While GPUs were originally invented for image processing, their powerful capabilities are now being applied to computation problems that have nothing to do with graphics. As GPUs have about 20x as many cores as CPUS, they can be up to 100x faster for highly parallelizable computations such as machine learning and data analysis.
Did you know that google has used Nvidia GPUs to train its google translate machine learning algorithms?
In particular, Nvidia GPUs find many applications in the financial services industry, which is increasingly making use of massive data sets and AI / deep learning. GPU computation is ideal for Monte Carlo simulations, used extensively in the finance industry, as each path can be processed independently and simultaneously.
CUDA is a program development environment from Nvidia which allows users to execute the highly parallelizable part of their code on an Nvidia GPU.