The turning point came in 2006-2007 with CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), Nvidia's software platform that allowed researchers to harness GPUs for scientific computing beyond graphics. John Nickolls, an engineer who had previously worked at a failed parallel computing company, championed CUDA within Nvidia. The platform initially struggled to find users - "our only customers were two breast cancer researchers," according to one executive - but Huang persisted despite investor pressure.