And 2017 was _late_ in their pivot. They'd been active for much, much longer. Last winter break I sat down to watch every GTC keynote, going back to 2009[1]. Even then, he's talking about expanding to non-graphics workloads. Google's GPU paper[2] just slotted naturally into their existing narrative and were happy to support it. "fortune favors the prepared" as they say.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYuH2Kl_b98 [2]: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

They definitely were sponsoring ML conferences before 2017, but symbolically, having Jensen/the CEO actually show up at a dedicated session and demonstrate detailed technical knowledge of the conference proceedings in my mind was a turning point. Albeit I remember his words to the crowd of grad students and post docs at the time: "Only Nvidia would announce their flagship card...to an audience who is completely broke!!"