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Business Insider
13-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Ian Buck built Nvidia's secret weapon. He may spend the rest of his career defending it.
Ian Buck, Nvidia's vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing, felt a twinge of nostalgia during CEO Jensen Huang's keynote presentation at their GTC conference in March. Huang spent nearly eight minutes on a single slide listing software products. "This slide is genuinely my favorite," said Huang onstage in front of 17,000 people. "A long time ago — 20 years ago — this slide was all we had," the CEO continued. Buck said he was instantly transported back to 2004 when he started building the company's breakthrough software, called Compute Unified Device Architecture. Back then, the team had two people and two libraries. Today, CUDA supports more than 900 libraries and artificial intelligence models. Each library corresponds to an industry using Nvidia technology. "It is a passionate and very personal slide for me," Buck told reporters the next day. The 48-year-old's contribution to Nvidia is hard-coded into the company's history. But his influence is just beginning. CUDA is the platform from which Nvidia jumped to, at one point, 90% market share in AI computing. CUDA is how the company defends its moat. One architecture to rule them all Dion Harris, Nvidia's senior director of high-performance computing and AI factory solutions, sometimes forgets that he's in the room with the Dr. Ian Buck. Then it hits him that his boss, and friend, is a computing legend. Since Buck's undergrad days at Princeton in the late 1990s, he had been focused on graphics — a particularly punishing field within computer science with no obvious connection to AI at the time. "Computer graphics was such a dweebie field," said Stephen Witt, the author of " The Thinking Machine," which details Nvidia's rise from obscurity to the most valuable company in the world. "There was a stigma to working in computer graphics — you were maybe some kind of man-child if this was your focus," Witt said. While getting his Ph.D. at Stanford, Buck connected multiple graphics processing units with the aim of stretching them to their limits. He had interned at Nvidia before pursuing his Ph.D., so he was familiar with the GPU. Initially, he used it for graphics like everyone else. Buck has said that he and his cohort would use the chips to play video games such as "Quake" and "Doom," but eventually, he started asking himself what else his gaming setup could do. He became fixated on proving that you could use GPUs for anything and everything. He received funding from Nvidia and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, among others, to develop tools to turn a GPU into a general-purpose supercomputing machine. When the company saw Brook—Buck's attempt at a programming language that applied the power of GPUs beyond graphics, Nvidia hired him. He wasn't alone. John Nickolls, a hardware expert and then director of architecture for GPU computing, was also instrumental in building CUDA. Buck may have been forever paired with Nickolls if the latter had not died from cancer in 2011. "Both Nickolls and Buck had this obsession with making computers go faster in the way that a Formula 1 mechanic would have an obsession with making the race car go faster," Witt told BI. (The author said Huang expressed frustration that Nickolls doesn't get the recognition he deserves since his passing.) Buck, Nickolls, and a small team of experts built a framework that allowed developers to use an existing coding language, C, to harness the GPU's ability to run immense calculations simultaneously rather than one at a time and apply it to any field. The result was CUDA, a vehicle to bring parallel computing to the masses. The rise of CUDA as an essential element in the world of AI wasn't inevitable. Huang insisted on making every chip compatible with the software, though hardly anyone was using it despite being free. In fact, Nvidia lost millions of dollars for more than a decade because of CUDA. The rest is lore. When ChatGPT launched, Nvidia was already powering the AI computing revolution that is now the focus of $7 trillion in infrastructure spending, much of which eventually goes to Nvidia. King of the nerds Buck's smarts do have limits. He joked to an eager audience at GTC that quantum chromodynamics, a field of particle physics, just won't stick in his brain. But he thrives in Nvidia's notoriously rigorous environment. The Santa Clara, California, company has an intense culture that eschews one-on-one meetings and airs missteps and disagreements in public. It might sound terrifying, but for those with the brains to keep up, the directness and the rigor are ideal. For this report, Business Insider spoke with four people who have either worked directly with Buck at Stanford, Nvidia, or both. Those who know Buck personally describe him as gregarious and easygoing but capable of intensity when goals are on the line. He's focused on results rather than theory. In his public remarks, at panels and in interviews on behalf of Nvidia, Buck volleys from rapid, technical lines of thought to slower, simple descriptions in layman's terms. At a GTC press conference, he detailed the latest development in convolutional neural networks and then