The end of the Jensen Huang era: NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) faces three major tests

Title context: The end of the Jensen Huang era: NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) faces three major tests Text: The Jensen Huang era at NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) has officially come to an end. On November 12 local time, Jensen Huang announced his resignation as the company's president, CEO, and director. Current CFO Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO, and the NVIDIA Corporation board has simultaneously launched a search for a new CEO. Having led NVIDIA Corporation for more than 30 years, Jensen Huang single-handedly brought NVIDIA Corporation to the core position of the global AI industry. Now, with the sudden departure of this founder, the market has begun to re-examine NVIDIA Corporation's past operating model, which was highly dependent on individual leadership: Without Jensen Huang, can NVIDIA Corporation still maintain its original speed of technology decision-making? Will the massive investments and financing support he promoted shrink with the management change? Will the supply chain continue to lay out in advance around NVIDIA Corporation's technology roadmap and capacity needs as it did in the past? NVIDIA Corporation and even the entire AI industry may need to readjust to an era without Jensen Huang. "A desperate all-in bet" After Jensen Huang's departure, the first test facing NVIDIA Corporation is its technology decision-making system. Unlike the multi-layer reporting management structures of many large technology companies, Jensen Huang long maintained a fairly flat management style. He had 60 direct reports, most of whom were deeply involved in engineering and technical work spanning GPU, CPU, storage, optics, and other fields. Jensen Huang explained that he did not like one-on-one meetings and instead preferred to have executives from different fields participate together in problem discussions, so that everyone could simultaneously understand the company's challenges and the basis for decisions. To some extent, this management style reduced information barriers between departments and also allowed Jensen Huang to place technology roadmaps from these different fields into a single picture, promoting their coordinated evolution around AI demand. But this highly flat organizational structure also brought the first hidden risk: an insufficient succession pipeline. Semiconductor analysis firm SemiAnalysis pointed out that Jensen Huang long held major decision-making power at the company. Although many executives were each responsible for important technology and business areas, they rarely had the opportunity to independently demonstrate the ability to coordinate the entire company. NVIDIA Corporation did not lack technical talent internally, but it was difficult to find someone who could simultaneously coordinate chip R&D, data center business, capital allocation, and supply chain relationshipsin other words, "a second Jensen Huang." SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel also said in an interview that after Jensen Huang's departure, NVIDIA Corporation may face a decline in decision-making efficiency. Technical issues that Jensen Huang directly pushed forward in the past may in the future require discussion among multiple managers, and the lack of a core figure who can quickly make the final call may also affect the company's judgment on technology roadmaps. This leads to the second issue: Will NVIDIA Corporation's future technology roadmap become more conservative? As NVIDIA Corporation's founder, Jensen Huang could make "a desperate all-in bet," staking the company's future on a technology direction that might only pay off a decade later; but a successor needs to explain to the board and shareholders why resources should continue to be invested in projects that cannot yet generate returns. CUDA is a typical case. When CUDA long failed in its early years to bring commercial returns commensurate with the investment and was questioned by Wall Street, Jensen Huang still insisted on pushing this roadmap, ultimately creating NVIDIA Corporation's most core competitive barrier. Similar long-term bets also include Tensor Cores, as well as Omniverse and the autonomous driving business, which are still continuously exploring commercial valueaccording to a SemiAnalysis report, Jensen Huang internally called the latter "zero billion dollar bets," that is, bets that currently generate no revenue but that he believed could have enormous value in the future. For Jensen Huang's successor, the decision-making environment may be completely different. Projects that require long-term investment and are difficult to prove commercially valuable in the short term may face stricter scrutiny in the future. Of course, this does not mean NVIDIA Corporation will necessarily cut long-term technology investment, but analysts believe that after Jensen Huang's departure, whether the company can continue to maintain this strategic style of daring to bet on the future will become an important standard for measuring the new management. The "financier" of startups across the industrial chain Adjustments and changes in technology roadmaps may be more subtle and gradual, but the impact of Jensen Huang's departure on the AI industry's capital chain may be more direct and rapid. Over the past few years, NVIDIA Corporation has gradually transformed from a chip supplier into a source of capital "transfusion" for the AI industry ecosystem: intensively investing in startups across various fields and also helping customers obtain funding for computing infrastructure construction through credit guarantees and other means. Jensen Huang would gain an in-depth understanding of startups' technologies, sometimes help companies connect with NVIDIA Corporation customers, and even participate in financing communications to help startups attract other investors. According to data from a media report this week, in just two months this year, the scale of transactions involving NVIDIA Corporation equity investments