The whole GPU history is off and being driven by finance bros as well. Everyone believes Nvidia kicked off the GPU AI craze when Ilya Sutskever cleaned up on AlexNet with an Nvidia GPU back in 2012, or when Andrew Ng and team at Stanford published their "Large Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors" in 2009, but in 2004, a couple of Korean researches were the first to implement neural networks on a GPU, using ATI Radeons (now AMD): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00313...

I remember ATI and Nvidia were neck-and-neck to launch the first GPUs around 2000. Just so much happening so fast.

I'd also say Nvidia had the benefit of AMD going after and focusing on Intel both at the server level as well as the integrated laptop processors, which was the reason they bought ATI.