‘The rocket ship keeps going off’: Inside the Nvidia phenomenon with author Stephen Witt

For employees at Nvidia, the chipmaker at the center of the artificial intelligence boom, the financial incentives to retire are staggering, yet few are heading for the exits. According to Stephen Witt, the freelance journalist and author whose book on the most valuable company in the world, The Thinking Machine, just became the FT and Schroders business book of the year, this retention of wealthy engineers comes down to a fear of missing out on history (along with all that money, of course).

“I think if the company was selling breakfast cereal, a lot of them would retire, but they’re making what they believe to be the single most important technology of all time,” Witt told Fortune in a recent interview, referring to Nvidia’s groundbreaking GPU chips that function as something like the oil wells of the AI boom.

“They’re engineers,” Witt said of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, all of whom he talked to for his deeply reported book. He described their attitude as one of “I can’t leave now … I just can’t not be working with thi...