Jensen Huang Leaves Nvidia: What Lies Ahead for the AI Chip Giant

Jensen Huang, cofounder and chief executive of US chipmaker Nvidia, has left the company he led for 33 years. Nvidia makes the graphics processors (GPUs) that power the global AI boom. It was the first company valued at $5 trillion, and it accounts for roughly 6 percent of the S&P 500 stock index. No successor has been named, so there are concerns about the impact on the US AI industry and the stock market.

The Verge reports that Huang departed after he seemingly enabled two chip smuggling scandals and allegedly had three extramarital affairs, one of them with an alleged Chinese spy. The 63-year-old had no deputies: around 60 employees reported directly to him, and no succession plan was in place.

What analysts say

IDC analyst Tom Mainelli says the company was built around Huang, but its technology road map is sound and the team remains. Pat Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy says the product roadmap and manufacturing are locked in through 2027, calling it "a stock shock, not a business shock." He sees the larger risk in customers hedging during a leadership vacuum. Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research expects an outsider to be brought in and the stock to be volatile for a while.

Huang's track record

Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993. The company nearly collapsed after a failed chip for the Sega Dreamcast console, then sold a million Riva 128 graphics accelerators in four months. He later bet on CUDA, which let GPUs handle tasks beyond graphics and, by his account, raised the cost of every GeForce card by 50 percent. In 2012, University of Toronto researchers trained the AlexNet image-recognition neural network on Nvidia GPUs, widely credited with sparking the AI revolution.

The article's author calls Huang Big Tech's last true visionary showman founder CEO and compares him to Steve Jobs.