I went back and read my 2023 Nvidia story. What struck me was what hasn’t changed

In February 2023, Nvidia traded around $23 a share. Three years later, it sits near $225 — and despite a wave of AI chip challengers, many of the forces behind its dominance remain unchanged.

When I started covering AI full-time in 2022 for VentureBeat, one of the first things that struck me was the popularity of stories about a company called Nvidia. At the time, I didn’t even know how to pronounce the company’s name (I said NI-vidia instead of EN-vidia), much less understand why it seemed to sit at the center of so many highly technical conversations about AI.

Today, of course, Nvidia is the world’s most valuable public company and has become a proxy for the entire AI boom. As usual, its earnings announcement this Wednesday will be something of a cultural event, with all eyes on the Santa Clara-based behemoth as investors look for signs that the extraordinary AI spending boom can continue.

But in January 2023, I mostly wanted to answer a basic question: What exactly did Nvidia do? So I reached out to the company and said I wanted to write a deep-dive feature on how it came to dominate AI — and how it planned to capitalize on the generative AI boom that had erupted after OpenAI’s ChatGPT stunned the world in late 2022.

The core Nvidia story hasn’t changed

Looking back at that story now — published in February 2023, just three months before Nvidia’s stock began its history-making ascent — I’m struck by how much the underlying storyline remains the same.

The history, of course, has not changed. Nvidia’s dominance in AI emerged partly by accident. The company’s famed GPUs, or graphics processing units, were originally created in 1999 to power ultrafast 3D graphics in PC video games. But as the chips became optimized for more general computing tasks, they turned out to be remarkably well-suited for running deep learning algorithms.

The generative AI boom sparked by large language models and ChatGPT would likely not have happened at this scale without Nvidia. Today’s massive AI models require hundreds of thousands of GPUs to train and run — and Nvidia still controls roughly 90% of the discrete GPU market, even slightly more than it did in 2023.

Back then, people were already asking how long Nvidia could sustain its AI dominance. Would anyone eventually topple it from its perch? Not anytime soon, experts told me. They agreed Nvidia would not have free rein forever — especially with competitors like Advanced Micro Devices and Google developing rival chips, alongside startups like Cerebras Systems and SambaNova Systems.

CUDA is Nvidia’s defining moat

However, Nvidia’s platform strategy and software-first approach also remain remarkably difficult to dislodge. As CEO Jensen Huang likes to emphasize, Nvidia is not simply a chip company. “We stopped thinking of ourselves as a chip company long ago,” Huang said during Nvidia’s 2025 annual shareholder meeting.

Nvidia’s ecosystem extends far beyond chips themselves, encompassing hardware, software, networking, and development tools all optimized to work together. The company’s CUDA compute platform, introduced in 2007, is the software and middleware layer that allows researchers to tap into the immense parallel processing power GPUs can provide. Experts both inside and outside Nvidia emphasized to me that the deep learning revolution likely would not have unfolded the same way without CUDA.

Today, CUDA remains Nvidia’s defining moat. Just last week, WIRED published a story about the platform Huang has described as Nvidia’s greatest “treasure.”

Geopolitical tensions loom larger

And just like today, geopolitical tensions already loomed over the company. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. had imposed export controls preventing state-of-the-art Nvidia chips like the A100 and H100 from being sold to China.

But one thing that also hasn’t changed is Jensen Huang’s determination not to give up on the Chinese market (not to mention his love of leather jackets and Asian street food). Last week, Huang joined the delegation of American business leaders traveling with President Donald Trump to Beijing, a sign of how aggressively Nvidia continues to pursue business in the country despite years of export controls and political uncertainty. Even after the Trump administration approved Nvidia’s H200 AI chip for sale to China late last year, Beijing has yet to approve purchases.

My VentureBeat story from February 2023 ended by saying that “Nvidia is still in an AI sweet spot.” “Just as the company’s GPU was at the center of powering the deep learning revolution of a decade ago,” I wrote, “Nvidia’s hardware and software are running behind the scenes of today’s GPU-hungry, hyped-up generative AI technology.”

Three years later, that remains true. In many ways, Nvidia’s position looks even stronger. But every move the company makes now also carries enormous geopolitical weight. Today, AI is infrastructure, economics, and geopolitics all intertwined — and Nvidia sits at the center of all three.

Last week, Cerebras — once one of several ambitious AI chip startups trying to challenge Nvidia — pulled off one of the most closely watched IPOs in the AI market. But even now, Nvidia’s moat looks stubbornly difficult to crack.

Nvidia has remained remarkably consistent

So much has changed since I started covering AI in 2022. OpenAI is nearly unrecognizable from the research lab I first encountered when the DALL-E 2 image model was released during my first week on the beat. Anthropic was still a scrappy startup fueled in part by money from the now-disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried. Google had not yet fully realized it was falling behind in the AI race.

Nvidia, however, has remained remarkably consistent in its focus on the infrastructure layer fueling the AI boom — much like Jensen Huang’s ever-present leather jacket.