described proteins as "complicated 3D squigglies in your body." He describes the tiny, sensitive interconnects between parts of an Nvidia chipset like the Geek Squad explaining the back of a TV from memory — it's all in his head. Harris said storytelling ability is particularly important in the upper ranks at Nvidia. Since the company essentially had a promising technology waiting for a market for years, Huang still sees being early as a business strategy. He has branded it "going after zero billion-dollar markets." The potential of AI, "AI factories," and the infrastructure spending that goes with them is a story Nvidia can't stop telling. Buck's shilling skills have improved over the years. But even in 15-year-old footage, he's most animated when explaining the inner workings of Nvidia's technology. "A lot of developers are amazing, but they say, 'Leave me alone. I'm going to write my code in the mountains somewhere," Paul Bloch, president of Nvidia partner DDN, told BI. Nvidia's leaders aren't like that, he said. Much of Nvidia's upper echelon may have the skills to match the reclusive set, but they don't choose between showmanship and code. Ian Buck's next act Ian Buck's work at Nvidia began with a simple mandate: make the GPU work for every industry. That mission is very nearly accomplished. There are hundreds of CUDA libraries targeting industries from weather forecasting to medical imaging. "The libraries are really there to connect the dots so that every business doesn't have to learn CUDA," Harris said. CUDA draws its strength from millions of developers, amassed over decades, who constantly innovate and improve on the platform. So far, no one has caught Nvidia's heels, but the competition is coming faster than ever. Even as Buck spoke at GTC, developers across the world were trying to break through CUDA's dominance. The first night of the conference, a cast of competitors convened by TensorWave, an AI cloud company exclusively using chips from Nvidia's only US rival, AMD, held an event entitled "Beyond CUDA." Tensorwave cofounder Jeff Tatarchuck said it included more than "24 presenters talking about what they're doing to overcome the CUDA moat." AMD, which also presented at the event, is making an explicit effort to catch up on the software side of AI computing, but industry analysts say they're not there yet. Harris told BI Buck's team spends a lot of time speaking with researchers to stay on top. That's always been true, but the nature of the work has changed. A decade ago, Buck was convincing researchers to apply accelerated computing to their problems; now the tables have turned. "One of the most challenging parts of my job often is to try to predict the future, but AI is always surprising us," Buck said at a Bank of America conference this month. Understanding what the smartest minds in AI need from Nvidia is paramount. Many saw DeepSeek, the company that spooked markets with its ostensibly cheap reasoning AI model, as a threat to Nvidia since the team bypassed CUDA to squeeze out the performance gains that allowed it to achieve competitive results with less compute. But Buck recently described the Chinese team as "one of the best CUDA developers out there." AI is entering a new phase as more companies commercialize their tools. Even with Nvidia's enormous head start, in part built by Buck, the pace is intense. For example, one of the products Nvidia debuted at GTC, Dynamo, is an inference computing platform designed to adapt to the rise of reasoning models. Nvidia launched Dynamo a couple of months after the DeepSeek earthquake, but some users had already built their own versions. That's how fast AI is evolving. "Inference is really hard. It's wickedly hard," said Buck at GTC. Talent is also a big part of how Nvidia is going to try to maintain its dominance, and another place where, Witt says, Buck has value beyond his technical skills. He's not exactly a household name, even at Stanford. But for a certain type of developer, the ones who can play in Buck's extremely complex sandbox, he is a draw. "Everyone's trying to hire these guys, especially after DeepSeek," said Witt. "This was not a sexy domain in computer science for a long time. Now it is white hot." "Now these guys are going for big money. So, I think Ian Buck has to be out there advertising what his group is doing," Witt continued. Nvidia declined to make Ian Buck available for an interview with Business Insider and declined to comment on this report. Who's Nvidia's next CEO? Buck is more than a decade younger than Huang, who is 62, and doesn't plan on going anywhere anytime soon. Yet, questions about succession are inevitable. Lip-Bu Tan, a semiconductor industry legend who recently became Intel's CEO, told BI that Buck is one of a handful of true collaborators for Huang, who has more than 60 direct reports. "Jensen has three right-hand men," Tan told BI before he took over at Intel. Buck is one. Vice President of GPU Engineering Jonah Alben is another. And CFO Colette Kress, though clearly not a man, is the third, Tan said. Jay Puri, Nvidia's executive vice president for worldwide field operations, and Sanja Fidler, vice president of AI research, are also names that come up in such conversations. "I don't think Ian spends a lot of time doing business strategy. He's more like the world's best mechanic," Witt said.
