Knowingo
The cover of The Thinking Machine

The Thinking Machine

Stephen Witt, 2025

A biography of Jensen Huang and an account of how Nvidia grew from a video game hardware company into a central supplier of artificial intelligence computing technology.

Get the app Read on the web

8 parts, about 35 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Tells how a struggling maker of gaming chips bet on parallel computing years before AI arrived to make that bet pay
  • Shows how patient platform building, fast release cycles and demanding leadership turned near failure into dominance, and at what cost
  • Built on close access to the company's founder and his colleagues, weighing luck, vision and the risks of the AI boom

Who it is for

  • Founders weighing a long bet on an unproven market
  • Investors and engineers curious how AI hardware came to be
  • Managers studying intense, demanding leadership styles

What the summary covers

  1. 1. Learning to endure and to build4 min
  2. 2. The company that nearly failed4 min
  3. 3. More than better graphics4 min
  4. 4. CUDA and the customers who had not arrived6 min
  5. 5. The unexpected application4 min
  6. 6. From chips to an integrated machine5 min
  7. 7. The payoff and its limits5 min
  8. 8. The thinking machine3 min

Recommended by

  • Mustafa SuleymanCEO of Microsoft AI and author of The Coming Wave
    Gripping and brilliantly told, this is the amazing story of the improbable origins of one of the most important technologies of our times.
  • David EpsteinAuthor of Range
    Stephen Witt’s deep reporting shines through every page of The Thinking Machine
  • Ray KurzweilAuthor of The Singularity Is Nearer
    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.
  • Sebastian MallabyAuthor of More Money Than God and The Power Law
    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.

About the author

  • Stephen WittAmerican journalist and nonfiction writer
    • Born in 1979 in New Hampshire and grew up in Minnesota
    • Degrees from the University of Chicago (2001) and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (2011)
    • First book How Music Got Free was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year
    • Writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Financial Times, New York, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and GQ
    • Ghost wrote Tim Berners Lee's 2025 memoir This Is for Everyone
    • The Thinking Machine (April 2025) won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award for 2025
    • Lives in Los Angeles; elder brother of investigative journalist Emily Witt

More books like this