NexGen, Inc. was a private semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that designed x86 microprocessors until it was purchased by AMD on January 16, 1996.

NexGen's chips were produced by IBM's Microelectronics division in Burlington, Vermont alongside PowerPC and DRAM parts.

It was an unusual start-up in its time as the original funding came from corporate investors, Compaq and Olivetti,[2] joined in a later round by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

[citation needed] Compaq, which had backed the company financially, announced its intention to use the Nx586 and even struck the name "Pentium" from its product literature, demos, and boxes, substituting the "586" moniker, but never used NexGen's chip widely.

Development of AMD's internal K5 successor was halted in favor of continuing from NexGen's Nx686 designs, eventually becoming K6.