HOTTEST GPU MAKER'S INDIA PLAYBOOK

While businesses in India need Nvidia's chips, the company also needs India

- Leslie D'Monte

Behind ChatGPT, the blockbuster generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot capable of creating human-like text based on context and past conversations, are about 20,000 graphics processing units (GPUs). Behind these GPUs is a 30-year-old American company, Nvidia.

You would know of central processing units (CPUs), the brain of computing devices like mobiles, desktops, laptops and servers. GPUs are a more powerful version—unlike CPUs, GPUs are specifically designed to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, a feature known as parallel computing. That makes them more suitable for high-performance computing tasks like supercomputers and training large language models or models that can learn and comprehend. Deploying a large number of high-performance GPUs helps in shortening the training time for models such as ChatGPT.

The explosive growth of AI has now made Nvidia, known for selling its processors to the gaming industry even till five years ago, one of the hottest technology assets in the world. As of September, it is the fifth largest tech company measured by market capitalization at $1.2 trillion, after Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon. For the second quarter ended 30 July, Nvidia generated revenue of $13.51 billion, up 101% from a year ago.