Deep Dives: NVIDIA

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In AI, learning is winning.

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By now, NVIDIA is probably the best story ever told about markets and creating shareholder value.

A decades-long bet on the important role AI will play transformed a company that provided hardware to gamer kids in basements into a company the size of the sixth-largest economy in the world, with more than $90 billion in data center revenues for 2024 alone.

And with some already predicting the company will be worth $10 trillion by the decade's end, the hype around NVIDIA shows no signs of slowing down.

For those reasons, today you will discover:

NVIDIA’s real moat (it’s not the hardware),

provide you with the ultimate guide on what NVIDIA is and does,

the very bullish reasons to believe it will become the most valuable company ever created,

and the various topics NVIDIA enthusiasts always seem to forget, like geopolitics, supply and demand issues, and technological disruption.

This is so you have the complete picture of the hottest company in AI today, so you can make more informed decisions about the future of your investments or business.

Let’s dive in!

From Gaming to AI, but Why?

Two words took NVIDIA to where it is today: linear algebra.

In our world, mathematics and engineers use linear algebra whenever it’s possible (because we deeply understand it) to the point that it’s literally everywhere.

But how did NVIDIA’s story begin, and what does linear algebra have to do with a company growing trillions of dollars in value in months?

From 3D to 2D

When playing video games, with the exception of virtual/augmented reality headsets, players look at a screen that displays the games in two dimensions.

Your screen is nothing more than a bunch of pixels. Each pixel depicts a color, and combined, they represent a frame, the image you see at a particular time.

Traditionally, screens had a much smaller amount of pixels, which caused images to appear weird:

But today, TVs have millions of pixels, allowing them to display extremely high-definition scenes. But when playing video games, you don’t see a single frame per second; you see up to 120 frames per second (fps) or more.

This means that your screen displays 120 frames of the scene every second, meaning that every single one of the millions of pixels gets allocated a color 120 times per second.

To assign a color, your computer or video game platform has to calculate, based on the 3D scene (the environment, the objects, how everything has moved from the previous instant, and so on), how that scene will be viewed from a 2D screen, a process we know as rendering.

This is a…

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