Even that is arguably not lucky, it just followed a non-obvious trajectory. Graphics uses a fair amount of linear algebra, so people with large scale physical modeling needs (among many) became interested. To an extent the deep learning craze kicked off because of developments in computation on GPUs enabled economical training.

Nvidia started their GPGPU adventure by acquiring a physics engine and porting it over to run on their GPUs. Supporting linear algebra operations was pretty much the goal from the start.