This is the latest confirmation that the “great man” theory of history continues to thrive in Silicon Valley. As such, it joins a genre that includes Walter Isaacson’s twin tomes on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, Brad Stone’s book on Jeff Bezos, Michael Becraft’s on Bill Gates, Max Chafkin’s on Peter Thiel and Michael Lewis’s on Sam Bankman-Fried. Notable characteristics of the genre include a tendency towards founder worship, discreet hagiography and a Whiggish interpretation of the life under examination.
The great man under Witt’s microscope is the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, a chip design company that went from being a small but plucky purveyor of graphics processing units (GPUs) for computer gaming to its current position as the third most valuable company in the world.
Two things drove this astonishing transition. One was Jensen Huang’s intuitive appreciation that Moore’s law – the observation that computing power doubles every two years – was not going to apply for ever, and that a radically different kind of computing architecture would be needed. The other was his decision to bet the future of Nvidia on that proposition and turn the company on a dime, much as Bill Gates had done with Microsoft in the 1990s when he had realised the significance of the internet.
Huang was born in Taiwan but brought up in Thailand and the US, of which he is now a citizen. He was a clever, diminutive, driven child who survived bullying at a boarding school in Kentucky but thrived academically. After graduating from Oregon State University he first worked at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a Silicon Valley chip company that competed with semiconductor giant Intel, before moving to LSI Logic, an innovative firm that developed the first design tools for chip architects. So he was in on the semiconductor industry from the very beginning of his career.
When Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, two chip designers who worked at Sun Microsystems, the fabled Silicon Valley workstation manufacturer, decided to set up a startup, they asked Huang to join them, on the grounds that he was already an accomplished and successful product manager at LSI. And so Nvidia was born, and Witt’s narrative really gets going.
Like most startups, Nvidia had initial ups and downs, but rapidly became known for providing the kind of processors that players of games such as Doom and Quake valued. Because accurate rendering of imagery in video games required computing power that conventional serial-processing processors struggled to provide, Nvidia moved to experimenting with chips that could do several calculations simultaneously, known as parallel processing, and thus to the development of GPUs.
Parallel processing provided an astonishing advance in computing power and speed. But writing software to harness the technology proved challenging: think of it as switching from thinking in three dimensions to thinking in 5,000. In order to make parallelism more widely usable, Nvidia embarked on a secret project, codenamed Cuda, to create a software platform that would make GPUs – hitherto used only for gaming – into tools that could be useful for any task requiring brute computing power.
Cuda turned out to be a masterstroke in two ways: first, it immediately increased the range of applications in which GPUs could be deployed – and therefore the size of the potential market; and second, although the software was free, it only worked with Nvidia hardware!
The only remaining problem was to find a market with an insatiable demand for high-end processors. And, as luck would have it, one such market hove into view, sailing under the banner of AI (AKA large language models), the training of which required unconscionable amounts of computing power. Suddenly the tech giants developed an insatiable hunger for Nvidia’s little supercomputer modules. The AI gold rush was on, and Huang was the man selling the picks and shovels – and on his way to a net worth of $100bn.
It’s a great story and Witt tells it well. He paints a rounded picture of a remarkable entrepreneur – part visionary, part maniacal workaholic, part inspiring corporate leader. Oh, and part ranting screamer: “yelling at people is part of his motivational strategy”, says one employee; he has “embraced candour to the extreme” says another, tongue firmly in cheek. So it’s a “warts and all” portrait, as Oliver Cromwell would have put it.
And just to underline that point: when, in his final interview for the book, Witt asks him what new jobs might be created by AI, Jensen loses it and starts shouting at him. “His anger seemed uncontained, omnidirectional, and wildly inappropriate,” he writes. “I was not Jensen’s employee, and he had nothing to gain from raging at me. He just seemed tired of being asked about the negative aspects of the tools he was building. He thought the question was stupid, and he had been asked it one too many times.”
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
