The Thinking Machine
Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
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4.5 • 35 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award
Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Economist
“Framed as a biography of Jensen Huang, the only CEO Nvidia has ever had, the book is also something more interesting and revealing: a window onto the intellectual, cultural, and economic ecosystem that has led to the emergence of superpowerful AI.” —James Surowiecki, The Atlantic
“A lively biography. . . . The story of how Nvidia became the hottest investment on Wall Street and a household name is fascinating.” —Katie Notopoulos, The New York Times Book Review
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.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This insightful biography from journalist Witt (How Music Got Free) recaps how Taiwanese American electrical engineer Jensen Huang built Nvidia, the microchip company he cofounded, into the central supplier for the AI revolution. Witt's colorful portrait paints Huang as a no-nonsense striver who built his company with smarts, a maniacal work ethic, and his signature management technique of screaming at underlings. (Witt reports that employees revere Huang anyway, viewing such incidents as "terrifying but cathartic.") Equally crucial was Huang's willingness to bet the company on dicey technologies, first on "parallel computing" architecture that had failed in previous applications but ended up considerably increasing the processing speed of Nvidia's chips, and then on neural networks, which were regarded as unworkable until the enhanced capacity of the company's chips enabled breakthroughs in machine learning in the late 2010s. Witt offers a perceptive account of how Huang thrived amid the cutthroat competition of Silicon Valley by pursuing offbeat products and niche markets, and his unrivaled access leads to some revealing moments, as when Huang explodes at Witt for suggesting that AI might harm humanity. The result is an entertaining account of a brave new world at its dawning.
