NVIDIA currently controls about 80% of the market for AI chips. In late 2025, their data center revenue reached over $50 billion in a single quarter. To understand how they reached this point, you must look at a software release from 2007 called CUDA.
Cuda is Born
In the early 2000s, NVIDIA spent over $1 billion to develop CUDA. At the time, this was a large amount of money for the company. They wanted to turn their graphics cards into “general-purpose” processors.
Most people thought this was a mistake. Graphics cards were for games, not for serious math. But NVIDIA’s CEO believed that the way GPUs process data would eventually be useful for more than just pictures.
How GPUs Work
A standard computer chip (CPU) processes tasks one after another. This is good for daily office work. A graphics chip (GPU) works differently. It contains thousands of small units that work at the same time.
In 2007, AI researchers found that “neural networks” which is the math behind AI, requires billions of simple calculations. A CPU is too slow for this. Because NVIDIA released CUDA, these researchers could use the GPU’s thousands of units to do the math much faster.
The 2014 Breakthrough: cuDNN
By 2014, NVIDIA released a new tool called cuDNN. This is a library of pre-written code for common AI tasks.
Before cuDNN, a researcher had to write complex math from scratch. With cuDNN, they could use a single command to perform a “convolution,” which is how AI identifies objects in a photo. This tool made AI training up to ten times faster. Today, every major AI program including those used by Google and Meta uses these NVIDIA libraries.
Why It Is Hard to Switch
Other companies also make fast chips. However, they struggle to compete because of “software lock-in.”
For fifteen years, programmers have written millions of lines of code specifically for CUDA. If a company stops using NVIDIA, they must rewrite all that code for a different system. This takes too much time and costs too much money. NVIDIA does not just sell a chip; they sell the only system that most AI experts already know how to use.
NVIDIA leads the industry because they built a software system before there was a market for it. They turned a gaming chip into a tool for science, and they gave researchers the code they needed to use it. Their dominance today is the result of a bet they made nearly twenty years ago.
Where we come in.
We have been in the business a little over a decade and have taken the AI craze head-on before people even knew about chatbots. Like this PC we have built specifically for AI all the way back in 2018, yeah that was 7 years ago! So, if you’re in the need to power your AI based solution, you know who to get in touch with.
