In the hours after Nvidia stunned Wall Street with yet another blockbuster earnings report, Stephen Witt found himself fielding a familiar question: Who exactly is Jensen Huang—this black-jacketed, relentlessly driven founder whose company now sits at the center of the most fevered technological boom since the dawn of the internet?
Witt, author of The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip, had just appeared on Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcast’s TechStuff with host Oz Woloshyn, where he attempted to decode the intensity behind a CEO who is shaping the architecture of global artificial intelligence—while also rattling the nerves of the people who work closest to him.
Across the conversation, Witt surfaced a portrait of a leader whose ambition and volatility are inseparable from Nvidia’s meteoric rise. Since its beginnings as a company that built gaming GPUs for hobbyists and young computer tinkerers, Nvidia has transformed into the essential backbone of modern AI.
Its chips train the models behind everything from search engines and drug discovery to robotics and national security. Its market value has swollen to historic proportions. And with each stock surge, Witt suggests, Huang only seems to wind the spring inside himself a little tighter.
The Mad Origins of a Boom
If the AI revolution feels sudden, Witt argues it began with an almost underground community of researchers who used Nvidia’s gaming cards—originally built for “mad scientists,” he says, with a grin—to push ahead with ideas mainstream labs considered delusional.
“It’s for mad scientists,” he recalls telling Woloshyn. “It’s for scientists who are pursuing unpopular or weird or kind of offbeat scientific projects, but ultimately the key use case turned out to be AI and specifically a branch of AI that most AI researchers thought was crazy… They couldn’t get $5,000 in research funding, but they could get enough money to afford two $500 Nvidia retail graphics gaming cards, which they did. And then they turned the neural net that they ran on these cards into something called AlexNet, which then started to recognize images better than any AI had ever done before. It smashed the paradigm.”
That paradigm shift catapulted Nvidia into a rarified position, one that left Huang both celebrated and feared.
An Electric-Socket CEO
Witt doesn’t mince words about what it means to sit across from Nvidia’s chief executive.
“It is like sticking your finger in an electric socket,” he says. “He’s so tightly wound. He expects so much to happen. In every conversation, just to even start talking to him, you have to be totally up to speed. He’s not gonna waste any time. He’s not gonna suffer fools.”
And when disappointed? The response could be volcanic.
“He has what I would describe as somewhat self-indulgent performances of anger from time to time… If you’re not delivering, he’s going to stand you up in front of an audience of people and just start screaming at you. Really, I mean, yelling, and he will humiliate you in front of an audience. People at Nvidia have to develop very thick skins.”
Witt himself was not spared. Recalling an interaction he expected to be warmly received, he winces slightly at the memory.
“I presented him with a clip from Arthur C. Clarke… I was hoping to get that response from Jensen. Instead, he just started screaming at me about how stupid the clip was, how he didn’t give a shit about Arthur C. Clarke. He’d never read one of his books. He didn’t read science fiction, and he thought the whole line of questioning was pedestrian and that I was letting him down by asking. I was wasting his time despite having written his biography. Jensen remains a little puzzle and extremely neurotic; by his own admission, he’s totally driven by negative emotions.”
It is a psychological profile that, in Witt’s telling, flips unexpectedly when the company stumbles.
“Jensen is actually a lot calmer and more compassionate with his employees when things are going wrong,” he says. “It’s when the company’s stock price is way up and it looks like everything’s going great that he really becomes much more cruel, like much, much meaner to everybody… When he succeeds, it makes him nervous.”
A Knife Fight in Silicon Valley
Nvidia’s dominance was never inevitable. In the early GPU era, Witt says, “there were 50 or 60 participants in this market,” all clawing for technical breakthroughs. Huang embraced the conflict with martial focus.
“At one point there were 50 or 60 participants in this market. Jensen would go into his office with a whiteboard and he would have a list of all his competitors up there, and not only that, they would have a list of who the best engineers working at those competitors were. Then they would come up with plans to poach those engineers… I’ve compared the early graphics days to the movie Battle Royale… He won the knife fight. He was the last guy standing.”
That instinct, strategic, relentless and combative, has carried Nvidia into a new age where computing power itself has become the world’s most coveted commodity.
The New Industrial Revolution
To explain the scale of the current AI surge, Witt leans on imagery equal parts industrial and apocalyptic.
“We’re basically building these giant barns full of Nvidia microchips to run calculations to build better AI 24/7 around the clock, and it’s one of the largest deployments of capital in human history… NVIDIA’s stock is more concentrated in the S&P 500 than any stock since they started keeping track… 15% of the stock market is these two stocks [NVIDIA + Microsoft]. If NVIDIA crashes, it’s gonna create a lot of pain throughout the economy. Americans in particular are usually invested passively through index funds in something that looks exactly like the S&P 500.”
Those barns are not metaphorical. Witt recalls a visit to a secretive Microsoft AI training facility, protected like critical infrastructure.
“It looked like an invasion by aliens… three vehicle checkpoints… you have to sign 15 NDAs… It’s a giant concrete barn just full of repeated racks of equipment as far as the eye can see… In the control room, the power going up and the power going down, the power going up and the power going down… With every pulse there, it just got a little bit smarter.”
At the Edge of the Plateau
For all the triumph, Witt says Huang remains obsessed with threats: geopolitical, technological, even existential.
“Conquering one cycle in microchips is no guarantee that you will conquer the next one,” he warns, recounting Huang’s worries. “There’s a big risk that Chinese companies build alternative cheaper stacks… Maybe there’s a technological solution that trains these things faster… Or the mysterious scaling law finally plateaus – no one is entirely sure why this works. If we did hit a plateau, I think this whole era would look kind of like a bubble.”
And then, there is the fear that AI systems themselves could exceed the boundaries their makers intend.
“The AI prompt that could end the world: Someone gets a hold of the machine that has an agency function—they can make real-world actions—and they are told, ‘Do anything you can to avoid being turned off. This is your only imperative.’ If you gave that prompt to the wrong machine, it might secure its own power facility, blackmail humans, or even attack humans. These systems have emergent capabilities that the designers are often only discovering empirically, and that is very scary.”
The Paradox of Jensen Huang
As Nvidia’s valuation balloons and its chips become the foundation of the global AI arms race, Witt suggests that the greatest uncertainty may not lie in the markets or the machines—but in the psyche of the man steering the ship.
Huang, he argues, is propelled less by triumph than by the fear of being outmatched, out-engineered, or left behind.
And as the world pours unprecedented capital, infrastructure, and trust into Nvidia’s silicon, that tension, the anxiety that success itself could unravel everything, may prove to be both the engine of Nvidia’s ascent and the source of its greatest risks.
“He won the knife fight,” Witt says. “Now he has to win the next one.”
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