{"id":202948,"date":"2025-12-21T03:52:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T03:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/202948\/"},"modified":"2025-12-21T03:52:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T03:52:16","slug":"inside-the-nvidia-phenomenon-with-author-stephen-witt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/202948\/","title":{"rendered":"inside the Nvidia phenomenon with author Stephen Witt"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For employees at Nvidia<\/a>, the chipmaker at the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, the financial incentives to retire are staggering, yet few are heading for the exits. According to Stephen Witt, the freelance journalist and author whose book on the most valuable company in the world, The Thinking Machine<\/a>, just became the FT and Schroders business book of the year<\/a>, the main retention of wealthy engineers comes down to a fear of missing out on history (along with all that money, of course).<\/p>\n

\u201cI think if the company was selling breakfast cereal, a lot of them would retire, but they\u2019re making what they believe to be the single most important technology of all time,\u201d Witt told Fortune in a recent interview, referring to Nvidia\u2019s groundbreaking GPU chips that function as something like the oil wells<\/a> of the AI boom.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re engineers,\u201d Witt said of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, all of whom he talked to for his deeply reported book. He described their attitude as one of \u201cI can\u2019t leave now \u2026 I just can\u2019t not be working with this technology. It\u2019s like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.\u201d Acknowledging that Nvidia\u2019s soaring valuation to a $4 trillion-plus market capitalization doesn\u2019t hurt, Witt explained how \u201cthe rocket ship keeps going off,\u201d both from a technological and financial standpoint. The thing is, he explained, \u201cthey\u2019re a very generous employer, especially with employee stock purchasing programs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nvidia\u2019s journey was not an overnight success, according to Witt. The author described the company\u2019s early development of GPUs for AI as a \u201cField of Dreams\u201d scenario where they built technology \u201cwithout any users, without any customers.\u201d Seen through a lens of capitalism developing a new technology, Witt concluded that for \u201cvery long-dated technologies, the market will not work\u201d without some kind of buffer to allow time for the tech to mature. \u201cJensen was a singular individual, and his stock price went down, or was stagnant, for 10 years while he was developing these platforms, for people to compute. He was not rewarded for a long, long, long time for doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nvidia\u2019s financial performance, and stock price, have really taken off since 2015<\/a>, to Witt\u2019s point, and really began gathering steam in the 2004-07 period, when academic AI researchers really discovered the benefit of Nvidia\u2019s GPUs. And there was a long period where the stock was not generating great returns, but Nvidia\u2019s chips were always popular with gamers<\/a> and so the market worked to at least that extent.<\/p>\n

Story Continues <\/p>\n

Witt noted that he found similar dynamics in previous reporting, having written a book about MP3 file-sharing tech in 2015 (How Music Got Free<\/a>). \u201cThat was also true of those guys,\u201d he said, who likewise faced many years of development before it paid off. \u201cIf we were working in a corporation, I don\u2019t think anyone would have had the patience. We needed almost a third base between academia and finance to sort of make this work.\u201d Witt cited other examples such as neural nets and the state-sponsored TSMC, one of Nvidia\u2019s closest rivals in the advanced semicondutors space.<\/p>\n

Witt said his reporting revealed that many Nvidia workers were initially on the losing side of this dynamic, having bought into employee stock ownership programs and seen the stock fall 50% or 60% from there. \u201cThe employees would get upset. They\u2019d be like, \u2018Oh my God, you know, I invested, I maxed out my cap to, you know, an employee stock purchasing program, and then now it\u2019s underwhelming, and I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll ever make it back.\u201d At that point, Huang instituted a program to allow workers to buy the stock at a discount to the current market price, but actually also at a discount to any price in the last two years. \u201cAnd then the stock turned into a rocket ship.\u201d Soon enough, he found, \u201cevery employee started maxing out these contributions to the employee stock purchase program, and then the stock continued to go up another, like, hundred times on these very low-cost basis transactions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that the market has caught up, questions of a financial bubble loom. Witt, who has worked for a hedge fund and said he approaches journalism with a shareholder\u2019s mindset, admits the possibility of a crash if cash flows don\u2019t eventually align with infrastructure spending. \u201cSo, so much is predicated on getting the timing of cash flows correct. And it may be the case that we throw all this money into building data centers and buying Nvidia chips, and that doesn\u2019t pay off at the exact right time, and then everything crashes for a little while. That may be happening right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Witt also drew a sharp distinction between financial bubbles and technological utility, saying that the now well-trod comparisons of AI to the internet and railroad booms may have some merit. But, echoing similar remarks from leaders such as JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Witt said of AI: \u201cThis stuff is real.\u201d Witt predicted that breakthroughs from Nvidia, TSMC and others will lead fo a \u201cspreading wave of robots and autonomy,\u201d recalling Huang\u2019s own prediction that in 10 years, anything that moves will be autonomous. \u201cWe\u2019re moving into the world of AI,\u201d Witt added, saying that in 10 years, \u201cwe will interact with AI as frequently as we interact with the internet for electricity. And there\u2019s a big scramble on to be the company that gets it in front of me. I think that explains all the investment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The big scramble for funding also had a political effect, of course. \u201cJensen was forced to become a political creature, especially this year,\u201d Witt said, suggesting that \u201che kind of pivoted into being almost like Trump\u2019s Thomas Cromwell,\u201d likening him to the famous adviser to King Henry VIII, although Huang is a close external adviser and not in Trump\u2019s cabinet, with someone like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a much closer analogue. (Witt said as an aside that he\u2019s been reading Hilary Mantel\u2019s modern classic Wolf Hall<\/a> lately, and the subject was on his mind.) On Huang and Trump\u2019s relationship, Witt added, \u201che became like a real advisor in the game. Yeah, yeah. And he was really successful in that regard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Witt observed of the dynamic that \u201cTrump likes to be close to Jensen because Jensen\u2019s a winner. And Trump likes winners, and Jensen\u2019s basically the biggest winner there is right now.\u201d Huang also needs certain support from the federal government, Witt added, not just exemption from tariffs from Taiwan, but also selling certain chips to China. \u201cMaybe even most importantly, and maybe least discussed, he needs absolutely to secure an ongoing pipeline of H-1B visas for his best technical work,\u201d Witt said, noting that one-third, if not more, of Nvidia\u2019s employees are South Asians. \u201cThey\u2019re extremely dedicated, they\u2019re extremely bright, and it\u2019s part of really what makes Nvidia work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Nvidia\u2019s soaring valuation is underpinned by a new geopolitical narrative. Witt argues that the U.S. is engineering a merger between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, fueled by fears of an \u201cAI gap\u201d with China. \u201cJust as in the old days,\u201d Witt said, \u201cyou would talk about the fear of a missile gap with the Soviet Union, now it\u2019s an AI gap with China.\u201d And on that count, Witt added, Trump likes winners, \u201cand he\u2019s got a winner in AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For employees at Nvidia, the chipmaker at the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, the financial incentives…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,233,82,247,107014,46914],"class_list":{"0":"post-202948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-nvidia","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space","13":"tag-stephen-witt","14":"tag-witt"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}