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The thought expressed in the title came to my mind when I saw Nvidia described as an "AI company" in the press recently...

• chii 1y ago
  to be fair, the percentage of their revenue derived from ai-related sales is much higher now than before. Why is that not accurate?
  • shootingoyster 1y ago
    https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/
  • ffsm8 1y ago
    GN did a video a few weeks ago in which they were showing a slide from Nvidias shareholder meeting in which it was shown that gaming was a tiny part of Nvidias revenue. Basically, almost half of their revenue is pure profit and all of that comes from AI. While the slide looked a lot nicer, the data is also available on their site https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-2025 https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...
  • dylan604 1y ago
    Just because customers use their hardware for AI does not mean the hardware maker is an AI company.
    • naasking 1y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487334 When more of their revenue comes from AI than graphics, and they're literally removing graphics output from their hardware...
    • dotnet00 1y ago
      There's a lot of software involved in GPUs, and NVIDIA's winning strategy has been that the software is great. They maintained a stable ecosystem across most of their consumer and workstation/server stack for many years before crypto, AI and GPU-focused HPC really blew up. AMD has generally better hardware but poor enough software that "fine wine" is a thing (ie the software takes many years post-hardware-launch to actually properly utilize the hardware). For example, they only recently got around to making AI libraries usable on the pre-covid 5700XT. NVIDIA basically owns the market because of the stability of the CUDA ecosystem. So, I think it might be fair to call them an AI company, though I definitely wouldn't call them just a hardware maker.
      • hansvm 1y ago
        *barely passable software while their competitors literally shit the bed, but I take your point.
        • pklausler 1y ago
          Literally?
          • mrguyorama 1y ago
            "Literally" as an intensifier predates the United States. You aren't even "dying on this hill", people like you are inventing a hill made out of dead bodies.
            • pklausler 1y ago
              Literally inventing a hill made out of dead bodies, or figuratively?
              • deleted 1y ago
                [deleted]
        • dotnet00 1y ago
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
• Almondsetat 1y ago
  An object is what it does. NVIDIA is making the most money through AI, so that's what it is now to the market
  • Pooge 1y ago
    Nvidia is selling hardware. What the buyers are doing with it doesn't change anything about Nvidia. A company selling knives is not considered a butcher or cook, despite the main uses of knives being just that.
    • matthewmacleod 1y ago
      But it clearly does, as NVIDIA rolls out hardware and software optimised for deployment as AI compute.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • Pooge 1y ago
        You have a point. Then it's a "compute" company.
    • swiftcoder 1y ago
      A company that sells knives, and also invests heavily in restaurants, might be considered to be in the restaurant business, however Nvidia spends a lot of money investing in downstream AI companies, in what feels like a rather incestuous circle
    • OJFord 1y ago
      I'm not sure if this is what you mean too, but by the same logic it's not a 'graphics company' nor gaming etc. either. 'Chipmaker' as they say, specialising in highly parallel application-specific compute.
  • calaphos 1y ago
    The hardware is heavily optimized for low precision matrix math, pretty much only used for AI.
• cantor_S_drug 1y ago
  This is similar to evolution. Evolution repurposes old systems for newer tasks. The GPU name is stuck but it has been deployed for AI.
• larodi 1y ago
  Indeed, why would they not call themselves NvidAI to begin with. This company has twice already been super lucky to have their products used for the wrong thing (given GPUs were created to accelerated graphics, not mining or inference)
  • Tuna-Fish 1y ago
    3 times, if you count the physics GPGPU boom that Nvidia rode before cryptocurrencies. And other than maybe the crypto stuff, luck had nothing to do with it. Nvidia was ready to support these other use cases because in a very real way they made them happen. Nvidia hardware is not particularly better for these workloads than competitors. The reason they are the $4.6T company is that all the foundational software was built on them. And the reason for that is that JHH invested heavily in supporting the development of that software, before anyone else realized there was a market there worth investing in. He made the call to make all future GPUs support CUDA in 2006, before there were heavy users.
    • indoordin0saur 1y ago
      I don't think the physics processing units were ever big. This was mostly just offloading some of their physics processes from the CPU to the GPU. It could be seen as a feature of GPUs for games, like ray-tracing acceleration.
      • touisteur 1y ago
        They still had a boom of being used for a lot of HPC loads, even non-AI supercomputers, although it was quickly dwarfed by their other markets.
      • Tuna-Fish 1y ago
        That's not what I was referring to. I was talking about NV selling GPGPUs for HPC loads, starting with the Tesla generation. They were mostly used for CFD.
        • 1y ago
• fennecfoxy 1y ago
  I mean afaik the consumer GPUs portion of their business has always been tiny in comparison to enterprise (except to begin with right at the start of the company's history, I believe). In a way it's the scientific/AI/etc enterprise use of Nvidia hardware that enables the sale of consumer GPUs as a side effect (which are just byproducts of workstation cards having a certain yield - so flawed chips can be used in consumer cards).
  • kokada 1y ago
    No, gaming revenue for NVIDIA was historically the major revenue percentage from the company (up until 2023). Only with the recent AI boom this changed. Source (I am not sure how reliable this is because I got this from ChatGPT, but I remember seeing something similar from other sources): https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/02/12/gaming-was-nvidias-largest-business-now-80-of-its/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/02/12/gaming-was-nvidias....
  • trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    Nvidia started as a gaming company and gaming was the majority of their business until the last 5-10 years.