Processor makers embrace the network computer Twenty years ago, Nvidia was squarely focused on one thing: 3D graphics. Not long from now, its founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang expects to preside over a company that reaches into every corner of the computing world thanks to a financial war chest the company built up from a strategy that saw its graphics processing units (GPUs) become the work horses of artificial intelligence (AI) in data centres. Alongside the ability to handle many floating-point operations in parallel â an attribute needed for training deep neural networks â the main reason Nvidia's GPUs became more commonly used in data centres than competitors such as AMD lay in its CUDA environment. This is a strategy Nvidia aims to repeat following its acquisition of networking specialist Mellanox, coupled with some rebranding before it rounds out the portfolio with the addition of Arm and its general-purpose processor architectures.