Software King of the World Microsoft’s top Vole Satya Nadella has been flinging much mock at Nvidia for forgetting its roots.
The AI chip boom since ChatGPT has shoved Nvidia’s market cap into the trillions, but the firm’s enterprise obsession is showing up in thin consumer GPU supply.
Nadella reminded Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang of his “gaming beginnings”, and the point landed because the company was built on pixels, not datacentres.
Nadella said: “The trickle from that excellence to the rest of the company becomes straightforward. I joke with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that if it weren’t for gaming, Nvidia wouldn’t exist. Think about it, without DirectX, I don’t think the entire GPU revolution, or the acceleration, would’ve happened.”
He said: “That’s why I’m long on Gaming. It is the largest entertainment category — what is gaming in its most expansive form going forward? This doesn’t mean we walk away from people who are doing today, when we think about an AAA game on a console. The question is about where else we can go to extend that. For me, we’re long on gaming. We’ll continue to invest, and we’ll always do so. It’s up to this team to show excellence in execution and creativity. Software always carries risk, but this software poses a high risk of creation. It’s way different. But yet, we have to be the best-in-class at it.”
Nadella framed his Nvidia jibe as a gag, but it is a tidy history lesson for a firm that treats gamers as an optional extra.
The GeForce 256 was about beating a rendering bottleneck, and Huang’s early pitch was a new compute frontier rather than yet another beige processor treadmill.
Years of faster rendering and bigger demands laid the groundwork for the current AI infrastructure arms race, but Nvidia is now playing favourites.
Memory shortages and the stampede for enterprise accelerators have squeezed the consumer side, leaving retail availability of RTX 50 cards looking increasingly fictional.
The GeForce RTX 50 SUPER series is reportedly delayed, and the usual trickle of supply has turned into a vanishing act in shops.
Nvidia is leaning on AI upscaling to stretch the life of current cards, which is handy if you cannot buy the next one anyway.
There is talk of reviving older models like the GeForce RTX 3060 to plug gaps, which is not exactly the shiny future gamers were sold.
The PC GPU market is already in “rough sailing” with shipments down 3.3 per cent, and Nvidia’s split focus is making the consumer side feel like a rounding error.
