Nvidia dominates the market for the powerful chips that underpin generative artificial intelligence, potentially the most transformational technology since the Industrial Revolution. It briefly surpassed $5tn in market value in October, the first company to do so. Yet author Stephen Witt says this extraordinary success must be tormenting Nvidia’s founder and chief executive, Jensen Huang.

“It’s hard to be Jensen day to day. It’s almost nightmarish. He’s constantly paranoid about competition. He’s constantly paranoid about people taking Nvidia down,” says Witt, whose thrilling and detailed account of Nvidia’s rise, The Thinking Machine, was this week named Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year.

Since the book was published in April, scrutiny of Nvidia has only intensified, as have potential challenges to its supremacy. In an interview the day after the prize-giving, Witt identifies Google’s rival chips, known as tensor processing units, as “an almost existential threat” to Nvidia. The latter’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, are the backbone for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, among others. TPUs were used to train Gemini 3, Google’s rival large language model.