Stephen Witt: The Thinking Machine. Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip (2025) 📚

The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt outlines the rise of Nvidia, currently the most valuable company in the world, from the point of view of Jensen Huang, its CEO and one of the founders. Jensen, or Jen-Hsun, as his Taiwanese name originally was written, was sent by his parents to the United States in 1973 when he was just ten, along with his brother Jen-Chieh (“Jeff”) who was twelve. He survived bullying in the notorious school he ended up in and later made friends with fellow nerds in the more welcoming high school. There, he also learned table-tennis, eventually playing at the national level. In university Huang majored in electrical engineering, learning to design microchips. His first job after graduating was at AMD, from where he moved on to LSI Logic after two years. There, he met two brilliant chip designers from a customer, Sun Microsystems: Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky. When Sun declined their idea of a dedicated graphics accelerator card for gamers (they made serious…