Hoggle
They have made some purchases that really didn't seem like the focus like buying PhysX. Of course at the time they thought it was going to be widely used.
True, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Look at Intel, they spend billions every year on acquisitions and the majority of it goes nowhere. Some years it's up to $20B if you add all the acquisitions together. For example Omni-path... Intel poleaxed its omni-connector Xeons this year, after first introducing them in 2015. Nevermind $15.3 billion for MobilEye in 2017, which has better odds of going bust like all the other market buy-ins Intel has tried so far. Don't forget that cool $7.68 billion for McAfee back in 2010, or a mobile app Moovit for $900m... Intel soaks up an average three companies every single year and the total is always in the billions range.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA simply bought Mellanox and used it to deliver the DGX A100 systems today.