Nvidia: From video games to the AI revolution

The challenge of writing a book on the tech industry, especially something as rapidly evolving as artificial intelligence (AI), is that the story will be slightly out of date in the few months between the final draft being turned in and the hardback hitting the shelves.

- KATIE NOTOPOULOS

For example, Stephen Witt's The Thinking Machine, a lively biography of the CEO Jensen Huang, whose company Nvidia makes microchips that power AI systems like ChatGPT, recounts events only up to a mid-2024 climactic showdown between the author and his subject over the possibility of AI destroying humanity, which means that a line that appears in an earlier chapter—about how Elon Musk differs from Huang in temperament—mentions that the Tesla CEO has "at least" 11 children. That count is now woefully behind. By most estimates, he's up to 14.

It also means Witt's account doesn't include the recent drama that arose after the release of a new AI chatbot from the Chinese company DeepSeek.

A rival to ChatGPT, the Chinese chatbot was allegedly built for a fraction of the cost, with fewer fancy chips. This bucked the accepted wisdom that the only way to improve AI was to shovel vast sums of money at Nvidia to buy more and more of its hardware. When the markets absorbed this fact in January, Nvidia's stock price tumbled.

Before that fall, however, there was an astonishing rise. The story of how Nvidia became the hottest investment on Wall Street and a household name is fascinating because its trajectory differs significantly from that of its Big Tech peers.

For most of the time that companies like Apple, Meta, and Amazon have been around, regular people used their products and services every day. But, unless you were a hard-core gamer, you probably hadn't heard of Nvidia until recently.