No, Nvidia was not lucky. They are a strong engineering culture who also has deep marketing expertise in 3D in all its facets for decades . Nvidia wisely recog

No, Nvidia was not lucky. They are a strong engineering culture who also has deep marketing expertise in 3D in all its facets for decades . Nvidia wisely recognized that only so much horsepower could be used by a conventional 3d graphics pipeline with a given screen resolution, and they needed to invest in growing future compute-heavy adjacent markets. They invested in generalizing their GPU into a more flexible vector coprocessor for HPC and then adjacent markets. They convinced fundamental engineers and researchers in this area to come work for them. There was deep fundamental work done by Ian Buck in 2004 on leveraging GPUs as general vector processors ( https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/brookgpu/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/brookgpu/ ) and that leadership and deep thinking went to Nvidia, not to Intel. Intel did not have the passion from the top to care about this. They couldn't even care enough to field competitive 3D chips (and associated software), much less extend their thinking to generalize beyond it skillfully. Nvidia did. Anyone who spent every day thinking about how to grow the vector coprocessor market would have pursued crypto and AI when they came along but Nvidia's strong engineering and profits from a leading 3D position gave them competitive advantages which they are, for now, reaping.