Time of India
06-06-2025
- Automotive
- Time of India
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's success secret revealed by his biographer: He is powered by fear of failing and that's why he never slows down
Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang leads one of the world's most valuable tech companies, valued at around $3.4 trillion. However, it is not confidence but a deep fear of failure that fuels his relentless drive. Huang's anxiety about potential setbacks and fierce competition motivates his intense work ethic and commitment to innovation. This constant pressure pushes him to stay focused and vigilant, ensuring Nvidia remains a leader in the tech industry. His story reveals a leadership style shaped by the delicate balance between remarkable success and the persistent fear that it could all collapse unexpectedly. Jensen Huang's tale defies the conventional leadership story of optimism and self-assurance. His experience illustrates how anxiety and fear, constructively controlled, can be tremendous drivers of innovation and success. Huang's single-minded drive to excellence, fueled by an abiding fear of failure, has enabled Nvidia to transform industries including graphics processing and artificial intelligence. This atypical leadership approach emphasises that vulnerability and emotional nuance can go hand in hand with monumental success in the technology space. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's biographer reveals 'his deep fear of failure' fuels his focus in tech industry Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's biographer Stephen Witt, author of The Thinking Machine, who spent considerable time interviewing Huang and his staff, Huang's primary driver is fear, not optimism. Huang openly admits that he lives every day with the nagging fear that Nvidia might "implode at any moment." Rather than letting this fear consume him, he employs it as a mighty engine that keeps him on the ball, propelling the company forward with an acute sense of urgency. Witt characterizes Huang's drive as "his fuel, his gasoline"; the nervous energy that drives him compulsively. This psychological pressure compels Huang to work all the harder and guarantees he never gets complacent, even when the firm is at the height of its success. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thrives under pressure and views stress as key to success In contrast to most CEOs who prize confidence and tranquility when the going is good, Huang is at ease with pressure and challenge. According to Witt, Huang gets anxious when everything is going well and that his tension keeps him on his toes anticipating the occurrence of any hurdle. Huang confesses to being a tough boss, and in his opinion, stress and hardship are preconditions for doing something remarkable. Huang has stated that success needs persistence, pressure, and overcoming adversity. His view is that success is not often the result of simple or linear routes but from consistent effort under difficult circumstances. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's leadership forged with challenges Huang's path hasn't been without challenges. During a 2024 Stanford University speech, he revealed that Nvidia came within a hair's breadth of collapse a mere few years after it was founded in 1993. This near failure had a significant influence on his leadership philosophy. Huang emphasizes that having high expectations of life or business to be always perfect predisposes individuals to failure when things are sure to go awry. Rather, he opines that the ability to endure tough situations and setbacks is vital for long-term success. Such resilience has been a major pillar in Nvidia's culture and Huang's own leadership style. Stephen Witt further discloses that Huang is motivated to a large extent by guilt. Huang has a deep sense of responsibility towards his team, investors, and firm, and this sense of obligation compels him to work even more diligently. Witt clarifies that Huang's motivation is not mere ambition but also a combination of the fear of failure, paranoia among competitors, and the guilt of possibly disappointing others. This generates tremendous internal pressure that Huang leverages as an impetus to remain focused and drive Nvidia to its greatest heights. Also Read | Meet billionaire YouTuber MrBeast's fiancée Thea Booysen - know about her career, relationship insights and more AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
CNBC
04-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Biographer: I interviewed Nvidia's CEO for 6 hours—here's the most surprising thing I learned: ‘This is his fuel'
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang runs one of the world's largest and most successful companies, valued at nearly $3.4 trillion. Yet, he's expressed that he still worries the company he co-founded in 1993 could implode at any minute. Huang's fear of failure is one of his biggest motivators, pushing him to become one of the world's most successful CEOs, says biographer Stephen Witt. "This is his fuel. This is his gasoline, [and it's] what makes him go is this anxiety," says Witt, who spent six hours interviewing Huang, and spoke to his colleagues and employees, for the book "The Thinking Machine," which published in January. Huang has discussed his drive for work before: When asked about work-life balance, he remarked, "I work as much as I can," in an April 2024 fireside chat with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. Still, Witt was caught off-guard by how much of Huang's motivation seems to stem from anxiety, fear and guilt, he says."I think the most surprising thing about Jensen is that he's almost totally driven by negative emotions," says Witt. "He's really motivated by fear and guilt to a significant extent: fear of failure, paranoia about competition, and guilt about letting people down." An Nvidia spokeswoman declined to comment when reached by CNBC Make It. Other CEOs Witt has met and interviewed over his career are "more kind of type-A people" who fit the mold of upbeat, optimistic "go-getters," he says. "Jensen, of course, is an obvious, huge go-getter, but it's all coming from this place of almost beating himself up for not working hard enough all the time," Witt adds. "I didn't expect to see that ... In fact, he becomes very uncomfortable and nervous when things are going well." Huang has said he's a "demanding" boss who isn't easy to work for, and that stress is the best motivator he knows. "It should be like that. If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn't be easy," he told CBS' "60 Minutes" in December 2024. His own success is a reflection of his resilience, overcoming setbacks like Nvidia's near collapse just three years after it first launched, he told students at Stanford University in March 2024. That resilience is partially due to having "low expectations," always preparing for potential failure and strategizing how best to avoid an implosion, he said. You just can't let your anxiety prevent you from taking calculated risks, said Huang. "Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you will never experiment, and if you don't ever experiment, you will never innovate," he said. "If you don't innovate, you don't succeed." The ability to tolerate and learn from failures is a common trait among successful people, psychologists say: It's a marker of the mental strength and confidence you need to overcome challenges and bounce back from failure. While excessive anxiety can be tough on your mental health and decision-making abilities, it can motivate people to succeed when harnessed in healthy ways, psychologist Lisa Damour told CNBC Make It in June 2024. Productive anxiety can spur you to be more productive and it can also be a signal that there could be a problem lurking that needs to be solved to avoid failure, research shows. "The way psychologists see anxiety is as a protective emotion," Damour said. "It's there to keep us on our toes and help us course correct." Huang, for his part, is most comfortable when he's "reminding himself it's like that first day, that they need to have a startup's energy, and that they're on the brink of failure at all times," Witt says. "This is the narrative he generates around himself — that he could fail at any time and be disgraced. And this is what motivates him."
