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 Nvidia 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,

...