In the annals of business success stories few saw coming, Nvidia’s incredible rise to surpass Microsoft and become the world’s most valuable company is one for the books. This past week , cofounded by Jensen Huang, edged out Microsoft as its market cap soared to $3.42 trillion. Yet it could have been otherwise. As business leaders marvel at Nvidia’s rise, it’s worth remembering that another company—Intel—came tantalizingly close to being where Nvidia is now.

Instead, Intel is waging a heroic effort to regain its place as the world’s preeminent maker of leading edge chips.

As detailed in the piece, a key moment occurred in the mid-2000s, when Paul Otellini, then CEO of intel, said a word to Steve Jobs he almost never heard: No.

It was 2006, and Intel, the global king of computer chips, was bringing in record revenue and profits by dominating the kinds of chips in hottest demand—for personal computers and data centers. Now Jobs wanted Intel to make a different type of chip for a product that didn’t even exist, which would be called the iPhone.

Otellini knew chips for phones and tablets were the next big thing, but Intel had to devote substantial capital and its best minds to the fabulously profitable business it already possessed. Besides, “no one knew what the iPhone would do,” he told The Atlantic seven years later, just before he stepped down as CEO. “There was a chip that they were interested in, that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more, and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it.”

Otellini, who died in 2017, was a highly successful CEO by many measures. But if that decision had gone the other way, Intel might have become a chip titan of the post-PC era. Instead, it gave up on phone chips in 2016 after losing billions trying to become a significant player. As he left the company, Otellini seemed to grasp the magnitude of his decision: “The world would have been a lot different if we’d done it.”