> Isn't he the entire reason Nvidia invested so heavily in tensor cores before AI even became a massive market mover?

Nvidia's tensor core investment is from 2017. People were already talking about AI at the time (OpenAI had already been founded, for example), and ML was everywhere.

They also made that investment when they already knew they had the gaming market locked up tight. AMD as a whole but especially AMD's graphics division was all but dead & buried at the time, so Nvidia was free to do anything at all risk free.