Nvidia GPUs have been used to train DNNs since around 2011 (the paper on how to do it was written in 2010 I think?). Nvidia was also used heavily to mine crypto currency until recently.
2012? If we are using Alexnet as the "starting" mark for DNN training on GPUs. Though probably there were efforts before that, Alexnet is the most well known for sure.
> As the speed of GPUs increased rapidly, it was soon possible to train deep networks such as convolutional networks without the help of pretraining as demonstrated by Ciresan and colleagues in 2011 and 2012 who won character recognition, traffic sign, and medical imaging competitions with their convolutional network architecture. Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used a similar architecture in 2012 that also features rectified linear activation functions and dropout for regularization. They received outstanding results in the ILSVRC-2012 ImageNet competition, which marked the abandonment of feature engineering and the adoption of feature learning in the form of deep learning. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft noticed this trend and made major acquisitions of deep learning startups and research teams between 2012 and 2014. From here, research in deep learning accelerated rapidly.
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> AlexNet is a convolutional network architecture named after Alex Krizhevsky, who along with Ilya Sutskever under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton applied this architecture to the ILSVRC-2012 competition that featured the ImageNet dataset. They improved the convolutional network architecture developed by Ciresan and colleagues, which won multiple international competitions in 2011 and 2012 by using rectified linear units for enhanced speed and dropout for improved generalization. Their results stood in stark contrast to feature engineering methods, which immediately created a great rift between deep learning and feature engineering methods for computer vision. From here it was apparent that deep learning would take over computer vision and that other methods would not be able to catch up. AlexNet heralded the mainstream usage and the hype of deep learning.