Inside Nvidia: The company powering the AI gold rush

Summary

The Times Tech Podcast — “Inside Nvidia: The Company Powering the AI Gold Rush”

Date: February 27, 2026
Hosts: Danny Fortson (Silicon Valley Correspondent) & Katie Prescott (Technology Business Editor, The Times)
Special Guest: Stephen Witt (Author, "The Thinking Machine: History of AI Giant Nvidia")

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the astonishing rise of Nvidia — from humble beginnings in a San Jose Denny’s to becoming the world’s most valuable company and the indisputable heart of the ongoing AI revolution. Hosts Danny Fortson and Katie Prescott, joined by journalist and author Stephen Witt, dissect Nvidia’s most recent financial results, the culture of its driven CEO Jensen Huang, and the wider implications for global finance, technology, and geopolitics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Nvidia’s Astounding Financials & Market Reactions [03:30–07:26]

• Nvidia’s Q4 Results:

  • Revenue up to $68 billion (a 73% rise YoY)
  • Quarterly profit nearly doubled to $43 billion
  • Gross margin at 75% — exceptionally high even by tech standards
  • Full-year revenue: $216 billion, up 65% YoY

• Market Paradox:

  • Despite record-breaking numbers and beating forecasts, Nvidia's share price dropped 4.3%, reflecting market unease about a potential tech bubble.
    • Danny Fortson: "Here you have these forecast beating results on every measure and yet the stock market is like, I’m uncomfortable." [06:08]

• Drivers of Growth:

  • Dominated by data center demand and big tech spending. There is concern about whether such spending is sustainable.

• Bubble or Not?

  • The analysts remain bullish (HSBC, Bank of America, Jefferies), but skepticism is evident.

2. Why Everyone Cares About Nvidia [07:26–09:25]

• Global Economical Significance:
  • "This company has become the bellwether for the almost the entire global economy because it is the most valuable company on the planet."
    • Danny Fortson [07:26]
  • Nvidia and its Big Tech cohort power 25–30% of the S&P 500, directly influencing pensions and investments worldwide.
• ‘Circular’ Industry Deals:
  • Eg. Tech giants loaning/investing massive sums into AI companies, which then funnel money back to Nvidia for chips — a “washing machine” dynamic.
    • Danny Fortson: "We give you money and then you give it to us right back and we count it as revenue." [10:46]

3. Geopolitics — China, Chips & Risk [08:35–10:46]

• China as a Market & Political Flashpoint:
  • No AI chip revenue from China in forecasts due to US export restrictions; this generates both business and political uncertainty.
• Threat of Alternatives:
  • Competitors like AMD are making inroads (e.g., $100 billion deal with Meta).
  • Rising signs of Chinese and other alternatives as US-China chip tensions persist.
• Debt-Driven Expansion:
  • Even big western tech firms are taking on debt to fund Nvidia-powered data centers.

4. Jensen Huang’s Leadership & Nvidia’s Culture — Stephen Witt Interview [12:12–37:07]

• Witt’s Research:

  • Spoke with ~100 Nvidia executives, friends, and cofounders; built a "three-dimensional portrait of who Jensen is."
    • Stephen Witt: "Jensen hasn’t forgotten the bad old days...In some ways he still lives in the world where Nvidia is not a success." [13:06]

• Nvidia’s Secret: The CUDA Platform

  • Origin: Started as a video game chipmaker, catered to hobbyists willing to pay for high-performance graphics cards.

  • Breakthrough: CUDA enabled “parallel computing” — scientists and researchers hacked GPUs to solve complex problems quickly and cheaply.

    • Witt: “Unlocking that capability was the secret to making AI succeed.” [21:13]

  • Platform Lock-In:

    • Developers get committed (“locked-in”) to Nvidia’s CUDA system; alternatives are hard to adopt later.
      • Witt: "The programmers are like, sorry, this is the best ... We’re now committed forever to the expensive Nvidia hardware upgrade ladder." [23:35]

• Jensen Huang’s Leadership Style

  • Paranoia, “Wartime” Mentality:

    • Jensen remains "terrified" of riches breeding complacency; prefers pressure and thrives on crisis.
      • Witt: "His greatest fear is that his company will get rich and his employees will grow complacent. He's terrified of this. I'm dead serious. He's just completely neurotic about this particular thing happening." [15:59]
    • Employees are discouraged from tracking the stock price day-to-day: "If you're an employee, you're not going to do anything over the course of the workday that's going to...the stock price is a meaningful input into unless you're–" [15:40]
    • Nvidia's unofficial motto: act like 30 days from bankruptcy.

