Nvidia has become the biggest chip vendor in the world, at three hundred and thirty-seven billion dollars in market capitalization, by dint of the fact that none of the competition have managed to come up with chips sufficiently superior to crack the company’s hold on the market for the most cutting-edge applications in data centers, especially artificial intelligence.

There is now a prospect of another interesting realm for Nvidia to exploit: software.

This week, Nvidia held another one of its “GTC” conferences, where it touts lots of new products. While the event was full of stuff about new chips, there was also the announcement of two cloud computing services that Nvidia will own and operate.

One service is a way for companies to collaborate on 3-D design via the cloud, based on Nvidia’s “Omniverse” technology, which is its take on The Metaverse, the mostly non-existent something that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has touted. I gave a preview of the idea of this service in a recent article.

The other service is a way to run very large AI programs in the cloud without a lot of the owned infrastructure or data science work, especially programs for handling natural language processing, which are becoming important tools for companies.

I covered the announcements for ZDNet. But, beyond the press releases, what interested me was the business question of whether Huang is really serious.