NVIDIA has quietly become the single most consequential company on Earth.
Let me explain.
1. NVIDIA is the engine of AI
OpenAI, Meta, Tesla, Amazon, Azure, Google Cloud, Microsoft... they all rely on NVIDIA.
Every major AI model is trained on NVIDIA's GPUs. The H100 and A100 GPUs are at the core of every modern AI supercomputer.
Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud rent them (at scale) too.
CUDA, NVIDIA’s proprietary software layer, has become the operating system of high-performance computation.
→ Without NVIDIA, there is no large-scale generative AI.
2. It has become a lever of digital sovereignty
The US tightly monitor the export of NVIDIA chips to China. Today, GPUs are as strategically sensitive as... hypersonic missiles. Yes, seriously.
NVIDIA is aligned with the U.S. strategic interests: it doesn’t sell to everyone.
→ NVIDIA is a geopolitical tool for technological containment.
3. It controls a rare "resource": computing power
Like oil in the 20th century, compute has become the foundational resource of the 21st. Access to high-performance compute is a competitive, if not civilizational, advantage.
Today, NVIDIA sells that power!
4. Lastly... it sits at the intersection of every domain of global economy
Autonomous vehicles, data centers, defense, robots, infrastructure of the internet, weather prediction, GPTs model, facial recognition, autonomous agents, UAVs, game engine, rendering for Pixar, medicine, robotics, drone, surveillance, real-time targeting, energy, climate science, quantum cryptography...
Do I really need to continue?
Its CUDA architecture has become a universal programming standard.
That being said... this power rests on a fundational problem.
Let’s follow the chain (supply chain) all the way down.
Inside every NVIDIA chip lies a collection of strategic minerals:
- Gallium and germanium: essential for high-frequency logic
- Tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold: the so-called 3TG conflict minerals
- Rare earths: for thermal resistance and magnetic precision
- Silicon: the digital bedrock
And guess what? None of these minerals come from Silicon Valley. They come from Congo. Bolivia. Myanmar. Mongolia.
Their refinement?
Almost entirely monopolized by China.
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In 2023, the United States banned NVIDIA’s H100 chips from being exported to China.
Beijing retaliated. Guess how?