Nvidia Can Change Its CEO. It Can’t Change Jensen Huang’s Imaginative and prescient
‘Jensen is Nvidia,’ explained one analyst. Huang always knew what the company should build next.
Jensen Huang. Illustration: Inc; Photo:
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.
Nvidia will go on selling chips, but it has lost the only person who has ever decided what the company should become next.
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What Nvidia keeps
One of Nvidia’s biggest assets is CUDA,
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. The company has no chief operating officer, and it had no chairman of the board at all until Thursday—when it appointed Harvey Jones alongside the announcement that Huang had resigned.
Nvidia has been saying this out loud in its annual report for years, in the section where companies list the things that could go wrong. It describes itself as “highly dependent on the services of our longstanding executive team” and warns that a failure to ensure effective succession planning “could hinder our strategic planning, execution, and long-term success.”
Source: www.inc.com
