They bet on AI, but it's more than that. What I'd say they seem to be good at is noticing what weirdos are doing and fairly quickly allocating resources to it.

They bet on AI, but it's more than that. What I'd say they seem to be good at is noticing what weirdos are doing and fairly quickly allocating resources to it. 1. CUDA. They noticed that people were using graphics shaders to do compute (GPGPU). This was extremely (really extremely) painful to program in. They created CUDA which is only somewhat painful to program in. Now, at this point, it wasn't that clear that GPU compute was a great market, but it opened up a bunch of opportunities. 2. After CUDA came out, Alex Krizhevsky came around and used it to implement a neural network. Now, this wasn't the first time someone had made a neural network with a GPU, but CUDA made it a lot easier to make a sophisticated one. 3. NVIDIA noticed that people were using CUDA to make neural networks, and created CuDNN and started sending out free GPUs to all of the academic researchers they could find, further cementing their lead in this area over AMD. In big corporations it tends to be hard for some seemingly insignificant thing like people using your product for something it wasn't intended for to bubble up to top management where resources can be allocated to capitalize on it. It's especially hard to do this quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if this habit of Jensen's was responsible for NVIDIA being able to take advantage of these opportunities.