In December 2011, Jensen Huang arrived onstage at a developer’s conference in Beijing armed with an announcement the importance of which few then understood.Dressed in jeans and a black suit jacket, Nvidia’s co-founder told the audience there would be a major update to the company’s proprietary programming platform, Cuda. Parts of it would be open source and easier for developers to use. For Huang, it was a strategic play: if he could win over Chinese engineers, hopefully they would remain loyal...