The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip

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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 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.

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

‘A page-turning biography of perhaps the most consequential CEO and company in the world’ David Epstein, author of Range

‘Brilliantly captures the riveting, unlikely story of Jensen Huang's Nvidia ... Exceptional reporting’ Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Nearer

© Stephen Witt 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025