  • Love & Fear Dynamic:

    • Employees receive both “extra time and encouragement” and (sometimes public) “explosions” — love and fear foster loyalty and excellence:
      • Witt: “His executives want his love, and they’re also afraid of him.” [29:02]
    • Generous stock options have made many early employees tremendously wealthy — “I’ve created more billionaires in my company than maybe anybody else in America.” [29:50, Danny quoting Huang]

  • Public Persona:

    • The charismatic, leather-jacket-wearing “showman” is a carefully cultivated act. Actually nervous before public speaking; prefers engineering to PR.
      • Witt: “I was with him in the green room before he went out to give a speech...he was nervous to be up there. He said, ‘I can’t sleep whenever I have to do this.’” [26:57]

5. Nvidia, Trump, and the Geopolitical Chessboard [31:52–34:19]

• Taiwan, Manufacturing, and Tariffs:
  • All Nvidia chips historically made in Taiwan by TSMC, though shifting some manufacturing to the US.
  • Huang “treats Trump like an engineering problem,” experimenting with different approaches to secure desired outcomes.
• Biggest Risk: Talent Pipeline
  • Over half of Nvidia employees are foreign-born; US visa policies are a vital strategic concern.
    • Witt: “If these skilled engineers don’t end up working for him, then they will go to their home countries and build companies that compete with Nvidia and beat him. And Jensen knows it can happen because he did that.” [34:19]
  • Keeping access to international talent is “the thing he can’t afford to lose,” more important than headline political issues.

6. Is There Really a Bubble? [35:20–36:05]

• Witt’s View:

  • “I don’t think we’re in a bubble. I don’t think it’s popping. I don’t see any evidence of that.” [35:20]
  • Demand is not speculative; real shift in developer and enterprise behavior toward AI.
  • "I think we've only trained...about 1% of the AI that we're ultimately going to train in a mature AI industry."

• Jensen’s Own Words:

  • Prescott recalling: “Do you remember, Danny, when I interviewed Jensen, he said, 'we're not in a bubble, it's a build out.'” [36:00]

7. Leadership: The Mindset of Relentless Paranoia [37:07–38:47]

• Fortson’s Reflection:
  • Compares Jensen’s always-alert mindset to Jeff Bezos’s “Day One” and Andy Grove’s “Only the Paranoid Survive.”
    • Fortson: “There is a thing here around just never relaxing...I’ve seen a version of that movie before with other CEOs, and obviously they've all been wildly successful.” [37:07]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Fortson on Nvidia’s rise:
  "This company has become the bellwether for the almost the entire global economy..." [07:26]

• Witt on Nvidia’s secret sauce:
  “Unlocking that capability (CUDA) was the secret to making AI succeed.” [21:13]

• Witt on Jensen’s culture of fear and drive:
  “His greatest fear is that his company will get rich and his employees will grow complacent. He’s terrified of this. I’m dead serious.” [15:59]
  "Nvidia's motto is, you should act like the company is 30 days from going into bankruptcy." [16:59]

• Witt on employee experience:
  "His executives want his love, and they're also afraid of him. It's a combination of love and fear." [29:02]

• Witt on geopolitics:
  “If these skilled engineers don’t end up working for him, then they will go to their home countries and build companies that compete with Nvidia and beat him. And Jensen knows it can happen because he did that.” [34:19]

• Witt on the “bubble” question:
  “I don’t think we’re in a bubble. I don’t think it’s popping. I don’t see any evidence of that.” [35:20]

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Suggested Listening Timestamps

• [03:30] — Dissecting Nvidia’s Q4 results
• [08:35] — Geopolitical crosswinds; China sales
• [12:12] — Start of in-depth Stephen Witt interview
• [13:06] — Jensen’s origins; “still lives in the bad old days”
• [19:29] — The rise from gaming chips to AI supercomputing (CUDA)
• [15:59] — Culture of fear/complacency; “act like 30 days from bankruptcy”
• [31:52] — On Trump, Taiwan, and global chip politics
• [34:19] — Nvidia’s dependence on international talent pipeline
• [35:20] — Is there an AI bubble? Witt’s perspective
• [37:07] — The modern CEO’s mindset: paranoia and leadership

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Tone and Style

The conversation maintains an energetic, lightly irreverent tone, as hosts banter over explosive financial stats, market psychology, and the remarkable personality of Jensen Huang. Stephen Witt offers a candid, almost story-like inside look at Nvidia’s culture, enriching technical topics with real human drama and industry lore.

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For anyone who wants to understand why Nvidia dominates headlines — and why its CEO, company culture, and chips are so influential — this episode is essential listening.

Transcript

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[Danny Fortson]

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[Katie Prescott]

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[Danny Fortson]

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[Katie Prescott]

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[Danny Fortson]

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[Katie Prescott]

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[Danny Fortson]

Hello, and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast, where every week we unpack how technology is reshaping business culture and everyday life. I'm Danny Fortson out here in Silicon Valley.

[Katie Prescott]

And I'm Katie Prescott. Katie in the city, the city of London. And this week, it's. It is once again the big one. Yes. Nvidia, the world's most valuable company and the chip maker powering the AI revolution, has published its fourth quarter earnings, and once again, they are enormous. Hooray.

[Danny Fortson]

Ginormous.

[Katie Prescott]

Maybe. Or not.

[Danny Fortson]

Yes. Yes. Well, so we're going to be unpacking all of it and finding out how this company went. From an idea hatched in a San Jose Denny's downmarket diner, beloved in my youth, to the company that is more valuable than all 2000 companies listed in Britain combined.

