Nvidia Can Replace Its CEO. It Cannot Replace Jensen Huang’s Vision

Résumé détaillé

‘Jensen is Nvidia,’ explained one analyst. Huang always knew what the company should build next.

‘Jensen is Nvidia,’ explained one analyst. Huang always knew what the company should build next.

Nvidia’s shares fell as much as 14 percent shortly after Thursday’s opening bell, briefly taking the company below its $4 trillion valuation. Jensen Huang had resigned as Nvidia’s president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately. The reason Nvidia’s shares dropped so quickly was explained on CNBC three days earlier, from Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon.

By now, the reasons why are very well-known: Huang resigned a day after The New York Times had reported—citing five people who have worked at the company—that he allegedly had an undisclosed extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare. He had already admitted to a separate extramarital affair, following reports of an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at the Singapore data center firm Megaspeed whom U.S. intelligence agencies suspect of gathering information for Beijing. She has not been charged, and China has called the allegations a smear.

Nvidia will go on selling chips, but it has lost the only person who has ever decided what the company should become next.

One of Nvidia’s biggest assets is CUDA, the programming layer Huang started shipping in 2006. The software lets developers run ordinary math on graphics hardware, and a majority of the past 20 years of AI research has depended on CUDA. So much so that any lab or cloud provider that wanted to move from Nvidia chips to those from AMD would need to rewrite large amounts of the code it has spent years accumulating. This is one of the reasons why Nvidia’s customers complain about the price of chips, yet keep paying it.

Nvidia’s product roadmap is also already public and funded through 2028, and roughly 60 executives reported to Huang directly. There was no management layer beneath him running pieces of Nvidia. He ran the whole of it.

Nvidia has been saying this out loud in its annual report for years, in the…

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