CUDA is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) developed by Nvidia that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated general-purpose processing, significantly broadening their utility in artificial intelligence, scientific and high-performance computing. CUDA was created in 2004 and was officially released in 2007. When introduced, the name was an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but Nvidia later dropped the initial meaning of the acronym and now rarely expands it.