# NVIDIA

> The company that sells the shovels of the AI gold rush.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Tech companies, Hardware
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/nvidia/
- In Spanish: [NVIDIA](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/nvidia/)

**NVIDIA** designs GPUs. For twenty years that meant graphics cards for gamers. Around 2012 researchers discovered those same chips were ideal for training neural networks, and NVIDIA leaned in hard: it built **CUDA**, the software layer that lets programmers use its GPUs for any kind of math, and it became the default for AI.

Today its data center chips (H100, B200 and successors) are what OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta use to train and run models. Demand is so high that access to NVIDIA GPUs is a geopolitical topic and a line item in national budgets.

NVIDIA does not manufacture the chips itself: it designs them and TSMC in Taiwan fabricates them. Its moat is less the silicon than the software ecosystem everyone already wrote on top of CUDA.

## An analogy

During a gold rush, the surest money is in selling shovels. NVIDIA sells the shovels (GPUs) and the only handle that fits them (CUDA).

## Keep in mind

- Started with gaming graphics; now most revenue is AI data centers.
- CUDA is the software lock-in that keeps developers on NVIDIA.
- Fabless: designs chips, TSMC manufactures them.

## Go deeper

- [NVIDIA on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia)
- [NVIDIA data center platforms](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/)

## Related terms

- [GPU](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/gpu/): The chip that does thousands of simple calculations at once.
- [Chip](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/semiconductor-chip/): A sliver of silicon carrying billions of tiny switches that compute and remember.
- [Training and inference](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/training-and-inference/): Training builds the model once; inference is using it, millions of times a day.
- [Neural network](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/neural-network/): A pile of tiny math units that learns patterns from examples.
- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
- [Data center](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/data-center/): A building full of servers where the internet, the cloud and AI actually run.
- [OpenAI](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/openai/): The company that made ChatGPT and turned AI into a household topic.
- [Anthropic](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/anthropic/): The AI company behind Claude, built around making models safe and useful.