By Muhammad Zuhair
Publication Date: 2026-03-31 19:33:00
NVIDIA’s CEO recalls a pretty interesting moment with the launch of CUDA on GeForce GPUs, saying that it was a bet that could’ve cost Jensen his company.
NVIDIA’s CEO Expresses His Gratitude To GeForce Being the Driving Force Behind CUDA
It’s actually astonishing to see how vital a resource CUDA has become for NVIDIA and its enterprise business, given that, according to Jensen, a framework laid down in 2006 is now the company’s biggest reason for dominating the AI race. However, according to Jensen Huang’s appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast, CUDA was a major bet for NVIDIA at launch, driven by the goal of not being known as a ‘GPU company’ but as a complete computing platform provider. Jensen wanted to dominate every workload, rather than becoming a ‘specialist’ company.
The better computing company we become, the worse we became as a specialist. The more of a specialist, the less capacity we have to do overall computing.
The company has to find that really narrow path, step by step by step, to expand our aperture of computing but not give up on the most important specialization that we had.
– NVIDIA’s CEO
Jensen talks about how the idea of CUDA, or rather programmable GPUs, surfaced, and how programmable pixel shaders, with the goal of making GPUs practical beyond 3D graphics workloads, helped make that happen. With pixel shaders, NVIDIA envisioned a world where programmability moved beyond the confines of…