AMD almost bought NVIDIA 20 years ago - only one person got in the way.

Currently, NVIDIA is one of the largest players in the technology market, with its market capitalization significantly exceeding that of Intel and AMD. However, it turns out that AMD almost bought the company at one point. A former AMD engineer recently revealed that when NVIDIA was a startup, the company almost acquired it. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang refused the deal because of the categorical demand to be appointed as the CEO of the merged company. Hemant Mohapatra worked as an engineer in the mid to late 2000s on the development of auxiliary, graphics, and central processors for AMD. He was with the company when AMD realized its potential in the graphics card market but initially missed out on it. Mohapatra shared a collection of his own memories from those times on Twitter. Among other things, Mohapatra spoke about the merger talks between AMD and NVIDIA into one company. However, Jensen Huang had a long-term strategy and guided NVIDIA's GPU towards the proprietary and closed CUDA model. Not willing to deviate from this strategy, Huang refused to sell NVIDIA unless appointed as CEO. After that, the then CEO of AMD, Hector Ruiz, decided to acquire ATI with its Radeon video cards. Another longtime AMD employee, Phil Park, confirmed these statements. While Park mentioned that he had never met Mohapatra and had a different opinion on some of his memories, he acknowledged the story about Huang wanting to be CEO as true. Park further commented on some of Mohapatra's posts. During that time, NVIDIA was a small company, and its video cards were popular among gaming enthusiasts, but ATI had a larger market share. Mohapatra states that AMD "never thought of them [NVIDIA] in the same league as Arm and Intel." Source: Tom's Hardware.