Chips

The silicon everything runs on. The transistor and the integrated circuit, Moore's law, the fabs and the lithography machines, Intel and TSMC and ARM, and the GPU that turned out to matter more than anyone planned.

Part of Technology

9 moments in this segment.

1. 1947 - Transistor Invented at Bell Labs. December 23, 1947. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley demonstrate the point-contact transistor. The end of the vacuum-tube era; the silicon era begins. All three share the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
2. 1968-07-18 - Intel Founded. July 18, 1968. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce leave Fairchild Semiconductor to found Intel. By 1971 they ship the 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, and the chip company that would define the next 50 years of computing.
3. 1978-12 - ARM Architecture Born. October 1985. Acorn Computers in Cambridge designs the ARM1, a low-power RISC processor for the BBC Micro. By 2024, ARM chips ship in 270+ billion devices; the underlying CPU architecture of every smartphone in the world.
4. 2014-11-20 - Intel 4004. November 1971. The Intel 4004, first commercial microprocessor on a single chip. 2,300 transistors; designed by Federico Faggin. The chip that started the microcomputer revolution.
5. 2023 - NVIDIA Hits $1 Trillion. May 30, 2023. NVIDIA market cap crosses $1 trillion. AI-training GPU demand drives it to $3.6T by Dec 2024, the most valuable company in the world. CEO Jensen Huang becomes one of tech's most consequential CEOs of the decade.
6. 2023 - NVIDIA Hits $1 Trillion. May 30, 2023. NVIDIA crosses $1T market cap on AI demand. Within 18 months: $3.6T, the most valuable company in the world.
7. 2023 - Jensen Huang Computex Keynote. May 2023. Jensen Huang's Computex keynote in Taipei. The leather jacket. The H100 explainer. The moment NVIDIA stopped being a "gaming card" company and became the AI infrastructure company.
8. 2024 - NVIDIA GTC 2024 - Blackwell Reveal. March 18, 2024. Jensen Huang reveals NVIDIA Blackwell at GTC. The chip that powered every flagship AI model launched in late 2024 and 2025.
9. 2025-10-10 - The Transistor Explained. Archival footage explaining the point-contact transistor, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley's 1947 Bell Labs invention.