by Stephen Witt
First published 2025
Stephen Witt tells the story of Nvidia and its CEO Jensen Huang, who transformed a video game graphics company into the world's most valuable corporation. Through direct access to Huang, his colleagues, investors, and employees, Witt traces the company's journey from its 1993 founding in a Denny's restaurant to its 2024 peak as Earth's top-valued business. The book reveals how Huang made a massive gamble on artificial intelligence more than ten years ago, betting his entire operation on early scientific research that suggested AI's potential. Witt documents the technical innovations that allowed Nvidia to evolve from making gaming hardware to producing hundred-million-dollar supercomputers that power today's AI systems. The narrative follows the small team of engineers who rebuilt computer architecture and the business decisions that defied Wall Street expectations. Readers discover how Nvidia's specialized microchips now enable autonomous vehicles, hyper-realistic digital avatars, and AI-generated creative content, positioning the company at the center of what Huang calls the next industrial revolution.
Genres: business, non-fiction, 21st-century, artificial-intelligence, computer-science, history-of-science
Vibes: fast-paced, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: rise-to-power, underdog-story
Setting: Denny's
Period: 1993, 2024
272 pages · Hardcover · Viking