The Company Behind the A.I. Boom

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 some way or another.

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