Graphics processing units (GPUs) were originally designed to make graphics applications more efficient: drawing and animation software, computer-aided design, and, of course, games!
At some point, it became clear that GPUs could not only do graphics processing but could also be used to do all kinds of computing, hence the appearance of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPUs). GPUs are attractive because they have substantially more computing power than CPUs. They have been successfully used for many applications, such as scientific computing and artificial intelligence. They have massive applications in data science and in making computing more efficient in general.