All the recent breakthroughs in “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence”—from goofy chatbots to revolutionary medical tools—have relied on the computing power supplied by a single American company. The Santa Clara tech firm Nvidia makes microchips that can handle the sheer volume of data required for training A.I. models to imitate patterns in human speech and images. That one product has made Nvidia the most valuable company on earth. Its CEO, Jensen Huang, is one of the most important men in tech. He is also one of the most fascinating.
Two recent books illuminate the significance of Huang’s work: Tae Kim’s The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant and Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip. Kim, a senior writer at Barron’s who has covered the tech sector for decades, draws a portrait of Huang as a maverick CEO by outlining the suite of habits, strategies, and sayings that have fostered Nvidia’s success. Witt, whose book emerged from a
