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

In June 2024, thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. Stephen Witt (the author of How Music Got Free) tells that story here, and he tells it with the same deep-dive reporting sensibility that made his first book essential reading. The result is a serious industrial history of how a graphics-chip company quietly became the backbone of the AI boom: the hardware provider that everyone in the field now depends on, and that almost nobody outside it fully understood until very recently.

The book centers on Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, and his decade-plus bet that AI acceleration would eventually need its own purpose-built silicon. Witt traces the technical evolution from consumer GPUs to data-center clusters to hundred-million-dollar supercomputers, drawing on access to Huang, his engineers, investors, and longtime colleagues. For readers who want to understand why the geopolitics of semiconductor supply chains suddenly matters to everyone from defense analysts to university research officers, this is the clearest account available.

For faculty teaching courses in technology policy, business strategy, science and technology studies, or AI ethics, the book offers a case study in how infrastructure decisions made by a small group of engineers ripple outward into every domain that now runs on machine learning. Witt does not shy away from the “awesome and terrifying” dimensions of what Huang calls the next industrial revolution. That candor is what makes the book useful in a classroom as well as at a desk.