It seems like an innocent question, but it is not so clear if you think about it. Some will say it is a chip "designer," but Jensen Huang probably will not agree, and he will say it is much more than that.
With all the last changes, how would you define Nvidia?
Right place, right time.
They went from gaming GPU provider to an early risk-taker in CUDA, and that paid off handsomely both for crypto and AI.
I hope they don't abandon the gaming segment :( GeForce Now has been a game-changer for me (hosted RTX-4080s for gaming for $20/mo)
Software is a big part of the NVIDIA story. That is, the drivers have a compiler that converts CUDA code to whatever instructions the silicon takes. Other tools like PyTorch are built on top of CUDA so I have a "just works" experience running most AI code on NVIDIA. I think AMD could handle these workloads at the silicon level but I'd have a lot of difficult software development in front of me to make it happen.
My understanding is that it is a similar story with games. The "game ready" drivers are insanely large because they contain all sorts of patches to improve performance and reliability for AAA games.