‘The Nvidia Way’ review: The hard work of tech mastery
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The origin story of Nvidia has yet to attain the status of technology myth. It isn’t Hewlett and Packard in their garage in Palo Alto, Calif., or Gates and Allen raising hell with the Lakeside School programmers’ group.
It is three men in a San Jose Denny’s in 1992 guzzling from a single bottomless cup of coffee and thinking of computer chips. But if Nvidia’s staggering ascent says anything, it is that mythical status is imminent. In January 2020, in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, a single share of Nvidia stock cost just over $6.
These days you will pay nearly $140. The company’s early chips were a flop. “We survived ourselves," Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive, tells the journalist Tae Kim in “The Nvidia Way," a first draft of the firm’s history.
“We were our own worst enemy." Yet since the end of 2022, when ChatGPT was launched, Nvidia’s growth has been vertiginous. Quarter after quarter, it has shredded analysts’ estimates, and this year it briefly passed Microsoft and Apple to become the world’s most valuable company. Mr.
Kim’s book is nothing like Walter Isaacson’s portraits of tech geniuses Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. It is more prosaic, focusing on the technical and human ground war of building a company. Even so, there is drama in Nvidia’s remarkable rise, and Mr.
Kim’s reporting offers plenty of incident and portraiture. Artificial intelligence without Nvidia is impossible to imagine. Its chips are the building blocks for the AI infrastructure being developed by both entrenched technology giants and well-funded newcomers.
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