Nvidia's market-cap growth was closely tied to GPUs used for which rapidly expanding technology field?

Nvidia’s market-cap growth was closely tied to graphics processing units used for artificial intelligence.

GPUs were originally developed to render graphics efficiently, especially for video games and professional visualization. Their ability to perform many calculations simultaneously also makes them highly effective for training and running neural-network models. As generative AI expanded, demand increased for Nvidia’s data-center GPUs, networking products, and software ecosystem.

Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. The company’s CUDA platform, introduced in 2006, helped developers use Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose computing rather than graphics alone.

Nvidia does not invent every AI model that uses its hardware. Its importance lies mainly in supplying computing platforms and software used by universities, cloud providers, startups, and major technology companies.