[Katie Prescott]

This one extraordinary statistic.

[Danny Fortson]

It's crazy. It is crazy. And to help us tell the Nvidia story, we've enlisted the help of Steven Witt. He is the author and journalist who has spent the past few years getting to know the company's CEO, Jensen Wang, very, very well. Better than most.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah. I mean, there are very few pies. It feels like that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn't have his fingers in. When he was over in London last year, it felt like he was sprinkling cash in all the top AI companies, I mean, 11 labs, Synthesia. He was liberally throwing around the dollars that he's making that we're going to be discussing later, later today. But of course, everybody is worrying about the circular deal making between the largest players in AI. And Jenison Huang really is at the heart of this spider's web, isn't he? And a lot of people are trying to unpick these relationships and how they're working and the, the possible impact if, if this all starts to fall apart.

[Danny Fortson]

That's right. And so this week we're actually recording a day later than normal because Nvidia was delivering its fourth quarter annual results, which has become an event. And they beat forecasts. Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise.

[Katie Prescott]

It's become a bit boring now, hasn't it?

[Danny Fortson]

Yes. And tried to dismiss these grand worries about the bubble.

[Katie Prescott]

I mean, it hasn't missed Wall Street's targets in about five years. And I can't think of another company where we've become so immune to these enormous figures and when they don't actually have an impact on its share price. I mean, clearly last year its value rose to 5 trillion. Last October, I think it was about 3 trillion at the start of the year. So it went up exponentially, but they've slipped about 7% since then, which is really surprising given that they are a classic beat and raised stock every quarter they publish their results, they beat what everyone thinks they're going to produce, and then they raise their forecast. So our big question today is do Nvidia's latest earnings ease bubble concerns or heighten them?

[Danny Fortson]

Right, so what are the numbers? Revenue between last three months this year relative to last year, up 68 billion. That's up 73% profit. Quarterly profit nearly doubled to $43 billion. Gross margin was 75%. I mean, how many companies can make 75% margin? Anything they're selling. When you think about like Tesco, it's like 0.1%. And the forecast predicts 78 billion in revenue for this current quarter. Just to put that in perspective, I think it was two years ago their annual profit was 4 billion or less than $5 billion. This year it was a total was 120 billion. And I think that just really brings to life what has happened these last couple years in this AI revolution. I mean, that's just insane. That is, you know, a small nation's income.

[Katie Prescott]

And its revenue for this year is $216 billion, up 65% year on year.

[Danny Fortson]

What did the stock market think of these amazing numbers?

[Katie Prescott]

Dun Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. I'm going to get up Nvidia's share price, it's down 4.3%.

[Danny Fortson]

Well, it really speaks to the central question, right? Like are we in a bubble or not? And I think people are looking for any reason to be like, you know what, no, this is not sustainable. This is the rise before the fall. This simply can't keep going. And so I just think as we've seen with, we've talked about it in the last couple weeks, the whole sell off in the market broadly and then here you have these forecast beating results on every measure and yet the stock market is like, I'm uncomfortable.

[Katie Prescott]

It's very notable that sales really are being driven by data center demand and by the big tech companies. So you're exactly right. It's that nervousness around big tech, their spending, can they afford the spending to continue that I think is really bouncing back on Nvidia. But it's interesting to note, I was just reading through some of the financial analysts notes about the results that have come through today from the likes of HSBC and Bank of America and Jefferies and they've all still got buy ratings on Nvidia, which means that so they're advising their investors to buy and they're still very bullish on the stock but obviously that's not feeding through to the share price.

[Danny Fortson]

So just stepping back and thinking about why we care about all of this, like you know, because you could be like, well who cares about the stock of one company? This company has become the kind of the bellwether for the almost the entire global economy because it is the most valuable company on the planet. It, along with the other big six tech companies account for something like 25 to 30% of the S&P 500, which is, you know, basically people's pensions, you know, what they're going to retire and all of this stuff. And it is seen as like the key indicator of is this AI revolution real and how to your point, who's going to pay for it? Because that's the other thing that Wall Street's freaking out about in past bubbles and kind of blow ups credit. People taking on debt to pay for things is a real problem. And you're starting to see even the biggest companies in the world pay for their data centers, pay for their Nvidia chips with debt. They're taking out big old loans to pay for all this because they're just blowing through all of their cash to kind of build all these countries of geniuses and data centers. As Dario Amadei calls them.

[Katie Prescott]

The other thing that we always watch for really closely in Nvidia's results is any information at all about sales to China. And that's because it tells us a lot about the political relationship between the US and China. But also for Nvidia, it is an enormous market. And Nvidia really has been in the eye of the storm in terms of this ongoing kind of bitter cold war between Washington and Beijing. And it was interesting that the cfo, Colette Kress, Nvidia's cfo, said that Nvidia didn't include any AI chip revenue from China in its forecast. So those sales are still not happening. And I know you'll remember that Nvidia really got caught up in all of this when Donald Trump said, hey, you can sell some of your chips to China. I mean, as long as you give some cash to the White House along the way.

[Danny Fortson]

Yes, indeed, indeed.

