Distributing CUDA for free on GPUs severely depressed NVIDIA's gross margins
Jensen Huang · NVIDIA: Jensen Huang. From near collapse to becoming the world’s biggest company · May 18, 2026 · at 34:13
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, recounts NVIDIA's strategy to achieve developer adoption for its CUDA platform by bundling hardware support into consumer graphics cards.
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“The answer was, let's use GeForce, which is the GPU that is now everywhere in the world used for playing video games. And let's have GeForce carry on its back CUDA to every single computer in the world. Now, of course, by doing so, our gross margins would go from bad to horrible. Okay, well, let's get past that. Let's not worry about the fact that it's going to be years. I know. Well, you never think that it's, nobody ever thinks it's that long. And I thought it was going to be next year. It's going to be okay. And the next year is going to be okay. And next year is going to be okay. But Nonetheless, the cost was incredible in carrying CUDA, and we couldn't charge anybody for it. And so, we gave it away.”
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