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The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
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Business

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

by Stephen Witt

“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, New York Times bestselling author of RangeNvidia is as valuable as Apple and Microsoft. It has shaped the world as we know it. But its story is little known. This is the definitive story of the greatest technology company of our times.In June of 2024, thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of video game equipment conquered the market for 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 single-minded and ferocious leader, now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures.The Thinking Machine is the story of how Nvidia evolved to supplying hundred-million-dollar supercomputers. It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of 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.This is the story of the company that is inventing the future.

Ask in the margins
How did Jensen Huang turn a gaming chip company into an AI powerhouse?
What's the biggest lesson from Nvidia's failures for my own career or business?
Can anyone compete with Nvidia’s AI dominance, based on its history in the book?