[Katie Prescott]

And I know Jensen Huang has spoken a lot about how concerned he is that the, the longer that they stop sales to China, the more the Chinese start developing their own products and the market gets close to them.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah. And you're already starting to see other kind of companies because everybody looks at that $120 billion in profits in a year. A company could have been around a century and not made that in their entire history. They see those profits and they've been working for a long time on kind of coming up with alternatives. And you're starting to see companies, chip startups or chip startups that have been around for a while get snapped up or roll out alternatives. And amd, big rival run by Lisa Su, they just announced a deal to sell $100 billion of chips to Meta. You know, so everybody's looking around being like, how can we get take away some of this business from. From Nvidia? And I think the worries, from what I see are what's going to happen with China? The people are starting to take out loans to buy this kit. And then as you mentioned, the circular deals of like, oh, we're going to invest $30 billion in OpenAI. And what is OpenAI going to spend it on? Oh, wait, our stuff.

[Katie Prescott]

And it was going to be a hundred, but now it's actually 30. And that original deal wasn't really a deal.

[Danny Fortson]

Y. So it's this. It's this washing machine where we give you money and then you give it to us right back and we count it as revenue. Wall Street's uncomfortable with that, understandably. So people walked away this week, even though the numbers were fabulous. And they're just like, this doesn't pass a smell test long term.

[Katie Prescott]

If I was Jensen Huang, though, I would feel a bit miffed, wouldn't you? Reduce these sales figures.

[Danny Fortson]

And I'm like, what do you people want?

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah, what more can I do?

[Danny Fortson]

Exactly. But I mean, the company is still worth $4.7 trillion and he is still one of the richest men on the planet and still like to channel our present, he's the hottest company around, you

[Katie Prescott]

know, so it feels like a really good day, Danny, to look back at Nvidia's history and work out how they got here, because I don't think we've done that before. We talk about their results every three months, as you said. You know, they're a huge important company to all of us because of the weight that they have on the stock market. But who are they?

[Danny Fortson]

So here to break it down with us is someone who knows the company and its CEO inside out, journalist Stephen Witt. He's the author of the Thinking Machine History of AI giant Nvidia, which won the Financial Times Business Book of the year in 2025. Congratulations and welcome, Stephen.

[Katie Prescott]

And congratulations on writing your book. How long did it take you?

[Stephen Witt]

It took about a year. I wrote it as fast as I possibly could because there was just so much going on with Nvidia. I got the commission and it just took off like a rocket ship. It was growing rapidly even when I wrote the book, but by the time I was finished, it had gone. Actually become the most valuable company in the world. Since then it has continued to accumulate in value and briefly became probably the most valuable company in human history with almost an 8% concentration in the S&P 500.

[Katie Prescott]

Stephen, the book based on what? Interviews with Jensen clearly, but also on sources close to him and from within the company.

[Stephen Witt]

Yeah, that's right. I interviewed Almost, I think 100 Nvidia executives. I interviewed many of Jensen's old friends. I interviewed, you know, his co founders. I interviewed people who knew him from a long time ago. I really wanted to build out the character of Jensen, the person of who he is, which is hard. He's guarded, you know, he didn't give me access to his emails or anything like I had to kind of piece it together as best I could could. But there was enough information going into the past to build to me at least a convincing kind of three dimensional portrait of who Jensen is from the pieces of data that were lying around. I, I read every New York Times article that ever mentioned Nvidia. Going back to 1999 and there's 700 of them. Just to get a sense of what Nvidia looked like to Jensen at that time. The success of this company was 30 years in the making and there were 20 years where it was tough. Jensen hasn't forgotten that that happened. And in some ways he still lives in the bad old days. He still lives in the world where, you know, Nvidia is not a success. That's his mentality. You know, he didn't really break through into the kind of top tier of business until he was in his 50s. So. So it was a long time in coming. He wasn't some kind of overnight success. And I think that was the story I really wanted to tell.

[Danny Fortson]

And I'm curious because we're talking to you obviously in the week of these earnings and Nvidia has become almost like the every six week meeting of the Fed where everybody just like stops and watches because it's become so important to the economy. There's watch parties. Have you been to any of these watch parties?

[Stephen Witt]

I was actually an Nvidia watch party at Nvidia, which was pretty funny. I mean they knew the results they were going to report but they were embargoed. So it was funny. I actually was physically present in the company on the day when it became the most valuable, valuable company on earth. Nobody acted any different. There was no champagne or anything.

[Danny Fortson]

There's no people basically said staring at their phone, being like, I can't believe

[Stephen Witt]

how much they were. Like a couple other employees had to

[Katie Prescott]

look how rich I've become.

[Stephen Witt]

You would think so. But Jensen really discourages this. You got to remember Jensen's been doing this for 30 years. There have been several times in Video's company where the stock went down almost 90%, sometimes more. You know, there was a period where Nvidia went was it like $2? So he hasn't forgo forgotten that. So he discourages his employees from paying too much attention. There's no CNBC is not on or at the office. There's no ticker tape showing Nvidia stock price. In fact, I talked to somebody who previously worked at intel and he's like, actually at intel we paid way more attention to the stock price day to day than we do at Nvidia. It's a distraction. If you're an employee, you're not going to do anything over the course of the workday that's, that's going to, you know, the stock price is a meaningful input into unless you're Like, I just

[Danny Fortson]

shipped this line of code another 20 cents.

