The Thinking Machine

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 May 2023, with the revelation that Chat GPT had trained on Nvidia’s supercomputer, and twenty years after its founding in a San Jose Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the sixth most valuable corporation on Earth. In The Thinking Machine, acclaimed journalist Stephen Witt recounts the unlikely story of how a company once known by hardcore gamers for PC graphics shocked Silicon Valley by building the hardware now used by all major AI applications.

Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its CEO Jensen Huang, who bet the company’s future on developing scientific supercomputing and the ever-larger AI systems that are reshaping our society. Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends and family, and Nvidia 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 a neglected manufacturer of gaming hardware became the dominant supplier of AI hardware. It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who for 30 years pushed 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 defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it’s the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, robotic tutors, self-driving cars, and new movies, art, and books, generated on command.