Hours after he was ousted as the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang was still winning at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit in San Francisco on Thursday. At least in a video game.
In “Cerebral Kombat,” an arcade game set up for attendees, the Nvidia cofounder could take down Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a giant GPU. Outside the game, things weren’t going nearly as well for Huang.
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On Thursday morning, he had resigned as CEO of Nvidia, the company he founded 33 years ago and built into the world’s most valuable chipmaker, following reports of extramarital affairs, including one with a woman suspected by US intelligence officials of spying for China. Nvidia named its longtime CFO, Colette Kress, interim CEO.
The news was hard to escape at the summit, where hundreds of founders, investors, and tech executives had gathered to talk about AI’s future. One venture capitalist asked Business Insider’s Katie Roof, who was wearing black, whether she was attending Huang’s funeral.
The jokes masked a genuine worry: What happens to the AI boom when one of its biggest financial backers is suddenly gone?
Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, a data and AI software company backed by Nvidia, said onstage that Huang had become something of a safety net for AI startups. Whenever investors worried about a bubble, he said, Huang was there to reassure them that Nvidia would help keep the industry going. Without him, that reassurance might be harder to come by.
“On the margin, I think that starts hurting a lot of startups,” Ghodsi said.
Nvidia’s importance to the AI industry goes well beyond the chips that power much of it. Under Huang, the company became one of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors, earning a reputation as the “central bank of AI” for its willingness to bankroll startups that, in many cases, also buy its chips.
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Just how deeply Nvidia is embedded in the industry became clear at the summit. Venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners and Newcomer, the publication that organized the conference, unveiled a list of the world’s 100 most important private AI companies. Nvidia had invested in 42 of them, according to Bessemer partner Talia Goldberg.
That kind of influence is hard to replace.
Hemant Taneja, CEO of venture capital firm General Catalyst, compared Nvidia’s importance to that of the big banks during the 2008 financial crisis. The implication was hard to miss: Nvidia had become too big to fail, and a messy leadership transition could have consequences far beyond the company.
“This is not a normal company,” he said onstage, “and we all need to make sure the continuity of leadership in AI for us as a nation and for the industry at large remains.”
Nikesh Arora, CEO of cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks, was less worried about Nvidia’s technology than about losing Huang himself. He described the Nvidia founder as an unusually generous champion of the industry, lending his time and influence to everything from open-source AI to cybersecurity.
“Is there short-term instability in the moment?” he said onstage. “Most likely, because there’s a whole bunch of parts of the ecosystem which need to reexamine where their champions are.”
Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a cloud platform for developers, also worried about the future of Nvidia’s support for open-source AI. Under Huang, Nvidia had become a major champion of the movement.
In September, Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face, a popular platform for sharing open-source AI models, for nearly $13 billion.
“An Nvidia without Jensen is going to be, I think, a challenging one,” Rauch said onstage. Still, he hoped the company’s extensive partnerships would help preserve Huang’s vision.
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For founders who work closely with Nvidia, the uncertainty was more immediate. Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO of Pathway, a startup developing AI models, told Business Insider that Nvidia had been an unusually attentive partner, with employees constantly looking for opportunities to collaborate. Whether the company could preserve that culture without Huang was another matter.
“I’d say we don’t know yet,” she said.
Hassaan Raza, CEO of Tavus, a startup building AI-powered video agents, worried that any stumble at Nvidia could set back America’s broader AI ambitions. Even a disappointing earnings report under new leadership, he suggested, could send shock waves through the industry.
“If Nvidia misses a quarter in the next year or something, oh my gosh, it’s going to be a bloodbath,” Raza told Business Insider.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of AI search startup Perplexity, which counts Nvidia among its largest investors, said he had met with Nvidia executives earlier Thursday and found business proceeding as usual.
Huang, he said, had built a company with technological advantages that wouldn’t disappear overnight.
“Even now, the best GPUs for running inference is Nvidia, and the best GPUs for running training is Nvidia, and none of that stops,” Srinivas said. “It’s established for years in the future.”
Databricks’ Ghodsi, too, expected Nvidia to remain strong for at least another two or three years, thanks to the long development cycles for its chips. What happens after that was a different question.
For Nvidia’s competitors, meanwhile, Huang’s abrupt exit presented an opening.
Robert Wachen, cofounder of Etched, a startup developing specialized AI chips to challenge Nvidia, praised Huang’s contributions to the industry before conceding that his departure could be good news for rivals.
“Now we see there’s probably going to be a big opening, which we plan to capitalize on,” Wachen said onstage.
There was at least some agreement that more competition would be good for AI. General Catalyst’s Taneja suggested the upheaval could push startups to explore alternatives from AMD and Google rather than relying so heavily on Nvidia.
Raza said that he agreed with Taneja. But he wasn’t exactly celebrating.
“This is not the best way to do it,” he said, “but we’ll be forced to do it.”
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