Behind the Money Business Book of the Year: Author Stephen Witt on Nvidia’s rise
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Dec 10, 2025 
In this insightful discussion, Stephen Witt, an author and journalist who wrote The Thinking Machine about NVIDIA, dives into the extraordinary rise of the company under Jensen Huang's leadership. He reveals Huang's relentless drive, characterized by a culture of urgency and constant demands for more. Witt explains how NVIDIA transformed gaming chips into a scientific powerhouse and created the AI hardware market from scratch. He also addresses the current competitive landscape and ethical concerns around AI, offering a compelling look at the mind of a visionary leader.
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Building A Market From Zero
- NVIDIA built a scientific computing platform from gaming chips and seeded a market that didn't exist.
- The company created an AI hardware market by supplying tools to marginalized researchers and waiting for use cases to emerge.
The 'Zero Billion Dollar' Gambit
- Jensen called it the 'zero billion dollar market': building for customers who don't yet exist.
- That strategy let NVIDIA invent the AI hardware market and later reap outsized rewards when demand arrived.
A Credible Existential Threat
- New hardware and alternative stacks (eg. Google's TPU/Gemini) present a real strategic threat to NVIDIA's dominance.
- The future balance of profits depends on whether rivals can offer cheaper or non‑NVIDIA-compatible alternatives.