Daily Mail
03-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt: Forget Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg – meet the mogul in tech you have never heard of
The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt (Bodley Head £25, 272pp) In summer last year, Nvidia topped $3trillion in market capitalisation. It became the most valuable company in the world. How did what was once a niche vendor of video game hardware achieve this? Stephen Witt's thought-provoking, occasionally alarming book sets out to answer the question. Much of Nvidia's success is down to its long-serving CEO, Jensen Huang. Forget Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Jensen Huang is probably the most influential tech bro alive today. He deserves this wide-ranging account of his life and the meteoric rise of his company, although he probably won't appreciate it. When told about the book, Huang said, 'I hope I die before it comes out.' By any standards, Huang is a remarkable, charismatic man. A colleague once said of him, 'Interacting with Jensen is like sticking your finger in the electrical socket.' He was born in Taiwan and spent his early childhood in Thailand. He arrived in rural Kentucky as a ten-year-old in 1973, despatched 8,000 miles from his parents to a foreign land where he could barely speak the language. He was bullied and the school he attended sounds like a penal institution. There was an illiterate who introduced himself by showing off the scars from his assorted stab wounds. Huang taught him to read and he became his protector against the bullies. After graduating from Stanford University, he worked in Silicon Valley. In 1993, he and two others founded Nvidia, the name echoing the Latin for 'envy'. They wanted other tech firms to become green with envy at their future successes. Huang, as described by Witt, appears to have had a Jekyll and Hyde approach to management. Often charming and self-deprecating, he could turn on employees who failed to meet his exacting standards. He would scream at his victims in front of their peers. His own commitment to Nvidia is legendary. 'His hobbies,' one colleague told Witt, 'are work, email and work.' Like all great entrepreneurs, his willingness to risk all is astonishing. His greatest gamble came in 2013. Nvidia had been highly successful as a producer of GPUs (graphics processing units) for computers. Huang became an overnight evangelist for AI. 'He sent out an email on Friday evening saying… that we were no longer a graphics company,' one Nvidia employee tells Witt. 'By Monday morning, we were an AI company.' Plenty of people see potential dangers in AI. Huang will have none of this. 'I'm so tired of this question,' he says and launches on one of his famous rants when Witt persists in raising the subject. His company has surfed the wave of AI to accumulate incredible riches. As Witt's book makes scarily clear, our future may depend on whether Huang is right.
Arab News
11-04-2025
- Business
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: The Thinking Machine
Author: Stephen Witt 'The Thinking Machine' is the story of how Nvidia evolved to supplying hundred-million-dollar supercomputers. It is a biography that dives into the rise of Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, focusing on their pivotal role in the AI revolution. The book highlights Huang's bold vision, particularly his early bet on AI over a decade ago, which transformed Nvidia from a maker of video game components into a powerhouse supplying massive supercomputers for AI applications like hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, and self-driving cars. It explores Huang's leadership style—described as single-minded and relentless—and his ability to defy Wall Street skepticism to push a radical computing vision, making him one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in Silicon Valley. Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Stephen Witt documents for the first time the company's epic rise and its single-minded and ferocious leader, now one of Silicon Valley's most influential figures. Witt is an American journalist and author known for his narrative-driven, deeply reported works on technology, culture, and innovation. Witt's style is noted for its clarity, wit, and ability to make dense topics accessible without sacrificing depth.
