NVIDIA moved from a specialized hardware company to a dominant platform company thanks to CUDA.

Now, with Agent Toolkit, the company has signaled it intends to further migrate to an infrastructure-as-a-platform player in the Agentic Era. The GPU business remains. The software infrastructure business allows to sell even more GPUs. A new moat emerges, or so NVIDIA hopes.

The difference is that this time, the outcome will not unfold over a decade. It will be decided in the next few years (or months, given the pace of Agentic AI progress?). And it will determine whether the agentic economy is controlled by the companies that build intelligence, or by the one that builds the system it runs on.

To understand what NVIDIA is really attempting, and whether it can work, we need to start with how the ground shifted beneath it.