Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was the Jenga piece to a towering multi-trillion AI industry. Will his exit set off a chain reaction?

Résumé détaillé

With spending on AI and data centers so important to the broader U.S. economy, the extent of the potential fallout from the Nvidia shakeup is difficult to overstate.

Tech industry insiders awoke Thursday morning with an unfamiliar, and somewhat alarming notion to contemplate: life without Jensen Huang.

Huang’s abrupt resignation as CEO leaves one of the world’s most valuable companies without the leader who has steered it for the past 33 years; the person who almost singlehandedly transformed Nvidia from a small maker of video game graphics chips into the driving force of the AI boom.

“NVIDIA’s leadership crisis is a stress test for the AI boom,” Stephanie Balaouras, Forrester’s VP, group research director, told Fortune.

The importance of Nvidia, and of Huang, to the AI industry extends well beyond the company’s own P&L statement. In addition to being the leading maker of the GPU chips powering AI services like ChatGPT and Claude, Nvidia has become the AI industry’s “central bank” financing scores of other companies. And then there’s Huang’s unique standing as AI’s senior statesman and cheerleader on everything from AI regulation to industrial policy.

Whether the AI industry turns out to have lost its most famous champion with the ignominious exit of Huang and his famous black leather coat, or a more crucial, Jenga-like piece may be the most important economic question to be answered in the coming weeks and months.

“Obviously Nvidia is more than Jensen Huang, but he kind of championed a whole range of investments,” a VC investor focused on early-stage companies told Fortune.

“There is a question around whether the pace of investment in AI and the size of the amounts of capital going into companies can be continued. Because by any stretch of the imagination, it’s been quite extreme,” the investor said.

In the immediate aftermath of the news, the stock market appears to be keeping its composure. While shares of Nvidia were down 6.3% in midday trading on Thursday, and certain AI-linked stocks took a hit, the broader market reaction was relatively muted, with the Nasdaq down only 95 points.

But with spending on AI and data centers so…

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