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.