The Thinking Machine

Summary

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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.

© Stephen Witt 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025