The Thinking Machine

Nvidia 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, and its charismatic CEO Jensen Huang.

‘Gripping and brilliantly told’ Mustafa Suleyman, author of The Coming Wave

In June 2024, thirty-one years after it was founded in a diner, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of videogame equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process reinvented 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, Stephen 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.

Review

Gripping and brilliantly told, this is the amazing story of the improbable origins of one of the most important technologies of our times ― Mustafa Suleyman, author of The Coming Wave and CEO of Microsoft AI

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, author of Range

The Thinking Machine brilliantly captures the riveting, unlikely story of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia―a company driving the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and humanity's inevitable merger with technology. Stephen Witt’s exceptional reporting offers a rare glimpse into the pioneers driving humanity’s leap toward an infinite future -- Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Nearer

A delicious account of how a scrawny Taiwanese immigrant, with an intense commitment to reason, loyalty to people, and a Stakhanovite work ethic, built the engine of the AI revolution ― Michael Moritz, former Chairman, Sequoia Capital

The AI revolution that defines this decade, and probably this century, rests on the shoulders of a shockingly small number of geniuses; and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is prominent among them. Witt’s superb portrait is both entertaining and disquieting, capturing an indispensable, elusive, and isolated man: the hardware wizard behind the machines that are careering toward something very much like sentience -- Sebastian Mallaby, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Law

Before reading The Thinking Machine, I didn't understand just how much the rise of Jensen Huang and Nvidia explains the sudden explosion of artificial intelligence. Stephen Witt’s sweeping narrative offers a roadmap to the various forces rapidly changing our lives, tucked into the wild insider story of how one of our strangest and most singular entrepreneurs―in an era chock full of them―not only built a remarkable company but also helped to usher in our brave new world -- Reeves Wiedeman, author of Billion Dollar Loser

About the Author

Stephen Witt is the author of How Music Got Free, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Financial Times, New York magazine, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and GQ. He lives in Los Angeles, California.