[Stephen Witt]

Yeah. It's like, what is that? How's. Is that going to change what you're doing?

[Katie Prescott]

But to that point, I mean, do you think Jensen Huang would get upset then when the stock price goes down like, 4% like it has today, having delivered such extraordinary results?

[Stephen Witt]

Nope. The opposite, in fact. His greatest fear is that his company will get rich and his employees will grow complacent. And he's terrified of this. I'm dead serious. He's just completely neurotic about this particular thing happening. And I'm talking to people inside the company. You remember when Deep Seek happened last year, which wiped out about a trillion dollars in value? It turned out to be an overreaction, but at least in the short term, it did a lot of pain. And I was talking to people inside the company, like, how's it going? They're like, oh, Jensen's in a much better mood. He's much more compassionate. He's a better leader. He's saying, we all have to pull together. He's such a good leader under pressure. I remember talking to him. His first job was a waiter at Denny's. It was this restaurant chain in the United States. And he was like, yeah, I think I calmed during the dinner rush hour. I think my heart rate goes down. It's when nothing happens that I get agitated and upset. And I think that's true at Nvidia, too. When things are going well, he becomes very nervous. Remember, the profits that he earns are just the opportunity for somebody else. Nvidia's motto is, you should act like the company is 30 days from going into bankruptcy.

[Katie Prescott]

Is that right? That's fascinating. So he's a wartime leader.

[Danny Fortson]

That's. That's like. It's the only paranoid survived, right?

[Stephen Witt]

Only the paranoid survived. That was the title of Andy Grove's book about Intel. Right. The CEO of Intel wrote that. And Jensen has absorbed that lesson completely. He envisions doomsday scenarios for Nvidia constantly. And even though it's not literally true that Nvidia is 30 days from going out of business, I said this to him. Well, it's not actually true. He's like, well, no, it's not literally true, but the decisions we make over the next 30 days could lead to us eventually going out of business if we don't make the right ones. Nvidia has a target on its back. Google's chasing it. Asics, Broadcom, China. People see how much they're making it. You know, use 70% gross margin on a chip. Like, you got a target on your back and you're what, you're hunted. And so when you succeed and make more money, for Jensen, it's just another person, you know, trying to shoot them down.

[Katie Prescott]

So what got you interested in Jensen Huang and Nvidia? Why did you start to write about this subject?

[Stephen Witt]

I had actually known about him going way back. I wasn't really a gamer, but the first thing I did in my career was trade stocks on Wall street for a hedge fund. I remember when Enron was kicked out of the S&P 500. Nvidia was put in. There used to be this trade. It no longer exists, but you could buy a company that you thought might get added to the S&P 500 and then capitalize on the fact that the index funds would provide liquidity. You'd make a little money. We actually bought the stock, but barely understanding what they did.

[Katie Prescott]

Oh, my good. When was that?

[Stephen Witt]

2001.

[Katie Prescott]

Oh, wow.

[Stephen Witt]

It's a long time ago when it

[Katie Prescott]

was a flat line on the bottom of the graph.

[Stephen Witt]

Well, at that time, actually, they looked kind of like an up and coming company because they were having success with this video game stuff. Nobody had ever heard of them then for the next 12 or 13 years, they were just absolutely in the toilet. You know, they were one of the dogs of The S and P 500. They never performed. They never. They never outperformed anybody, and people would make fun of them. Jensen was in trouble. This reputation that he has garnered as a visionary, as, As a great leader, he did not have that for the first 20 years of his career. People thought he was eccentric. You know, he didn't wear a leather jacket.

[Danny Fortson]

I was going to say, did he have the leather jacket then? Because the leather jacket is like a.

[Stephen Witt]

No. The whole rebrand, the whole. What started to happen was that his, his. His video game chips were so good at doing massive calculations in parallel that scientists became interested in them and they would actually hack the video game programming software just to get at the circuits to do more complex kinds of things like doing, like, weather forecasting or, you know, petroleum engineering or quantum physics.

[Katie Prescott]

Listeners who don't know. So he started off making computer graphics cards.

[Stephen Witt]

He basically made a hobbyist product for nerds. So you would.

[Danny Fortson]

You.

[Stephen Witt]

If you were really into video games, you wanted the highest possible frame rate for your game, you wanted it to run as smoothly as possible. And there was a certain class of consumer that would pay basically any price to make this happen. And Jensen realized that and built These powerful kind of video game engines for his customers. And then they would buy these things and they would be so proud of them. They would get like clear computer cases to showcase the video game cards that they were running. It was like a whole subculture. In fact, even today, if you go to the Nvidia subreddit, all they talk about is video games. Like, there's no discussion of the stock or AI. It's totally for hobbyist PC guys who want to build what they call rigs. That's basically hot rodding your PC.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah.

