And sure, AlexNet was good but remember this is the maxwell days, tensor cores aren't even a thing yet, it was at minimum a very bold bet on the basis of "some image classifier model thing". Nobody else saw it as more than an academic toy (obviously, or they'd have jumped in too).
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-hua...
> Within a couple of years, every entrant in the ImageNet competition was using a neural network. By the mid-twenty-tens, neural networks trained on G.P.U.s were identifying images with ninety-six-per-cent accuracy, surpassing humans. Huang’s ten-year crusade to democratize supercomputing had succeeded. “The fact that they can solve computer vision, which is completely unstructured, leads to the question ‘What else can you teach it?’ ” Huang said to me.
> The answer seemed to be: everything. Huang concluded that neural networks would revolutionize society, and that he could use CUDA to corner the market on the necessary hardware. He announced that he was once again betting the company. “He sent out an e-mail on Friday evening saying everything is going to deep learning, and that we were no longer a graphics company,” Greg Estes, a vice-president at Nvidia, told me. “By Monday morning, we were an A.I. company. Literally, it was that fast.”