NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Reveals Sega's $5 Million Investment Saved the Company
On July 15, 2026, NVIDIA and Sega held an invitation-only fan event at GiGO Akihabara Building 3 in Tokyo, bringing together NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Sega Chairman Harunori Satomi, President Kunifumi Utsumi, former Sega President Shoichiro Irimajiri, and Virtua Fighter creator Yu Suzuki. Huang recounted a little-known history: in the mid-1990s, NVIDIA was developing the NV2 GPU for Sega's next-generation console (later the Dreamcast) but realized after nine months that its technology-quadrilateral polygons and forward texture mapping-was wrong. Facing bankruptcy, Huang asked Irimajiri to cancel the contract and provide financial support. Irimajiri agreed, and Sega invested approximately $5 million (about 500 million yen). That funding allowed NVIDIA to pivot to triangular polygons and inverse texture mapping, leading to the successful RIVA 128 and ultimately the GeForce line. Huang stated, "Without what Sega did for NVIDIA, today's NVIDIA would not exist." The event also featured the world premiere of VIRTUA FIGHTER CROSSROADS running on an RTX Spark laptop. NVIDIA and Sega announced a partnership to bring future Sega titles to the RTX Spark platform, which launches in autumn 2026. VIRTUA FIGHTER CROSSROADS is scheduled for release in 2027.