The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
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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. Read more
Publisher : Viking
Publication date : April 8, 2025
Language : English
Print length : 272 pages
ISBN-10 : 0593832698
ISBN-13 : 91
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 6.27 x 0.97 x 9.29 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #4,513 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #5 in Company Business Profiles (Books) #9 in Computers & Technology Industry #13 in Artificial Intelligence & Semantics
#5 in Company Business Profiles (Books):
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Top Amazon Reviews
Format: Hardcover
I recently finished The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt, and I have to say, this was one of the more interesting business books I’ve read in a while. What stood out to me most was that this book is about much more than Nvidia or Jensen Huang’s success. It is really a story about vision, self-disruption, leadership, talent, and the outside forces that can shape a company in ways many people do not think about. One of my biggest takeaways was how Huang seemed willing to move beyond Nvidia’s original identity. What started as a gaming hardware company became something far larger because he understood that the technology had a much broader use. Instead of protecting the old business model, he kept pushing toward the future. That reminded me a lot of the contrast with Kodak. Kodak helped create digital imaging, but it struggled to move away from its legacy film business. Nvidia took the opposite path and leaned into change. The book also made me think about Blue Ocean Shift. Nvidia did not just compete harder in an existing market. It moved into new strategic space and changed the meaning of the company itself. To me, that is one of the clearest examples of what it looks like when a company stops thinking only in terms of current products and starts thinking in terms of future capability. I also found the leadership side of the story interesting. Huang is not presented as an easygoing leader, but the book does show the value of building a place where talented people stay, grow, and do meaningful work over time. In a business environment where many leaders treat employees as temporary assets, that stood out to me. Long-term loyalty, deep expertise, and commitment can become a competitive advantage of their own. Another reason I found the book interesting this book is that it does not ignore geopolitics. It shows how business is affected by much more than internal strategy. Taiwan, China, export controls, the CHIPS Act, Arizona manufacturing, and even the impact of the war in Israel all show how global events can directly affect a company’s path and its people. That part of the book made it feel especially relevant for today’s business environment. Overall, I thought The Thinking Machine was an excellent read. It is one of those books that gives you more than a company story. It gives you a way to think about innovation, disruption, leadership, and strategy in a much broader sense. I would definitely recommend it to business leaders, professionals, and anyone interested in how companies succeed, adapt, and survive in a changing world. My rating: 5/5. #Leadership #Strategy #Innovation #AI #BusinessBooks #Nvidia #ProfessionalDevelopment #Management #Geopolitics
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Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2026 Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2026 by Dfg
Format: Hardcover
The Thinking Machine is the story of Nvidia and mainly its founder Jensen Huang. It is both engaging and illuminating and takes the reader through the company's whole history and dramas. The visionary leadership of Jensen is a common thread throughout and the author discusses how AI is affecting our outlook and Jensen's disregard of any negativity on the potential misuse of his hardware. Given the importance of Nvidia this is a really great book to get to know the company's history and journey to where it is today, which is somewhat miraculous. The Thinking Machine really takes the tour of Nvidia as a byproduct of the biography of Jensen Huang, one of the three founders of the company. The author starts by telling where Jensen came from, his early childhood and subsequent college experience, how he met his wife and how he navigated his career in Silicon Valley. The author then brings the reader through the founding of Nvidia, the Denny's Jensen worked at but still goes to and the early days of computer graphics which was quite the mess. The author then takes the reader on the journey of Nvidia and how it got its first early adopters, how they consolidated an industry through relentless competition and how there were many instances of near failure. The path through the internet bubble is discussed and then the slow recovery riddled with bumps. The author spends a lot of time on the growth of parallel computing, the role of GPUs and the development of CUDA. CUDA takes up a lot of the book as its development was not appreciated by the market for which activists saw it as an unnecessary cash-burn. The story discusses how parallel computation in scientific research was a core customer for NVidia's program but was not the killer app needed to sustain the business. The evolution of neural networks and their enablement from hacked GPUs takes up several chapters and one learns about Hinton, Sutskever and the early pronouncements of Elon Musk, This is where the story really picks up as the growth of use cases in academia for neural networks was immense but image classification was not chat GPT, so all of this laid the groundwork for the eventual growth in large language models. The author discusses Google's role in being the R&D center responsible for the transformer architecture but also how the team disbanded given the overall lack of interest in developing neural network architectures but the story goes back to the further developement of all of this as well as how Nvidia was at the center because of Cuda and its difficulty in replacement. The author briefly discusses AMD and Jensen's blood relation to Lisa Su, but the author then moves into the existential threat of AI as believed by Hinton and felt by the author himself. The book ends with a discussion of how Jensen felt and responded to these criticisms of the potential endpoint of AI and his complete dismissal of such concerns. There are personal stories which give some perspective into the mind of the man and gives a perspective that would have been hard to grasp in the absence of this book. Overall there is a history here woven into an entertaining story. The reader will gain a picture of the technology, the history, the roadmap and the future with this technology more and more embedded in it. Definitely worth the read for its entertainment value.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2025 by A. Menon
Format: Kindle
Overall, a good and detailed look at Jensen and NVidia. A few unnecessary side tracks into the author's bias on Gaza and social causes. The final chapter was a disappointing review of Jensen and the author's personal fears. Also, the book is now nearly 2 years out of date, which is forever in AI development.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2026 by William Maddox
I found this book to very useful on several levels. It informs my decisions in buying NVIDIA shares (I did). It gave a deep background about the recent history of AI - and the technology was very clearly explained. It gave a case study of a Silicon Valley success and the multiple factors governing that success. It finally, like Musk (The Musk Way, recommended) reminds us of the power of a single CEO/Founder and persistence in search of excellence. It would not be waste of time for students and managers and startup founders to read this book. Much better than the glib theory of the strategic planning professors.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2026 by Tom Gilb
Format: Kindle
It reads as a balanced view on NVidia and its growth, more from technology perspective, and how it propelled the gaming and AI landscapes. It’s not just about NVIdia and Jensen but also many other key players who were instrumental in getting to where we are and their perspectives.
Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2026 by GK
Format: Hardcover
Stephen Witt's "The Thinking Machine" is an exploration of the captivating and often enigmatic world of artificial intelligence. Witt's ability to weave intricate narratives with meticulous research makes this book not only a fascinating read but also an invaluable resource for anyone intrigued by the advancements and implications of AI. Despite the complexity of the subject matter, Witt's use of accessible language makes "The Thinking Machine" a suitable read for a wide audience. He avoids jargon and explains technical terms in a straightforward manner, allowing readers from various backgrounds to grasp the concepts with ease. I wrote an AI overview for a broad audience and understand its difficulty from experience. A crucial aspect that Witt addresses in "The Thinking Machine" is the environmental impact of AI, particularly the power consumption of data centers that support AI technologies. Witt sheds light on how the growing demand for AI applications contributes to increased energy usage, raising important questions about sustainability. The intricate nature of AI systems, characterized by continuous operation and complex computational demands, necessitates a strategic approach to energy efficiency. Data centers must prioritize optimization of resource usage, reduction of energy consumption, and facilitation of renewable energy transitions. The recently published book "Making IT Sustainable: Techniques and Applications" by Academic Press provides further insights into these critical developments, offering a comprehensive exploration of sustainable IT strategies and challenges of AI development.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2025 by Flying Wombat
Format: Hardcover
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip By Stephen Witt The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt describes the evolution of Nvidia (pronounced IN-vidia) under the leadership of founder and CEO Jensen Huang (“Jensen”) as well as parallel developments in computer technology and Artificial Intelligence in the 21st century. After graduation from Oregon State, Jensen worked at LSI Logic where despite his youth, he quickly rose to a leadership position. In the early 1990s together with two colleagues from Sun Microsystems, Nvidia was formed to provide chips for PC video games. With the support of Will Corrigan, founder and CEO of LSI Logic, Nvidia secured an initial round of venture funding. Like many entrepreneurial startups, Nvidia had its ups and downs. In 1997 with funding about exhausted its Riva 128 (Real-Time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator) took off selling over 1 million cards in four months. Gamers and game designers constantly want more features: pixel shaders, multiplayer combat, increased screens per second, these demands were straining traditional chip capabilities. At that time most chips processed one instruction at a time sequentially. Jensen began to explore a chip that would process multiple instructions at once, referred to as “parallel computing.” This technology was at the heart of Nvidia’s GeForce, referred to as a Graphics Processing Unit (“GPU”) that ushered in a golden age of gaming in the early 2000’s. Jensen believed that parallel processing could also be more effective with certain scientific applications: weather simulation, Black Hole modeling or breast imaging. Nvidia invested heavily in Computer Unified Domain Architecture (“CUDA”), but the demand for this technology was limited. CUDA launched in 2006 was a drag on earnings and by 2013, with Nvidia stock stagnant, investors were losing patience. The human brain (and other animals) recognize objects through a neural network. At the lowest level neurons in the brain recognize points of light, at the next level, neurons combine these points to make a line; then a shape; ultimately a cat that the brain recognizes. Professor Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto believed that a neural network could be created with transistors on silicon serving as neurons. With error correction technology, back propagation, a computer neural network could self-correct, learn to identify objects. In 2012 he tasked Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, two students with recent PhDs in computer science to create a neural network with CUDA. The two graduates pooled their savings, $1,000, to purchase 2 GeForce GPU’s from Nvidia and in Krizhevsky’s bedroom tried to create a neural computer network about equivalent to the brain of a honeybee. At first the results were awful, but then the network began to learn: correct identification “moving to 1 percent, then 10 percent, then 40 percent, then 60 percent ….” (page 124). They entered their network in a 2012 Artificial Intelligence contest recording a stunning 80% correct identification, 10 points above the nearest competitor. Shortly thereafter, Krizhevsky presented these results at an Artificial Intelligence conference in Florence and, overnight, a discipline was transformed. Let me pause to reflect, in an age with one-hundred million dollar + research budgets and huge science teams it is heartwarming that two recent graduates with a $1,000 capital budget working in a bedroom develop a Nobel Prize winning technology that transforms a discipline. Google, Microsoft, Facebook and numerous other companies and research institutions immediately recognized the potential of this technology. Nvidia has the chip design and has worked closely with Taiwan Semiconductor who manufactures these very complex devices; Nvidia has the software support. The billions of dollars invested to develop Artificial Intelligence has led to dramatic revenues and earnings gains for Nvidia as well as staggering investment returns (this is not an investment recommendation). For many years parallel computing and neural networks were backwater technologies. Jensen with imagination, hard work and persistence, as well as the assembly of a very capable team, and Hinton, Krizhevsky and Sutskeyer with the development of neural networks on silicon drove the revolution in artificial intelligence. This book is the history of that evolution. Julian Schroeder
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Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2025 by Julian Schroeder
Format: Hardcover
This book far exceeded my expectations. I thought is was going to be a bit of a clone of "The NVIDIA Way" book. From my perspective this goes so much deeper, including coverage of the actual true engineers who made key discoveries, which propelled the field of AI. They don't get much coverage in other books and literature, but Stephen Witt does a fantastic job of covering broad spectrum without stroking Haung's ego too much. Highly recommend this read! Can not put it down.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2026 by Amazon Customer