In December 2011, Jensen Huang arrived onstage at a developer’s conference in Beijing armed with an announcement the importance of which few then understood.

Dressed in jeans and a black suit jacket, Nvidia’s co-founder told the audience there would be a major update to the company’s proprietary programming platform, Cuda. Parts of it would be open source and easier for developers to use. For Huang, it was a strategic play: if he could win over Chinese engineers, hopefully they would remain loyal to Nvidia for decades.

At the time, Nvidia’s China business was booming. The country was its largest market by revenue, accounting for a third of sales, due to its vast online gaming community and manufacturers making electronic goods for export. Earlier that year, Nvidia had opened a research and development lab in Tianjin, a north-eastern city, after installing a supercomputer at a government-backed research lab in the same city.