[Stephen Witt]

And Jensen's innovation was that he realized that there was some wiggle room on pricing with these guys and basically he could charge them more to fund what was functionally a very ambitious scientific computing effort. Right. And they started shipping this platform for supercomputing called cuda. So you have this video game card and you flip a switch on it, and if you know what you're doing on the back, you can start doing scientific and programming and computing. Now, the number of users who actually flipped that switch and did weather forecasting instead of playing Call of Duty is small. But Jensen thought that those were the most important customers, the science guys, because maybe they could unlock some new branch of science. And the thing is, supercomputing had already existed, Right? And if you're a well established research scientist, you can afford time on a supercomputer. So who is CUDA for? Like, who is this for? Well, it's for marginalized scientists, right? It's for scientists without a lot of research money, without a lot of funding, for scientists who can't afford to build their, you know, get their own supercomputer. They build one, they jerry rig one out of, out of video game cards. And it turned out that unlocking that capability was the secret to making AI succeed.

[Katie Prescott]

And could you just explain to listeners what CUDA is? Because it remains one of the reasons why Nvidia is such a successful company.

[Stephen Witt]

Yeah, it's a kind of platform, a software platform where you can kind of do what's called parallel computing. Basically what we're doing here is taking one big problem, chopping it up into a number of smaller problems, and then executing them all at once. The nice thing about this is you take advantage of more of the kind of surface of the microchip. So, like in Intel's classic model is serial computing. We're bringing one problem to the processor at a time. If you look at an intel microchip, each clock cycle it pulses with electricity. On the intel chip, maybe 3% of the circuits are active. With each pulse on an Nvidia chip, it can be more like 30 or 40%. So Cuda is basically a platform to make that more accessible to the programmers, so they don't have to do so much work to get to those kind of precious circuits and clock cycles, which are their fuel and which are becoming like basically money now. Right? It's the most valuable commodity in our society now is what they call compute or basically clock cycles on a microchip. Because with each pulse of the microchip, you can get another answer from AI.

[Katie Prescott]

And it's what I keep hearing from developers is that they're so tied into the CUDA system that they don't want to buy other chips.

[Stephen Witt]

That's exactly right. A great story I heard early on at Adobe, like 2008, 2009, they were trying to build the world's first 4K video editor. And the management in Adobe actually tried to block the programmers from using Nvidia chips because they knew this would happen. They knew they'd get locked into Nvidia forever. But the programmers are like, sorry, this is the best. They actually, I think they did it in secret, basically, and then brought it to management, was like, look, we built a 4K video editor. There's just one thing. We're now committed forever to the expensive Nvidia hardware upgrade ladder. And it's not going to be so easy to port this 4K video editor to the cheap Chinese commodity hardware that everyone likes to use. That same thing happened in AI, and it's why Nvidia went from being, you know, essentially a flatline stock to the most valuable company in the world. They basically got the world to commit to their expensive upgrade.

[Danny Fortson]

Today's episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.

[Katie Prescott]

ServiceNow describes itself as an AI control tower for business reinvention, connecting people, systems, data and AI so workflows more smoothly across an organization.

[Danny Fortson]

The platform integrates with different clouds, models and data sources, bringing them together in one place to help.

[Katie Prescott]

To learn More about how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com

[American Red Cross Announcer]

Blood donation is now more inclusive. More people are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross through FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible for to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross. The Red Cross is committed to achieving an inclusive blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect, while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org LGBTQ that's redcrossblood.org LGBTQ howdy, howdy ho, and welcome

[Stephen Witt]

to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson. And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy. And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before. That's right. Hey.

[American Red Cross Announcer]

Hey. So each week, you'll get my unfiltered

[Stephen Witt]

raw reactions to every single chapter. And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what. What's next? Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong. News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy Fan Fellows wherever you get your podcasts.

[Katie Prescott]

What's he like, Stephen? I mean, I've met him a few times, and I've seen the sharp side of Jensen when he doesn't like what journalists are asking him in a press conference. And he gets touchy. And I've seen the very, very charming side outside 10 Downing street, where he's with British ministers, and he's, you know, on it, on his smiling a game.

[Stephen Witt]

The Jensen you see in public is a. Is an act. It's a carefully cultivated Persona that he's groomed and built. You know, the most amazing thing that I learned about Jensen, of all the many amazing things I learned, I think the most amazing thing is he hates public speaking, which is so weird because he's so good at it. I mean, he's just. He can sit up there in front of an audience and talk for two hours and have everyone on the edge of their chair. But I was with him in the green room before he went out to give a speech one time, and I'm looking at the guy, and he's rocking back and forth on his feet, and he's cracking all these weak jokes, and I'm like, oh, my God, this guy is nervous. This is a meaningless speech he was giving. When I saw him, too, it was like 400 people, and he was just. He was nervous to be up there. He's like, yeah, I can't sleep whenever I have to do this. I can't sleep the night before. I get so nervous. It was crazy to think about. This is the most Powerful man in the world. I mean, tells the President what to do. You know, like, it's unbelievable, but it's really true. And to see that human side of him was. Was really extraordinary.

