Nvidia has been the tech world’s favourite stock over the past year, with the company’s success stemming from the AI boom and the company’s place in it. Many observers are calling it a bubble, while Nvidia’s president Jensen Huang continues to promise otherworldly things for the company’s next steps. It brings to question; as far as a casual observer is concerned, what does Nvidia actually do?
When the company isn’t jumping around on the stock market, it’s selling tangible things that make computers work. The Nvidia that you’re probably most accustomed to is the market leader for graphics cards.
The RTX 40 series, which includes the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, are two of the most powerful cards you can currently get for computers. These cards are extremely popular in the PC gaming space, but they’re also extremely popular purchases among enterprise computing and server providers. You may remember back a few years when crypto enthusiasts were buying up dozens of GPUs to power their projects.
Fun fact: Nvidia coined the term ‘Graphics Processing Unit’, or GPU. It was marketing slang for their newly developed PCIE-reliant card in 1999. As far as the average consumer is concerned, Nvidia probably only enters your life as the company that makes the graphics chips in your computer.
Nvidia’s prowess with graphics technology goes back to 1993, and today it has allowed the company to form inroads into other tech-heavy fields. A big one is providing platforms to carmakers to power their digital infotainment systems and autonomous tech.
Lately, though, Nvidia’s bread and butter has been AI, to the point where networking has become the company’s leading area of development, followed by the development of GPUs. Simply put: every tech company in the world is going after a piece of the AI pie, and Nvidia’s selling the shovels in a gold rush.
The platforms that Nvidia provides, including server racks filled with immense processing capability, are exactly what things like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot need. Oh, they’re also extremely thirsty and power-hungry.
So, anyway, that’s what Nvidia does. They don’t make AI, but they make the things that AI companies need to make AI. Hope this helps!
Image: Gizmodo Australia