[rchiang]

To be fair, Nvidia hired a lot of people who at some point worked at SGI and 3dfx, so there was already a lot of HPC/server/supercomputing talent working there. There are articles (e.g. https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/239078-ten-years-ago-toda...) showing the transition from having fixed vertex/pixel shaders in the GeForce 7000 GTX series to the generalized stream processors starting with the GeForce 8000 GTX series going forward.

And it's easy to see that Huang and Nvidia put their money where their mouth was. The first GTC was 2009. That's 3 years before the famous AlexNet paper that's often credited with kicking off the current AI on GPUs trend.