Yes, but they placed a bet on the development of the tech and on the time it would be relevant which was a huge risk.

The technology was built for 3D graphics and video game processing. The company was very smart to recognize the opportunity that AI presented when AI researchers realized that gaming GPUs could vastly outperform CPUs for their workloads, but this was a "happy accident", not something Nvidia actually predicted, planned for or initially pushed.

This predates modern AI

The first papers on using GPUs to accelerate scientific tasks came out at the turn of the century. Initially it was molecular dynamics, which led Nvidia to release their first scientific-focused line, the Tesla.

Then in 2010 or so, someone realized you could train a neural network very fast on these things.

The reason they are the leader here goes all the way back to the 2000s when they released CUDA. Because of that, the neural network (and therefore AI) ecosystem went with them.

If you bothered to learn a little bit about Nvidia history you'd know this is false. They invested in supporting transformers before most people in this thread heard of that name. That's just one example. Look at InfiniBand and you can tell they made correct decisions years before it's obvious to everyone.

Sorry. Nvidia started supporting transformers in 2017. AI researchers discovered that its GPUs were way better than CPUs for their workloads almost a decade earlier. Specifically, Rajat Raina, Anand Madhavan and Andrew Ng at Stanford published a paper showing that GPUs could train large deep networks up to 70x faster than CPUs back in 2009.

Nvidia released CUDA in 2006-2007, which made that discovery possible, but Nvidia wasn't targeting AI with CUDA. It was targeting general high-performance computing (physics simulations, molecular dynamics, medical imaging, etc.).

There's no doubt the company seized on the AI opportunity superbly but the suitability of its product for AI, and the AI boom, was absolutely a "happy accident".