The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt: Forget Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg – meet the mogul in tech you have never heard of
The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt (Bodley Head £25, 272pp)
In summer last year, Nvidia topped $3trillion in market capitalisation. It became the most valuable company in the world.
How did what was once a niche vendor of video game hardware achieve this? Stephen Witt's thought-provoking, occasionally alarming book sets out to answer the question.
Much of Nvidia's success is down to its long-serving CEO, Jensen Huang. Forget Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Jensen Huang is probably the most influential tech bro alive today.
He deserves this wide-ranging account of his life and the meteoric rise of his company, although he probably won't appreciate it. When told about the book, Huang said, 'I hope I die before it comes out.'
By any standards, Huang is a remarkable, charismatic man. A colleague once said of him, 'Interacting with Jensen is like sticking your finger in the electrical socket.' He was born in Taiwan and spent his early childhood in Thailand.
He arrived in rural Kentucky as a ten-year-old in 1973, despatched 8,000 miles from his parents to a foreign land where he could barely speak the language.
He was bullied and the school he attended sounds like a penal institution. There was an illiterate who introduced himself by showing off the scars from his assorted stab wounds. Huang taught him to read and he became his protector against the bullies.
After graduating from Stanford University, he worked in Silicon Valley. In 1993, he and two others founded Nvidia, the name echoing the Latin for 'envy'. They wanted other tech firms to become green with envy at their future successes.
Huang, as described by Witt, appears to have had a Jekyll and Hyde approach to management. Often charming and self-deprecating, he could turn on employees who failed to meet his exacting standards. He would scream at his victims in front of their peers.
His own commitment to Nvidia is legendary. 'His hobbies,' one colleague told Witt, 'are work, email and work.' Like all great entrepreneurs, his willingness to risk all is astonishing. His greatest gamble came in 2013. Nvidia had been highly successful as a producer of GPUs (graphics processing units) for computers.
Huang became an overnight evangelist for AI. 'He sent out an email on Friday evening saying… that we were no longer a graphics company,' one Nvidia employee tells Witt. 'By Monday morning, we were an AI company.'
Plenty of people see potential dangers in AI. Huang will have none of this. 'I'm so tired of this question,' he says and launches on one of his famous rants when Witt persists in raising the subject. His company has surfed the wave of AI to accumulate incredible riches. As Witt's book makes scarily clear, our future may depend on whether Huang is right.
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