It's worth noting that all four of your examples routinely run on GPUs. 3D graphics? Check (freebie). Fluid dynamics? Check - supercomputers increasingly get

It's worth noting that all four of your examples routinely run on GPUs. 3D graphics? Check (freebie). Fluid dynamics? Check - supercomputers increasingly get most of their compute from GPUs. Cryptography? Check - this is the only one that really got specialized hardware. Machine learning? Check. So "large quantities of special purpose hardware" wasn't even used for these. Just large quantities of general purpose parallel processors, known for historical reasons as "graphics processing units."