The explosive story of the tech giant Nvidia - the producer of the only chip anyone involved in AI wants - and its charismatic, uncompromising, complicated CEO, Jensen Huang
The riveting investigative account of Nvidia, the tech company that has exploded in value for its artificial intelligence computing hardware, and Jensen Huang, Nvidia's charismatic, uncompromising CEO
In March 2024, following the revelation that ChatGPT had trained on Nvidia's microchips, and twenty-one years after its founding in a Denny's restaurant, Nvidia became the third most-valuable corporation on Earth. In The Thinking Machine, acclaimed journalist Stephen Witt recounts the unlikely story of how a manufacturer of video game components shocked Silicon Valley by establishing a monopoly on AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer.
Essential to Nvidia's meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI. Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Witt documents for the first time the company's epic rise and its iconoclastic CEO, who emerges as a compelling, single-minded, and ferocious leader, and now one of Silicon Valley's most influential figures.
The Thinking Machine is the story of how Nvidia evolved from selling cheap, aftermarket circuit boards to hundred-million-dollar room-sized supercomputers. It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is about a revolution in computer architecture, and the small group of renegade engineers who made it happen. And it's the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, which Huang has billed as the "next industrial revolution," as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and new movies, art, and books, generated on command.
About the Author
A member of what he calls the ‘pirate generation’, Stephen Witt has been bootlegging music since the mid-1990s. While amassing an archive of hundreds of thousands of pirated mp3s, he became obsessed with the subject of digital piracy, and eventually changed careers to write this thrilling investigative history. He was born in New Hampshire in 1979, raised in the Midwest and graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in mathematics. He spent the next six years working for hedge funds in Chicago and New York. Following a spell in East Africa working in economic development, he graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2011. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. How Music Got Free is his first book.
Industry Reviews
Gripping and brilliantly told, this is the amazing story of the improbable origins of one of the most important technologies of our times * Mustafa Suleyman, author of The Coming Wave and CEO of Microsoft AI *
Stephen Witt's deep reporting shines through every page of The Thinking Machine. The result is a page-turning biography of perhaps the most consequential CEO and company in the world -- David Epstein, author of Range
The Thinking Machine brilliantly captures the riveting, unlikely story of Jensen Huang's Nvidia-a company driving the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and humanity's inevitable merger with technology. Stephen Witt's exceptional reporting offers a rare glimpse into the pioneers driving humanity's leap toward an infinite future -- Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Nearer
A delicious account of how a scrawny Taiwanese immigrant, with an intense commitment to reason, loyalty to people, and a Stakhanovite work ethic, built the engine of the AI revolution * Michael Moritz, former Chairman, Sequoia Capital *
The AI revolution that defines this decade, and probably this century, rests on the shoulders of a shockingly small number of geniuses; and Nvidia's Jensen Huang is prominent among them. Witt's superb portrait is both entertaining and disquieting, capturing an indispensable, elusive, and isolated man: the hardware wizard behind the machines that are careering toward something very much like sentience -- Sebastian Mallaby, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Law
Before reading The Thinking Machine, I didn't understand just how much the rise of Jensen Huang and Nvidia explains the sudden explosion of artificial intelligence. Stephen Witt's sweeping narrative offers a roadmap to the various forces rapidly changing our lives, tucked into the wild insider story of how one of our strangest and most singular entrepreneurs-in an era chock full of them-not only built a remarkable company but also helped to usher in our brave new world -- Reeves Wiedeman, author of Billion Dollar Loser