and large-scale credit guarantees reached about US$140 billion. After Jensen Huang's departure, venture capitalists, startup founders, and semiconductor industry figures have begun to worry that NVIDIA Corporation may slow its previously aggressive investment pace. The report also used the term "Nvidia put," referring to a kind of implicit market expectation that NVIDIA Corporation might step in to support some AI companies at critical moments. In the past, some companies were able to obtain financing and advance data center construction partly because the market believed NVIDIA Corporation was willing to provide funding or credit support. Colette Kress, who has taken over as NVIDIA Corporation's interim CEO, is not the same as Jensen Huang in investment decision-making style. The outside world believes her style may be more conservative. As NVIDIA Corporation's CFO, Kress previously did not agree with some of the massive transactions promoted by Jensen Huang, including the credit support plan with OpenAI. When that plan first came to light, NVIDIA Corporation planned to provide OpenAI with up to US$250 billion in credit support to help it build large data centers. But at the time Kress worried that support on such a large scale would over-concentrate NVIDIA Corporation's financial risk, and the plan was ultimately split, with NVIDIA Corporation committing to provide only US$100 billion in credit support for the first phase of construction. Behind this are two different operating philosophies: Jensen Huang hoped to expand the scale of the AI industry as quickly as possible through investment and financing support, thereby consolidating demand for NVIDIA Corporation's chips; Kress focused more on the risk exposure of capital investment, customers' ability to repay, and investment returns. It is worth mentioning that this summer, Jensen Huang summoned NVIDIA Corporation's senior financial management team to his office, including CFO Colette Kress. At the time, NVIDIA Corporation's investment bets were becoming increasingly astonishing, and doubts about an AI bubble were growing loudly; Jensen Huang wanted to ensure the company had not made mistakes in related decisions. According to media reports, during that discussion Jensen Huang sharply criticized Kress, interrupting her during her report and saying bluntly that she was "like a deer in the headlights" (note: an English idiom describing someone who reacts slowly in the face of a sudden situation). At the current point, NVIDIA Corporation's capital layout in the AI ecosystem is already quite large. If, after Jensen Huang's departure, NVIDIA Corporation places greater emphasis on financial risk in the future and slows some investment and financing support, it may affect the financing environment of the entire AI industry. Of course, a reduction in NVIDIA Corporation's investment activity does not necessarily mean AI demand is shrinking, and other investors may also fill the funding gap. But the expansion model the market had grown accustomed toone actively driven by NVIDIA Corporation, with capital and chip demand reinforcing each othermay face adjustment. Supply chain mobilization power In addition to technology and capital, another manifestation of Jensen Huang's personal influence was his ability to mobilize the global semiconductor supply chain. Competition in AI chips has never been merely competition at the chip design level. Advanced packaging, HBM, substrates, optical interconnects, and other segments all require suppliers to invest capital and capacity in advance. What truly enabled NVIDIA Corporation to sustain its competitiveness was its supply chain. One important reason it could continuously drive new product iterations was that it could coordinate upstream and downstream in advance, enabling the supply chain to lay out around its own technology roadmap and demand rhythm. Jensen Huang played a key role in this. Jensen Huang previously personally negotiated multiple times with senior executives of major supply chain companies in South Korea, Taiwan region of China, and other places. He could not only convey long-term demand expectations to suppliers, but also use NVIDIA Corporation's core position in the AI industry to push suppliers to accept more aggressive technology cooperation and capacity arrangements. In analysts' view, for the AI chip industry, where technology iterates rapidly and the supply chain is highly complex, this kind of long-term cooperative relationship directly promoted by the CEO is sometimes more important than simply increasing the scale of purchase orders. NVIDIA Corporation previously disclosed in its fiscal 2026 second-quarter filing that, in order to meet product demand for the coming years, it significantly increased supply- and capacity-related commitments, from US$119 billion in the previous quarter to US$279 billion. SemiAnalysis pointed out that in the past NVIDIA Corporation could, through aggressive supply chain negotiations, secure suppliers' priority allocation of 60% or 70% of capacity to itself, and even persuade them to accept terms below market prices. This cooperative relationship was based not only on NVIDIA Corporation's procurement scale, but also on Jensen Huang's personal technical judgment and industry influence. Jensen Huang could make suppliers believe that cooperating with NVIDIA Corporation to expand production in advance and advance new technologies would help them seize future growth opportunities in the AI industry. After his departure, NVIDIA Corporation's supply chain bargaining power will not disappear immediately; after all, the company still has a massive customer base, procurement demand, and technology ecosystem. But supply chain mobilization capability and procurement scale are not the same thing, and whether NVIDIA Corporation can continue to secure suppliers' priority support with the same intensity remains to be seen. The Jensen Huang era at NVIDIA Corporation has ended, and this giant standing at the center of the global AI industry is waiting for its next helmsman. This article is reprinted from Cailian Press, edited by GMTEight: Chen Yufeng.