On January 6th, 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang got his rockstar moment at last. He strode triumphantly onstage, hand raised in the air, to the claps and cheers of a 14,000-person arena absolutely packed<\/a> with influencers and fans, their faces awash in blue glow, as he made his entrance in a black leather jacket that shimmered in the stadium\u2019s lights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Few are cheering for Jensen Huang now. He has left Nvidia<\/a> after seemingly enabling two chip smuggling scandals<\/a> and allegedly having three extramarital affairs<\/a>, including one with an alleged Chinese spy at the same time he was mingling with President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The world is watching to see if this scandal might disrupt the entire US AI industry<\/a> and perhaps destabilize the stock market along with it. That\u2019s because Huang wasn\u2019t merely running the first $5 trillion company<\/a>, he was the<\/em> visionary leader in control of the must-have GPUs powering the worldwide AI boom, part of a company that represents around 6 percent of the S&P 500 stock market index all by itself. And he didn\u2019t plan for succession if he ever stepped down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The 63-year-old once said he preferred to die on the job<\/a>; he once suggested he\u2019d work until he was 90 or 100<\/a>, then carry on leading the company as a robot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s not easy to replace Huang, partly because he had no deputies. Around 60 employees reported directly to the CEO<\/a>. \u201cHe built the company around himself, and everything that happened there flowed through him,\u201d says IDC analyst and former computing journalist Tom Mainelli.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cJensen is Nvidia, and Nvidia is Jensen,\u201d Jon Peddie, a computer industry analyst who\u2019s been tracking Nvidia since its inception, tells me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But Nvidia isn\u2019t Jensen anymore. He has left the company he cofounded 33 years ago. It\u2019s the end of an era, and not just for Nvidia \u2014 because Jensen Huang was Big Tech\u2019s last true example of a visionary showman founder CEO.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe was both the visionary and the tactical leader, the closest thing tech has had to Steve Jobs,\u201d Moor Insights & Strategy chief analyst Pat Moorhead tells me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Elon Musk didn\u2019t exactly found Tesla<\/a> and has quite the track record of broken promises, and Meta\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg has proven to be neither visionary nor showman<\/a> so far. Google\u2019s Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped away in 2019 as their company dealt with growing employee turmoil<\/a>, leaving the company in the hands of Sundar Pichai, and both Microsoft and Apple have each passed the torch twice since the days of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Some say Apple\u2019s Steve Jobs broke the CEO mold, but he created a mold of his own. Huang was one of countless tech leaders who followed his example by introducing their products in keynote speeches, adopting a single recognizable piece of clothing like Jobs\u2019 trademark black turtleneck, and even occasionally teasing \u201cone more thing\u201d for the surprise at the end of their presentations. In the newsroom, we\u2019d sometimes joke about the Jobs wannabes; many were stiff suits who didn\u2019t have the credibility to pull it off.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I thought Huang might be a Jobs wannabe, too, the first time I saw that he\u2019d adopted a black jacket as his uniform. (It was not always a leather<\/em> jacket; an earlier<\/a> version<\/a> was a Nvidia-branded softshell.) Huang later insisted on wearing a jacket even when the temperature was hot \u2014 more than once, I saw him sweat profusely rather than take it off. Unlike Jobs, he also held quite a few keynotes when he didn\u2019t have much news to share; he liked to repeat the company\u2019s previous accomplishments as if they were brand-new.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But even if Huang didn\u2019t have the same gravitas as Jobs, he did have exciting tech up his sleeves and loved to demo it onstage. He knew how to get people excited about the future of visual computing with eye-opening gaming graphics, physics and lighting demos, and eventually image recognition, AI weather simulations, digital copies of real-world factories, and the robots that can virtually train in them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n His Nvidia tried to educate people about the how and why of GPUs, too; I still remember in 2008 when Nvidia invited the Mythbusters to demo the difference between serial processing and parallel processing by firing a 1,100-nozzle paintball gun<\/a> to \u201cpaint\u201d the Mona Lisa<\/em> in one shot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What I didn\u2019t know back then: Huang was<\/em> a visionary founder. He took Nvidia to fame and fortune through a series of tremendous bets.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 1996, three years after he cofounded the company at a Denny\u2019s diner, Nvidia nearly went out of business while working on a failed graphics chip for the Sega Dreamcast game console. But even though he didn\u2019t deliver that chip, Huang personally convinced Sega to invest $5 million afterward, The Wall Street Journal<\/em> reported<\/a> in 2024.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Even without a named successor, analysts don\u2019t think Nvidia is in big trouble yet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis is a stock shock, not a business shock, for the next year. The roadmap and manufacturing are locked in through 2027,\u201d says Pat Moorhead, Moor Insights & Strategy<\/strong>. \u201cThe question is whether Nvidia keeps inventing at Jensen\u2019s pace once those plans run out. The bigger risk than any rival chip is customers hedging during a vacuum. That is why the next CEO needs technical credibility, an operating model that doesn\u2019t depend on one person, and a plan to protect CUDA.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cFounder visionary, culture setter, leader, AI industry spokesperson etc., is the real loss. We don\u2019t think anything changes strategically,\u201d says Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin<\/strong>.\u201d The product roadmap is set and remains strong, and the next several generations are already in design, in tape-out or on order. NVIDIA is still the company best placed to ship its roadmap at scale, because it has spent years locking up the supply chain behind it, from leading-edge wafers and CoWoS-class packaging to HBM and the rack-level partners. That supply position does not walk out the door with one person.