NVIDIA CEO says CUDA gamble on GeForce nearly threatened the company but became its biggest moat

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said enabling CUDA on GeForce was a risky strategic bet that nearly cost the company.

NVIDIA increased costs by about 50% and saw gross margins near 35% while market cap fell to roughly $1.5 billion during the transition.

Jensen said FP32 support and programmable shaders enabled GPUs to be used for compute workloads and that CUDA took about a decade to pay off.

He credited GeForce with driving CUDA adoption and said the framework is now a major competitive moat for NVIDIA.