Originally designed for rendering graphics, GPUs turned out to be perfect for AI because they can do thousands of math operations simultaneously. Training and running AI models is essentially massive matrix multiplication — exactly what GPUs are built for. NVIDIA dominates this market.
Why it matters
GPUs are the physical bottleneck of the entire AI industry. Why models cost what they cost, why some providers are faster than others, why there's a global chip shortage — it all comes back to GPU supply and VRAM.