Jensen Huang is the tech titan you need to know about – The Times

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Jensen Huang is the most powerful tech entrepreneur you’ve never heard of, as important a figure as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. As this story of his life and work unfolds, Stephen Witt, a writer for The New Yorker, reveals that tech bros like Huang, whatever you may think of their products, are rare beasts: propulsive, mercurial, brilliant and with a superhuman appetite for risk. Best of all, he leaves you optimistic that AI will change the world for the better.

If you use ChatGPT, self-drive mode in a car or any other new AI wizardry, you are using Huang’s products. He makes the superfast computer microchips that are powering the AI revolution. That’s why his company, Nvidia, last year became the most valuable in the world — worth more than $3 trillion — earning him a personal fortune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

How he got here is one of the great tales of Silicon Valley. Witt, who spoke to Huang and 200 others who have worked with him or competed against him, writes it like a screenplay. Born in 1963, Huang emigrated with his family to the US from Taiwan and grew up in poverty in rural Kentucky. Bullies at his school called him “chink”. He crossed a rope bridge on his way to and from school. “When Huang was in the middle, the bullies would grab the ropes and begin to swing, attempting to dislodge him into the river below.”

Huang had the last laugh, though. He got good grades and landed a job at Advanced Micro Devices, a tech company in California. He went on to found Nvidia in the 1990s to produce super-powered chips for computer games. He was so successful that Nvidia became the market leader and, aged just 38, he was one of the youngest chief executives in the S&P 500 stock market index.

Success prompted him to make the biggest bet anyone has taken on the future of tech. Twenty years ago he wagered that one day computers would “think’ for themselves, and for them to do so would require vastly more powerful chips. Fellow techies and Wall Street thought he was potty. An activist investor described it as “a suicide mission” but he persevered and invested billions in the microprocessors that would power a distant revolution.

He got his breakthrough when a young programmer named Alex Krizhevsky was tasked by Geoffrey Hinton, the British scientist nicknamed the Godfather of AI, with teaching a computer how to “see”. Krizhevsky repurposed Nvidia chips to execute ten quadrillion mathematical steps in a week and created an accurate image recognition system. AI language models, such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, followed. Overall, Huang’s chips have been responsible for a ten-billion-fold increase in computing power in the past decade.

This book is about but not for techies alone. Witt has a knack for explaining microprocessors and AI in ways that everyone can understand. He addresses the issue of how power-hungry AI models are by writing: “Ask ChatGPT to write you a 5,000 word paper and you use enough energy to run a microwave for an hour.” His turn of phrase is deft. Describing why video gamers snapped up Huang’s chips, Witt notes: “PC gamers were the best kind of customers: addicts.”

The book does more than recount a thrilling origin story. Witt illustrates how almost impossibly difficult it is to win in tech. As the pace of technological change accelerated, Nvidia teetered on the brink of bankruptcy on more than one occasion but Huang pulled through by taking outsized bets that came good. Huang realised “your only chance to survive was to find a promising hand and shove in all your chips — then do it again and again. Not to gamble was the biggest risk of all.”

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In his drive to overtake rival tech giants, notably Intel, Huang was as tough on his staff as Jobs was at Apple. If a project was delayed, he would “command the person responsible to stand up and explain to an audience every single thing that had gone wrong.” Huang would then “explode in fury, berating them cruelly. Spectators were important to Huang. ‘Failure must be shared,’ he said.” To atone for an error, he once asked a staffer to return all the money Nvidia had ever paid him. The employee did not sleep for three weeks.

But Huang’s big bets came good so often — adding a zero to employees’ net worth each time — that they put up with it. “You felt you couldn’t let him down. You just couldn’t,” a former employee says.

Perhaps best of all, Witt, through Huang, begins to dispel some of the fears surrounding AI. Huang is convinced that AI will spur a new industrial revolution. “We invented agriculture and then made the marginal cost of producing food zero. It was good for society,” Witt quotes him saying.

“We manufactured electricity at scale and it caused the marginal cost of chopping down trees, lighting fires and carrying fires and torches to approximately zero, and we went off to do something else. We make the marginal cost of things zero generation after generation.”

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Huang dismisses fears of job losses by asking whether calculators put maths teachers on the dole. He rejects the notion, propagated by Elon Musk, that supercomputers could become self-aware and turn on mankind. “In order for you to be a creature, you have to have some knowledge of self. I don’t know where that could happen.”

Not everyone will accept Huang’s predictions but this is the rarest of books on tech — one that may just leave you feeling good about an entrepreneur founder and optimistic about the future. We could all do with a bit of that now.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt (Bodley Head £25 pp272). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members