You're listening to the political scene.

I'm David Remnick.

Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

2025 was the year, at least in my experience, that conversations about AI became absolutely inescapable.

You heard about it all the time. The economy, the job market, politics, music education, everything. Absolutely everything seemed to gravitate back to AI. Across the country, data centers, huge industrial complexes, are being constructed at a record pace. Virtually all of them are using chips built by the tech colossus,

NVIDIA.

The company has nearly cornered the market on the hardware that runs much of AI.

But this is not primarily or not only a business story,

it's also a story about the United States and China,

about who is building the technology

that will shape the future, all of our futures. Back in April, I spoke with Stephen Witt, who writes

about technology for the New Yorker, and his book about Nvidia and its founder, Jensen Huang,

came out this year. It's called the thinking machine.

Stephen, in all the years we've been doing this show, I don't think we've ever sat down to talk about a microchip company and the CEO of that microchip company. And yet,

NVIDIA is incredibly important to all of our futures in somewhere or another. Explain what

invidia is and why it's so important. Invidia was there at the beginning of AI. They really kind of made

these systems work for the first time. We think of AI as a software revolution, something called

neural nets, but AI is also a hardware revolution.

And these microchips that NVIDIA designed used a process called parallel computing,

which meant that they split mathematical problems up into a bunch of bits and then solve them all at once.

...