[Katie Prescott]

So he's shyer than he comes across.

[Stephen Witt]

I don't know if he. I would never call Jensen shy, but I think that he does get a little stage fright, or not so comfortable with being kind of the guy on stage, which is amazing. He's great at it. He's better than any other CEO, at least. Going back to, like, Steve Jobs, you know, Steve Jobs is good, but he's one of the best. He's just so good at being on stage and when he gives. I watched him present for two hours at CES last month, and everyone was just gripped. I mean, he's just talking about this incredible technology. I mean, I think that's part of it. You know, what they've engineered and what they've promoted is just so unreal that it's just captivating to hear his vision and what it could be. Yeah. And the leather jacket came along later. Right. Actually, what happened was his daughter got a job at Louis Vuitton, and I think she was like, dad, you need to makeover.

[Katie Prescott]

Ouch. So, but. But aside from the sort of stage fright stuff, what's he like with his staff? What's his reputation like within the company?

[Stephen Witt]

I mean, this is the thing. He's super nice in some ways. Everyone has a story about a time that Jensen went out of his way to give them extra time, to help them and to encourage them and to be nice to them. And then everyone has a story at the time Jensen exploded and started screaming at you in public in front of 100 people and humiliating you in an incredibly cruel way. So he has both of those things, and as a result, the people who stick around, they want his love, and they're also afraid of him. It's a combination of love and fear. As a result, his executives, they're excellent. Most of them could be CEOs of other company in their own rights, but ironically, they'd probably make less money than they would as a top executive in video.

[Danny Fortson]

He's famously said, I've created more billionaires in my company than maybe anybody else in America.

[Stephen Witt]

Yeah, I mean, that was partly. It was primarily because, well, obviously the stock price went up a ton. But the other thing is, they're very generous with their stock options. And in fact, they had not always been that generous employer. If you go back and talk to people during the video games days, they're like, yeah, Nvidia didn't pay that well, actually. But they always are very generous with the stock options because what was happening is people would buy the stock and during the bad days when they weren't doing too well, it would drop like 70% and then suddenly they'd be in the hole. I bought the company stock through the esop and now I'm like 50% underwater. This sucks. So what Jensen did was he instituted a plan where not only could you buy the stock at a discount to the prevailing market price, you could buy the stock at a discount to the prevailing market price at any time in the past two years. So what happened is the stock started to rocket upwards. In the AI era, you know, 2014 onwards, it was free money. Like, the stock would go up like 600% and you could still buy it to the discount of the price like two years before. And so everybody just maxed out their employee stock option cap and became, I think, something like 50% of the company now has a net worth of more than $25 million. Now, when we say that 99% of their net worth is this volatile tech stock. So it's not like. It's not like it's sitting in the bank account, you know what I mean?

[Katie Prescott]

But it's been high for quite a while. And whether it's 5 trillion or 4 trillion, you know, it was a trillion among friends. It's interesting you talked about the yelling because he yelled at you, didn't he?

[Stephen Witt]

Yeah.

[Katie Prescott]

When you were writing the book, what happened?

[Stephen Witt]

I don't want to give away the ending, but, yeah,

[Katie Prescott]

fair enough.

[Stephen Witt]

I got to incur the wrath of Wong, as I described it. But it felt special to get yelled at by him. It did. It was part of his inner circle.

[Danny Fortson]

Congratulations.

[Stephen Witt]

Now you love him. How many people can say they got screamed at by the most powerful man in the world?

[Danny Fortson]

Well, speaking of the most powerful man in the world, what is your sense of his relationship with Donald Trump? Because obviously, the other big thing around is, like, China, are we going to sell chips there? Are we not? There's this big kind of geopolitical race over AI supremacy. And all of a sudden he's, to your point, he's kind of, if not the most powerful man in the world. He controls what everybody wants.

[Stephen Witt]

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, with Trump, what's he want? You know, Trump has various levers, obviously, that determine Nvidia's profitability. Trump is attempting to force Taiwan, via tariffs or very other incentives, to shift more manufacturing to the United States. Trump does. And the National Security Board don't really. You know, there's a lot of argument about whether or not to sell these

[Danny Fortson]

chips to China just to kind making clear in case listeners don't know they designed the chips. But they're all made by Taiwan Semiconductor. Basically.

[Stephen Witt]

Yes, yes. Although that's changing because we're moving manufacturing to the United States now. But historically all the chips are made in Taiwan. So Jensen's going to treat Trump like an engineering problem. Jensen treats everything like an engineering problem. So he's going to just experiment with inputs and outputs. He's going to experiment on saying different kinds of things to Trump and seeing what the outputs are until he gets, we want, I mean, I think he can manipulate Trump and so he wants all these things, but the thing he really wants doesn't get publicized that much. Nvidia doesn't make anything, as you just pointed out. They just design it. They're basically just an R and D laboratory. And if they don't have the best people in their R and D laboratory, they don't really have a business. If you go into Nvidia Today, fewer than 50% of the people in the company were born in the United States. They're all brilliant scientists from India and China and Europe and all over the world Middle east with H1BS or on green cards or on visas. And the MAGA base does not like this. Right. So Huang has to continue to make Nvidia the first choice destination for this talent pipeline. This is actually the biggest risk that he faces and I don't think enough people talk about it. If these skilled engineers don't end up working for him, then they will go to their home countries and build companies that compete with Nvidia and beat him. And Jensen knows it can happen because he did that. That's the biggest risk.

