Nvidia After Jensen Huang: Why I Don’t See A Change In Direction

The recent resignation of the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, amid the news of extramarital affairs and possible espionage allegation has caused much speculation in the tech world of what this means for Nvidia.

(Disclosure: Nvidia is among the many global technology companies that subscribe to research from Creative Strategies, the firm I founded.)

I don’t want to understate what Jensen Huang has meant to Nvidia and to the tech industry. He was the visionary who bet the company on accelerated computing years before most of the market understood where it was headed, and he set the tone for the entire AI buildout. For much of the last decade, he was also the industry’s chief explainer, walking customers, partners, governments and investors through where computing was going and why it mattered. Very few executives have played that role, and no one steps into it overnight. His departure is a real loss for Nvidia and for the ecosystem that has grown up around it.

That said, I have watched this industry long enough to know that losing a visionary is not the same as changing strategy. The vision Jensen laid out is now baked into Nvidia’s roadmap, its supply chain and its people. For that reason, I don’t believe his departure changes where the company is going.

What stays the same

From a strategic standpoint, I don’t expect a change in direction. The product roadmap remains strong, with the next several generations already in design, in tape-out or on order. Nvidia is also still the company best positioned to deliver that roadmap at scale because it has spent years securing the supply chain behind it. That includes leading-edge wafers, advanced packaging such as CoWoS, high-bandwidth memory and the partners who turn chips into rack-level systems. That kind of supply position doesn’t walk out the door with one executive.