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 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.