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe was the consummate showman, salesman, and visionary for NVIDIA, so he will be hard to replace,\u201d says IDC analyst Tom Mainelli<\/strong>. \u201cBut the company\u2019s technology road map is sound, and the team behind him is still there. Choosing the right person to replace him will be key, and there will undoubtedly be bumps along the way. But the company will survive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cJensen built an exceptionally talented organization with a deep engineering bench, a mature, heavily-resourced software ecosystem, and strong customer relationships,\u201d says Dave Altavilla, HotTech Vision and Analysis<\/strong>. \u201cHis departure undoubtedly leaves a leadership and strategic vision gap, but the technology, talent, and execution capabilities he helped establish aren\u2019t going away. The real question is whether his successor can sustain that same long-term vision and willingness to invest ahead of the market.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cNo one in the company really wants to step into his shoes, so an outsider is going to have to be found,\u201d says Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Researc<\/strong>h. <\/strong>\u201cWhoever that is will not be Jensen, won\u2019t have the same ambitions, the same contacts and relationships, the same vision, or the same courage to make big, long-term bets. We\u2019ve seen this in Apple, AMD, Intel, and other companies. So the stock will probably get battered around a bit until investors see some stability and fewer \u2018what if\u2019 questions.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He then turned around and bet the company again on the Riva 128 PC graphics accelerator, an effort so ambitious he had to lay off over half of Nvidia\u2019s roughly 100 staffers, skip the prototyping stage, and rush it straight to production, and he still only had one month of payroll left by the time it shipped, The New Yorker<\/em> wrote<\/a> in 2023. Thankfully, it was a success, selling a million units in just four months<\/a> and paving the way for both the GeForce GPU and a long-term relationship<\/a> with chip fabricator TSMC.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Roughly eight years later, Huang decided it wasn\u2019t enough to be the leader in PC gaming graphics alone. He bet the company\u2019s entire gross profit<\/a>, he told podcaster Lex Fridman, on shipping a new feature inside those graphics cards that no one had asked for: CUDA. It was the ability to use a GPU for other<\/em> kinds of computing tasks beyond graphics, and Huang said it increased the cost of every GeForce graphics card by 50 percent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cOriginally there was no market or market demand for it. It was almost as if they built it because they could,\u201d says Peddie. \u201cJensen had the vision for what it could be and the courage to pursue it in spite of the opinions of others.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cNVIDIA was effectively investing in a computing platform that extended far beyond graphics, with no guarantee of a near-term return,\u201d says HotTech analyst Dave Altavilla.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHuang saw that a GPU was really a parallel computer that happened to render graphics. CUDA turned that insight into a platform, and it\u2019s why NVIDIA was ready when AI arrived,\u201d Mainelli tells me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was a bad time for graphics cards to suddenly cost more. When the Great Recession<\/a> hit in 2007\u20132009, and Nvidia laptop graphics chips also started failing due to design defects<\/a>, the company lost 80 percent of its market value.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But Huang believed in CUDA enough to invest even more. \u201cHe literally handed out high-end NVIDIA GPUs to researchers at industry conferences, while the company seeded universities like Stanford with hardware to encourage development on its platform,\u201d says Altavilla. And by 2012, Nvidia\u2019s potential for AI had started to emerge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s when University of Toronto researchers used Nvidia GPUs to train a prize-winning image-recognition neural network called AlexNet<\/a>, which is widely credited for sparking the AI revolution.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Not all of Huang\u2019s visions panned out the way he publicly expected. That AlexNet demo directly led to Huang\u2019s bets on chips for self-driving cars<\/a>, he said, but he didn\u2019t exactly predict AI \u2014 CUDA was instead thought of as better and more affordable supercomputing for researchers and scientists. In 2013, I also wrote about how his grand plan for the future of the company<\/a> relied heavily on putting Nvidia chips in your phone, which didn\u2019t pan out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But that bet on ARM-based phone chips did<\/em> put Nvidia inside every Nintendo Switch and may have helped make future \u201cAI superchips\u201d possible \u2014 the latest Nvidia AI server chips have ARM CPU cores. And in 2022, the leaders of the AI revolution launched the most groundbreaking AI tech yet on Nvidia hardware: ChatGPT. Six years earlier, Huang hand-delivered Nvidia\u2019s first purpose-built AI workstation to OpenAI, and by 2022 Microsoft had strung together tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 GPUs<\/a> to handle the load.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cEvery time competitors got close, he moved the fight up a level: the chip, then the server, then networking with the $6.9 billion Mellanox deal, then the full rack, all tied together by CUDA,\u201d says Moorhead. \u201cThe speed came from how he ran the company,\u201d he adds. \u201cDecisions that took other companies four weeks took Nvidia four days.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDecisions that took other companies four weeks took Nvidia four days.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As Nvidia\u2019s fortunes and profit ballooned \u2014 thousands of dollars in pure profit every single second!<\/a> \u2014 and as it became clearer that AI would reshape the world in one way or another, something strange happened. Huang became a celebrity. In summer 2024, The Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> and social media chronicled that he received a hero\u2019s welcome in his birthplace of Taiwan. He stopped over and over to sign autographs, including one on a woman\u2019s chest<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In person, at presentations, and in the company\u2019s investor Q&As, I saw the tone shift. People began treating the leather-jacketed man like an actual rockstar instead of a wannabe rockstar, asking for photos and autographs and complimenting him rather than asking tough questions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It felt like he\u2019d attained Steve Jobs\u2019 infamous \u201creality distortion field\u201d<\/a> at last \u2014 until he popped that bubble himself with his infidelity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But one fewer reality distortion field in the world isn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing, and as Apple has shown, a company doesn\u2019t go bust just because its charismatic founder is gone. Tim Cook made Apple the most profitable company in the world<\/a>. The question now is: who for Nvidia?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe was the king,\u201d says Peddie. \u201cMake no mistake \u2013 it was the Jensen Huang company. He called all the shots, took all the glory, and shouldered all the blame.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\nDoes Nvidia work without Huang?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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