Nvidia plows $2B into Synopsys to make GPUs a must-have for design, simulation customers

As part of its effort to spread GPUs everywhere, Nvidia is investing $2 billion into simulation giant Synopsys. 

The investment is the latest development in a years-long relationship between the two companies and will see the GPU kingmaker purchase $2 billion of Synopsys common stock at a price of $414.79 a share. 

While Nvidia's GPUs have become synonymous with AI in recent years, they're by no means limited to machine learning workloads.

Nvidia has developed numerous frameworks to speed up jobs that traditionally ran on CPUs - from semiconductor manufacturing and physics simulations to electronic design automation - using its chips.

"Something that would take weeks could now happen in hours," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a press conference on Monday.

Synopsys has been one of the most enthusiastic adopters of the tech. At GTC this spring, the company touted up to a 30x speedup for circuit sims ...