Nvidia after Jensen Huang: Will Big Tech’s ‘key man’ ethos live on?

详细摘要

The former Nvidia CEO’s exit will test the idea that founders are irreplaceable

If there is one incident that encapsulates the celebrity of Jensen Huang while simultaneously foreshadowing his downfall, it would be his appearance at a 2024 tech conference in his native Taiwan. Mr. Huang, the founder of Nvidia Corp., was swarmed by attendees who demanded photos, autographs, and a moment of his time. In a video of the encounter, a woman asks him to sign her shirt.

“You sure?” he asks, raising his eyebrows. “Is that a good idea?” He then appears to move a strand of the woman’s hair out of the way and writes his name in black pen on her clothing, right above her cleavage.

Normally, movie stars and musicians are asked to do such things, not a grey-haired, bespectacled tech executive, no matter how cool his leather jacket. But such was the aura surrounding Mr. Huang, who catapulted into CEO rock star status in recent years as the AI boom took off.

He is one of the handful of individuals most responsible for the AI era that is now reshaping the world. Nvidia’s chips, known as graphics processing units, are the workhorse of AI development. OpenAI, Anthropic and most every other AI company relies on Nvidia’s GPUs to build and run their models. The massive global demand for these chips have turned Nvidia into a multi-trillion dollar company and elevated Mr. Huang into one of the richest people on earth.

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He built a close relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump, and was able to influence American AI policy while travelling the world to meet with government officials in other countries, extolling the virtues of AI and the necessity for nations to build their own domestic computing power – preferably with Nvidia’s chips. His lengthy keynote addresses were must-see events, and his on-stage pronouncements could move markets and tank companies.

He resigned on Thursday from Nvidia, the company he co-founded in 1993.

“The board did what we said it needed to do, which is…

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