# NVIDIA and Demand

Nvidia is a demand machine.

In the early 90's, DOOM kicked off the first person shooter craze. DOOM was followed shortly after by Quake and Unreal, which sported new, 3D graphics. NVIDIA got started in the mid 90's, alongside 3dfx and ATI, developing GPUs which enabled the latest 3D graphics for computer games.

Over the next two decades, NVIDIA would partner with game developers to develop new games along side new hardware, fueling a marketing scheme where gaming enthusiasts were ~~forced~~ encouraged to upgrade to the newest NVIDIA hardware to play the latest games.

In May 2016, NVIDIA released the GTX 1080 GPU which some hailed as the last card you'd ever need to buy for 1080p gaming. My own GTX 1080 is still running and still playing games 10 years later.

Not to be outdone by their own outstanding technical achievements, NVIDIA quickly sought ways to make the 1080 obsolete, working with game developers to promote ray tracing, DLSS, and 4k display resolution, all of which required faster GPUs. Games today look about as good as games from 10 years ago, but they run more slowly thanks to the weird crap NVIDIA keeps pushing on game developers.

# Bitcoin & Covid

Sometime around December 2017, Bitcoin started trading at 10,000 USD. As it happens, NVIDIA GPUs are great at converting electricity into Bitcoin, and a new craze began. While NVIDIA sold their GPUs at reasonably low retail prices, demand for NVIDIA GPUs for crypto currency mining pushed their prices much, much higher on second hand markets.

When COVID rolled in a few years later and sent everyone home to play computer games, NVIDIA struggled to keep up with demand. In a sensational heist in California in 2021, thieves stole an entire truck full of NVIDIA GPUs, to the lament of gamers everywhere.

Publicly, NVIDIA appeared to take measures to discourage using their cards crypto mining in order to boost supply for gamers. But eventually, NVIDIA realized they could just raise prices at retail instead of being sold out at retail. Massive profits followed.

It's unclear whether NVIDIA's unseen hand had any influence on the crypto craze (there was certainly a lot of money spent on dubious marketing, PR, hype, and lobbying for crypto), or whether they were selling their own cards on eBay to avoid the optics of raising retail prices for a while, but they certainly made bank from the mining frenzy and gaming bonanza.

# Enter AI

Well, we're all familiar with AI these days, whether we like it or not.

Some people are spending a lot of money — truly staggering amounts of money — to make sure we all know all about AI all the time. There are astroturfed campaigns everywhere (often starring Jensen Huang himself) trying to convince you that you need to use AI, that your company needs to use AI, that AI is taking your job, that you should help AI take your job, and actually, it's better if AI takes your job, and all the while NVIDIA is selling tons and tons of GPUs to AI companies all over the planet.

It's not clear to anyone that AI is particularly useful for anything other than generating spam, scams, and PowerPoints that no one wants to look at, and suppressing wages, but darn if it ain't profitable. At least for NVIDIA.

I'm really curious to know how much NVIDIA specifically has spent on PR firms, paid articles, and troll farms to stimulate demand for AI, and thus, NVIDIA hardware. It has to be a large number. They probably won't tell us what it is, though.