Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a technology company in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a more advanced computer processor.

Processors, after all, are the heart and soul of our technology era. This is an arena of intense technological innovation and contestation, especially between military superpowers such as China and the United States. Recently, with the emergence and popularity of generative language “AI” app developers like OpenAI there has been much excitement about the prospects of an “artificial intelligence” revolution in the technology sector. A major beneficiary of this buzz has been the computer chip manufacturer, Nvidia which has had its order books for its customised AI processors filled to beyond capacity, and sent its stock price soaring. This has allowed Nvidia to join the rarefied bracket of technology corporations like Apple, Google, Meta or Tesla.

Forgive us old timers, grizzled veterans and survivors of the 80s and 90s computer games scene, for scratching our heads. We who filled hours of our time with games such as Half-Life, Max Payne, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Quake and of course the OG, DOOM. It’s like living in a tiny, rural backward one-horse village and waking up one morning to find that it suddenly, overnight, developed into a bustling town with a railway station. The next morning you wake up and it’s transformed once again — a gleaming metropolis with flying cars.

You think: NVDIA? Our NVDIA, the company that made the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or cards needed to run first person shooters has become one of the world’s most valuable technology companies?

Photo by Sam Pak on Unsplash

When it comes to being the beneficiary of a technological gold-rush, this is not NVIDIA’s first rodeo. There was a time when we had our hearts broken when our rusty old PC no longer had the juice to play a new release. If we scraped together a little bit, it was possible to get a new graphics card. A few years ago, tragically, NVIDIA’s GPUs were…