[Katie Prescott]

And he has spoken about this quite a lot when it comes to China.

[Stephen Witt]

I think the most important part of Jensen's kind of push with Trump, although there's many factors to it, I think actually secretly the most important is blunting the influence of Trump's kind of like base so that he can continue to get access to this talent pipeline. That's the thing he can't afford to lose.

[Danny Fortson]

I'm not going to ask you to predict the future. Well, actually I kind of am. But sure. You used to be a trader. You've been inside this company that is now the most valuable company on the planet. And as you say, Google's making their TPUs. You got everybody being like, oh, 70% profit margins on a thing everybody wants. I want to take some of that. So if we go out and then, you know, overlaid on that is like the bubble worries and where we are in this revolution, if we go out one, two years, based on what you have seen, what does the world look like for Nvidia then? Has the bubble popped? Like, where do you see this going?

[Stephen Witt]

I don't think we're in a bubble. I don't think it's popping. I don't see any evidence of that. I mean it seems like the people who are spending money on these inference load alone. Every programmer I talk to now in the past two months has completely transitioned their workflow to using Claude code all of the time. And I think that is a bellwether for every industry. It creates a tremendous amount of demand for inference chips and for ongoing training making better clog codes. So, you know, the demand for continuously. I think we've only trained. My guess would be about 1% of the the AI that we're ultimately going to train in a mature AI industry.

[Katie Prescott]

Do you remember, Danny, when I interviewed Jensen, he said we're not in a bubble, it's a build out.

[Stephen Witt]

Yeah, I agree with that.

[Katie Prescott]

Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. It's been absolutely fascinating to go through some of this with you and hear from inside the company. Stephen Witt, the author of the Thinking Machine, a fantastic book about Nvidia and its history. Fascinating to hear from Stephen. Wasn't it, Danny? I mean, a lot of that I actually had no idea about. I liked what he said about him being a really great wartime leader. Like him hating complacency, him hating being in a leading position and feeling most comfortable under pressure because it must be extraordinarily difficult when it always is right when you're the leader. Because there's a very, very long way to fall. And that's the position that video is in all the time with lots and lots of people snapping at its heels trying to push it off its perch. And it sounded like that point he made about, you know, the deep seat moment he went gents and went calm and everyone went in the business said, oh, he's, you know, he's been really nice to deal with, just feeling in control.

[Danny Fortson]

It just sounds to me just like as a mere mortal, it sounds so exhausting because, you know, it reminds me of like, you know, Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos famously has his whole, like, it's always day one because day two is complacency, irrelevance and death. Or whatever. And you have Andy Grove, who is like the legendary CEO of Intel. Only the paranoid survive. Like there is a thing here around just never relaxing. And they have to be a certain type of person. You know, it feels like there's only so much you can kind of learn to be that way. But I just thought it was interesting. That kind of struck me that, that, you know, I've, I've, I've seen a version of that movie before with other CEOs, and obviously they've all been wildly successful. Well, so that is it for this week's episode of the Times Tech Podcast. If you are enjoying the show, please do follow or subscribe. Leave us a rating or a review. It genuinely helps other people find us. Or better still, get a bot to like us or a whole. You know what they call them now? Bot swarms. Agent swarms. Swarms. Which is just. They need to really work on marketing these whole. All these AI folks. Calling something a swarm makes me think of like killer bees. Like, come up with a better way.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah, but maybe we need a swarm and that would help our market.

[Danny Fortson]

We need to kind of come up with a better nomenclature than, you know, swarm. It just sounds so aggressive.

[Katie Prescott]

And we would love to know your thoughts on today's discussion on swarms. Any of that. So drop us an [e-mail]. and we shall see you back here next week.

[Danny Fortson]

Bye. Bye.

[Katie Prescott]

This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.

[Danny Fortson]

There's a lot of excitement around AI right now, but the problem is what happens after the demo when you have

[Katie Prescott]

to plug that technology into a real company.

[Danny Fortson]

Different clouds, different data, different systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

[Katie Prescott]

ServiceNow's platform is designed to help people by connecting these pieces, enabling organizations to coordinate work across departments, tools, and, increasingly, AI agents.

[Danny Fortson]

In fact, the company says more than 80 billion workflows run on its platform

[Katie Prescott]

every year, which gives you a sense of the scale of operations it's designed to handle.

[Danny Fortson]

Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for [e-mail]

[American Red Cross Announcer]

Blood donation is now more inclusive. More people are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross through FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross. The Red Cross is committed to achieving an inclusive blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect, while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, Visit redcrossblood.org LGBTQ. That's redcrossblood.org LGBTQ.