Science Tokyo developed its Swallow family of open foundation models using NVIDIA Nemotron datasets and the NVIDIA NeMo software stack. The Swallow models enhance Japanese language and reasoning performance while preserving core English, math, and coding capabilities. Enterprises are deploying these models for specialized use cases, including financial-document translation and asset-management report generation.

SB Intuitions Corp., the generative AI research subsidiary of SoftBank Corp., trained its Sarashina series of models using NVIDIA Nemotron, including the NVIDIA NeMo RL and Megatron-LM libraries. The Sarashina3 mini model has been selected by Japan’s Digital Agency for specialized AI use cases. Additionally, SoftBank Corp. has developed a large telco model using NVIDIA Nemotron to enable autonomous telecom network operations.

Stockmark released a specialized Japanese-language document-understanding model based on the NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano Omni model. The company is developing enterprise knowledge applications using NVIDIA NeMo Retriever and the Nemotron-Personas-Japan dataset. These applications serve customers in manufacturing, energy, and chemical industries through Japan’s Generative AI Accelerator Challenge national project.

Several Japanese enterprises are leveraging NVIDIA Nemotron to modernize services and improve productivity. Avatarin is using the models to develop Japanese-language speech and reasoning capabilities for enterprise AI agents. ENEOS Holdings is advancing agentic AI workflows for energy and materials R&D using NVIDIA Nemotron with the NVIDIA AI-Q Blueprint and NVIDIA ALCHEMI NIM microservices. NTT DATA augmented training data for its tsuzumi 2 model using NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-Japan to improve question-answering accuracy. Hitachi is developing physical AI technologies using NVIDIA Nemotron and NVIDIA Cosmos open models to address operational challenges.

Sakana AI is integrating NVIDIA Nemotron into its Fugu model-orchestration platform. This integration expands the range of AI models Fugu can intelligently orchestrate to dynamically select the best model for each task. By routing requests to the most suitable model, Fugu helps developers balance accuracy, performance, and cost across multiple open and proprietary AI models.

NVIDIA Nemotron models are released with open weights, datasets, and recipes, providing transparency and control for domain-specific customization. Developers can use NVIDIA NeMo to customize and deploy models in environments that meet regulatory and data localization requirements. The models are available on Hugging Face, ModelScope, OpenRouter, and build.nvidia.com as NVIDIA NIM microservices, as well as through NVIDIA Cloud Partners and cloud service providers.