NVIDIA started out as a hardware company but today its software is the bigger contributor to its recent success.
Gamers like me know NVIDIA as the company behind GeForce graphics cards but that changed years ago. Now AI chips and AI supercomputers are NVIDIA’s main hardware offerings.
But NVIDIA’s hardware is only part of the story.
Because AMD has been building GPUs and Intel has started building them too. Dozens of startups are trying to build AI accelerators.
Yet companies continue to spend billions on NVIDIA.
That is because when organizations buy NVIDIA, they’re not just buying a chip. They’re buying a developer ecosystem that has been optimized over decades.
This whole ecosystem is CUDA and it combines all the tools that one may need to develop applications on a GPU.
CUDA didn’t spawn out of thin air either, NVIDIA has been building it piece by piece since 2006.
The company bet on CUDA long before AI became mainstream. At that time most people viewed GPUs as gaming hardware.
NVIDIA was investing billions into CUDA and convincing developers to use GPUs for entirely different kinds of computing.
Only when researchers discovered that neural networks could take advantage of massive parallel computing, NVIDIA became the giant it is today.
NVIDIA’s story as a company is pretty fun too. The company famously was near bankruptcy and their initial chip was a disaster.
Yet, it’s a 5 trillion dollar company today. If you’re interested, you can checkout my article that shared the story of NVIDIA:
<a href="https://www.sknexus.org/p/from-gaming-to-ai-history-of-nvidia" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://www.sknexus.org/p/from-gaming-to-ai-history-of-nvidia</a>

Knowledge by Execution - Breaking Down Tech for the Mango Man (Aam Aadmi/Regular Person) - https://www.sknexus.org/

SK NEXUS

NVIDIA's dominance in AI isn't just about hardware — it's built on CUDA, a developer ecosystem two decades in the making. While AMD, Intel, and dozens of startups compete on GPU hardware, companies keep spending billions on NVIDIA because CUDA provides a deeply optimized, comprehensive toolkit for GPU computing. NVIDIA began investing in CUDA in 2006, long before AI went mainstream, betting that GPUs would power general-purpose parallel computing. That long-term software bet paid off when neural networks proved to need exactly what CUDA offered. Today, NVIDIA is arguably as much a software company as a hardware one.

Is NVIDIA a software company?