RED DAWN

Welcome to topsy-turvy land, where buying a tub of butter comes with a Klarna pay in three option, where a dishwasher requires Wi-Fi and a cloud subscription, and where that graphics card lot we bought our GTX 970 from is the biggest and most valuable company in the world.

- Phil Iwaniuk

AMD's new AI chip: you're probably going to need a bigger case.

Economics students will read about Nvidia's rise to the top of the market cap rankings for decades to come. The big players in the free market tend to jostle for minor position gains and losses from one year to the next, and it's unheard of for one company to suddenly soar to the top after decades of trading. But for us as PC gamers, the sense of cheese dream improbability is especially pronounced. It's like reading that Corsair has just bought Google.

Nvidia's rise owes a lot to speculative stock investment from Al evangelists, who see that Jensen Huang's operation has managed to secure a stronghold of hardware supply contracts to deep large language model Al service operators and believe such things to be the future of just about everything. A position it was able to establish by happy accident, being a market leader in highly advanced processors capable of processing deep learning data, which in turn came about through team green's dominance in the consumer graphics sector. Without that dominance among PC gamers, the world's biggest company wouldn't be in a position to have capitalized on the Al bubble.

How different it might have been, then, if Nvidia weren't the dominant force. If, instead, it was AMD who'd won the graphics card war and then started supplying chips to the gen-Al tech valley bros intent on our doom...