‘The Thinking Machine’: How NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang built the most coveted chip

The person in the eye of this tech processor storm has been the high-profile, highly idiosyncratic Jensen Huang, the CEO and President of NVIDIA. Known for his dedication to work and willingness to take risks — he uses the line “our company is thirty days from going out of business” to instil a sense of urgency at work — Huang is rapidly acquiring the sort of aura that the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk have: of being a genius, tech billionaire baron who could control our lives.

The story of NVIDIA told sharply and succinctly

Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine brings readers up close to Jensen Huang and the rise of NVIDIA. (Photo: Wikimedia)

Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, NVIDIA and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip attempts to bring readers close to both Huang and NVIDIA, the company he co-founded with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. Given how event-packed the existence of both the brand and its founder has been, it is no easy task, but Witt handles it very well indeed.

The Thinking Machine does not have the sort of detail that Isaacson’s biographies of Jobs and Musk have, but packs in everything in a relatively slim 270-odd pages. It is succinct and sharp enough to be an entertaining yet informative read. Crucially, Witt stays objective, mentioning roses and thorns alike in the NVIDIA–Huang story. The Thinking Machine in this regard is very similar to Brad Stone’s epic Amazon Unbound, which detailed the story of Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos, and recently won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award.

Intense risk taker with temper

Based on interactions with Huang and his existing as well as former colleagues and acquaintances, the Huang that emerges from The Thinking Machine is a multi-faceted, intense and complex character. He wakes up and does a hundred push-ups, leaves thousand-dollar tips at Denny’s — his favourite restaurant (where he once did the dishes) — and inspires terror and admiration among his colleagues with his penchant for publicly dressing down those who do not meet his exacting standards of work. While he is legendary for his meltdowns, Witt says Huang’s employees worship him to the extent that “I believe they would follow him out of the window of a skyscraper if he saw a market opportunity there.”

It is just as well that they do, because Huang has a marked tendency to roll the dice again and again. His decision to go with parallel computing in the late 1990s was a distinctly risky one. “The success rate of parallel computing was zero percent when we came along,” Huang says in the book. “Literally zero. Everyone who tried to make it into a business had failed.” He, however, stuck to his guns, notwithstanding widespread cynicism and losing money on it. In 2012, he then bet heavily on neural networks running on his company’s parallel computing platform, and as the world watched in wonder, took NVIDIA from being a graphics card brand to a supercomputer one. Almost all major AI apps (ChatGPT, Copilot, Midjourney) have been developed on NVIDIA chips.

Thinking like an engineer, groomed by adversity

Witt attributes Huang’s ability to take risks to the fact that he thinks like an engineer rather than a businessman, “breaking down difficult concepts into simple principles, then leveraging these principles to great effect.” And while he does roll the dice, building technologies for customers that will emerge (or not) in the future, Huang is not reckless. “I do everything I can not to fail,” he tells the author.

What has helped Huang go against the tide and succeed is his ability to almost thrive in adversity, instead of being cowed by it. This stems from a tough childhood. Born in Thailand in a far-from-affluent family, his brother and he were sent to the US by their parents in the hope of getting a better life, given the political instability at home — his real name is Jen-Hsun Huang, but it was shortened to the more American Jensen (his brother’s name was changed from Jen-Chieh to Jeff).

Huang was just nine when his uncle (with whom they were staying in the US) accidentally enrolled him in an institute which was not a school, but actually a reform school. Huang was a target for bullies — “they shoved him in the alleys and chased him on the playground” — but he never backed off. Ben Bays, Huang’s classmate and friend, describes how other students tried to push Huang into a river by shaking the ropes on the bridge over it. “Somehow it never seemed to affect him… Actually, it looked like he was having fun.” It is a quality that Witt says Huang has carried with him ever since: “He learned to rely on himself when no one else was available to help, a lesson that would serve him well when making high-stakes decisions later in life.”

A compelling read about a complex CEO who believes in AI

The Thinking Machine is packed with incidents like these, giving us a deeper insight into the mind of Huang. But while the passages regarding his early struggle and the formative years of NVIDIA will attract those who do not know him too well (welcome to the planet), the really fascinating part of the book is about Huang’s outlook towards AI. While Witt himself seems a little fearful of the dangers AI could pose to humans, Huang insists there is nothing dangerous about AI and often gets confrontational in its defence.

When Witt talks to him about concerns regarding deep learning, which thinks and makes decisions almost like humans do, Huang waves away the fears. “I know how it works, so there’s nothing there,” he says. “It’s no different than how microwaves work… all it’s doing is processing data. There are so many other things to worry about.” Some of his exchanges on the subject get sharp and even intimidating, with Huang insisting AI is a pure force for progress rather than a threat to humanity.

“His anger seemed uncontained, omnidirectional, and wildly inappropriate. I was not Jensen’s employee and he had nothing to gain from raging at me,” Witt writes of a particularly angry reaction from the NVIDIA boss towards the end of the book, where Huang even says Witt has disappointed him and questions the very book he was being interviewed for. It is an almost Oppenheimer-like stance: a tendency to blame the users of the tools rather than the tools themselves.

Witt’s refusal to place Huang on a pedestal, even while admiring him, makes The Thinking Machine a compelling read for anyone interested in technology. There is a fair bit of tech jargon floating around, and not all of it is well explained, but Witt packs in plenty of incidents (often presenting them with near theatrical skill) to keep the narrative flowing smoothly even if you are not a geek.

All of which makes The Thinking Machine a must-read for all those who are not just interested in Huang and NVIDIA but also think deeply (pun intended) about technology and where it is headed.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
Stephen Witt
272 pp
Bodley Head
Rs 999