Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the world’s most coveted microchip
By Stephen Witt
The riveting account of Nvidia, the tech company that has exploded in value for its Artificial Intelligence (AI) computing hardware, centres on Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s charismatic, uncompromising CEO.
In June of 2024, spurred by the frenzy of investment following the launch of ChatGPT, Nvidia achieved a historic milestone. Thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, it became the most valuable corporation on Earth.
About The Thinking Machine
In The Thinking Machine, acclaimed journalist Stephen Witt recounts the unlikely story of how a manufacturer of video game components shocked Silicon Valley. Nvidia 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. More than a decade ago, Huang bet his entire company on AI based on just a few promising scientific results.
Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Witt documents the company’s epic rise for the first time. He also captures the essence of its iconoclastic CEO, who emerges as a compelling, single-minded, and ferocious leader. Today, Huang stands as one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures.
A radical vision for computing
The Thinking Machine tells the story of how Nvidia evolved from providing components for circuit boards to supplying hundred-million dollar supercomputers. It also tells the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing. Along the way, he became one of the wealthiest men alive.
This is also the story of a revolution in computer architecture, led by a small group of renegade engineers who made it happen. And finally, it’s the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future.
Huang has billed this future as the “next industrial revolution”. A new kind of microchip is unlocking hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars and new movies, art, and books – generated on command.
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.
- PUBLISHER | Penguin Random House SA |
- ISBN | 9781847928283 |
- Recommended Retail Price | R430.00 |
- Classification | Technology |
