The Man Who Built NVIDIA (with Stephen Witt)
4/13/20261 hr 4 min
He arrived in America as a child with no English. He was mistakenly sent to a school for juvenile delinquents. He faced rampant prejudice--yet Jensen Huang, the under-the-radar CEO of NVIDIA, became a catalyzing figure behind the AI revolution and built the most valuable company in the world. Listen as journalist Stephen Witt speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about how Jensen pivoted from manufacturing processing units for video games to leveraging their capacity into astonishing computing power and speed. They analyze why Huang bet so heavily on AI when no one else did, and why NVIDIA processors enjoyed almost unrivalled market dominance for so long. They also explore Huang's unique way of thinking and problem-solving—as well as his temperamental leadership style.
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First 90 secondsRuss Roberts· Host0:00
[on-hold music] Welcome to EconTalk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to two thousand and six. Our email address is mail@econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. [on-hold music] Today is March fifth, twenty twenty-six, and my guest is author Steven Witt. His latest book and the subject of today's conversation is The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip. Steven, welcome to EconTalk.
Stephen Witt· Guest0:54
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Russ Roberts· Host0:56
So this is, um, really an extraordinary book. It's, it's a history indirectly of, I'd say, the last thirty years or so of the digital age. It's an incredible portrait of a visionary and his company. I think some of my listeners and viewers will know or have heard of Nvidia, but won't know much about it other than perhaps that it's the most valuable company in the world measured by market capitalization. Most of them I don't