“The law was actually a law from the CEO of Intel to his employees: you better make this happen. This is the law. This better happen because our whole business model is based on it.”
Search Engine · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Witt is explaining how NVIDIA got ahead of Intel. Moore's Law held for decades because Intel's engineers were made to deliver it, until transistors got so small they ran into quantum effects and the scaling broke down.
Transcript
…Now, Jensen doesn't have all those traits, but he has some of them, I think. And I think that's what really allowed him to succeed later in life in business. It prepared him very well to be the CEO. Oh, and by the way, the microchip industry, the semiconductor industry, is an absolute knife fight.
…named after a man named Gordon Moore, who'd co-founded Intel, the company that made the processors of the computers my friends and I were obsessed with. Moore's Law was not a law of nature, it was basically a description of how hard Gordon Moore pushed people at his company. Here's Stephen.
The way I would put this is: the law was actually a law from the CEO of Intel to his employees: you better make this happen. This is the law. This better happen because our whole business model is based on it. And so, you know, you engineers go bust your ass and figure out a way to make sure this will happen, you know? And those engineers worked very hard and they were very smart and they did make this happen for decades. But what happened ultimately is that the components just got too small. They got so small, they started running into quantum mechanics. And basically, you couldn't shrink them anymore after that because they were starting to leak electricity out of the components and the scaling relationship broke down. Jensen was among the first to see and to understand that that was going to happen. And so you couldn't rely on Moore's Law anymore. You had to find another way to make the microchip faster that wasn't just shrinking the components.
Nearly everybody else believed Moore's Law would just go on forever. Jensen didn't. AI. He made a big, confident bet in that direction. His company, NVIDIA, back then did not make CPUs like Intel did. They made graphics cards, what we now call GPUs. And those were really only sold to gamers like…
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