alt Hacker NewsNvidia focused on gaming for 20 years, made a ton of bets that didn't pan out (self-driving cars, set-top boxes, streaming, etc) and made unforced errors (Arm acquisition attempt). Nothing hints at him being a visionary beyond wanting to diversify.
Nvidia benefited from the AI boom by being right place, right time. And just yesterday, Mythos ported itself to AMD cards, showing there's no moat.
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It didn't even start with AI, their exorbitant valuations go all the way back to the days of the cryptocurrency mining craze.
But as a counterpoint: AMD is very similar but hasn't benefitted nearly as much. They've been plastering "AI" all over their webpage for years, with little to show for it. So maybe there was something that Nvidia was doing right.
They didn't just focus on gaming though. They've spent the last two decades making sure they're the obvious choice for scientific and engineering number crunching, by creating and continuing to invest in CUDA. Which is also why they have been an obvious choice for the AI crowd.
They've benefitted from being in the right place, but being there was not (or, not only) luck.
Compare to AMD which did not do that and has not had the same level of benefit from the AI wave despite everyone obviously wanting a competitor to create price pressure.
The ARM acquisition attempt looks better each day now that x86 is zooming into irrelevance and Apple Silicon remains exclusive to Apple products.
The AI winter wouldn't have ended without NVidia cards. NVidia didn't benefit from the AI boom, they made it possible. CUDA is the be all and end all of the AI boom.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to try and get AMD cards working.
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That’s an absurd statement considering Nvidia has been pushing CUDA since 2007. I doubt Nvidia was making a “bet” on set-top boxes as the next 100 billion dollar idea. It was simply gaming adjacent which was the main market for GPUs which is their business. Nvidia has maintained their position on GPGPUs potential for 15 years before they paid off. Literally no other company had that vision. If that was an obvious thing, where is Intel, AMD, Samsung, TI, or Qualcomm chips? They only had 15 years. It’s crazy to call it “right place right time” when they have been anticipating it for over 15 years.
Self driving cars are poised to be huge, Nvidia simply didn’t have good execution or plan there because they focused on the hardware rather than data collection. Not sure how the ARM acquisition attempt was an unforced error. Data centers are buying Nvidia GPUs and AMD CPUs. Could have been Nvidia both. It was just in an unfavorable political climate.