Without Jensen Huang as CEO, Nvidia may find its AI chip magic tough to sustain

Modern companies are extremely resilient entities. They don't wither away at the loss of founder CEOs. But in the case of Nvidia, where its founder and CEO Jensen Huang is no longer in the driving seat, there is a real risk the company might see its fortunes dwindle. Because reasons.

In Short

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has resigned
• Huang has been at the company since he started it in 1992
• It is his tenacity that has made Nvidia a success

In the annals of Silicon Valley, there is no shortage of legendary founder CEOs. But even in the room full of them, a few stand apart from the rest. That is because, as Steve Jobs used to say, these are the people who put a “ding in the universe.” Jobs was, of course, one of them. Gordon Moore. Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg has earned his place. Up to an extent, Larry and Sergey of Google. Jensen Huang is in the same list. He is one of the OG tech founders.

Now he is no longer at Nvidia. With a couple of his extramarital affairs keeping the tech press abuzz in the last one week, on Thursday evening Huang “resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.”

Modern companies are extremely resilient entities. Their decoupling from the founder CEOs rarely impacts them in the long term. Twitter, now called X, is surviving even years after Jack Dorsey took a step back. Google is the same, although the arrival of AI has also marked a return of Sergey Brin back to the office. Amazon is doing fine while Bezos is partying and enjoying sights across the world.

In case of Nvidia this might turn out to be different.

Companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or even Apple grew quickly and carved out a niche within a few years. Nvidia, however, had a more scruffy and scrappy start. Created in 1992 by Huang and two other engineers, the company had the right idea about creating specialised chips focussed only on 3D graphics. But Nvidia spent its early years in doldrums before the world reached the late 1990s when computer gaming suddenly took off. Titles like Doom burst on the scene and graphics chips, the kind which Nvidia was making, became hot-selling items.

In that decade of struggle — from 1992 to 2000 when GeForce made Nvidia a technology marvel — it was Jensen Huang who kept the faith and steered the ship with his Asian doggedness and his inability to take no for an answer. He popularised a phrase in the 1990s, which became the motto of Nvidia. “Our company is thirty days from going out of business,” he said. This became the guiding light for Nvidia as it operated, even when it became big and successful, as if it was always at the knife’s edge, always at the risk of going bankrupt.

Steve Jobs might have coined the phrase “stay hungry, stay foolish” but the person in Silicon Valley who best embodied it has been Jensen Huang. And it has worked wonders for him, that is until now when his seemingly foolishness with two women has unraveled his storied career.

The two extramarital affairs of Jensen Huang are largely his personal burden to bear. But they also, given the importance of Huang to Nvidia, threaten to undo the pole position that the company has acquired in our AI world of 2026. Already in the last few days the affairs have hit Nvidia stock hard enough to make it shed over $500 billion in market capitalisation.

The problem for Nvidia is, as its rockstar Founder CEO noted in the 1990s, that the company is “thirty days from going out of business.” That is because it plays in a segment where technology is not the difficult part. It is the execution that is the key and the way Nvidia has executed its AI strategy in the last 15 years has been more about Huang rather than the company.

Nvidia does not have a secret sauce in chips. It doesn’t make chips. It designs them. Many other companies can also design similar chips. Its success is not entirely because of what it can bring to the table in terms of technology. Instead the company is at the centre of the AI world because of three main reasons, all carefully managed by Huang.

One, it is big because it was early in the AI race. Long before the world had discovered LLMs and GPTs, Nvidia started pivoting away from graphics cards. Huang realised the big money in future would be in selling to enterprise customers, to data centre operators, who wanted chips that could speed up machine learning. For this specific workload, the graphics cards were perfect. They only needed to be tweaked. Nvidia did that. AMD, which had an equally powerful graphics chip, missed the boat.

That early start gave Nvidia a foothold in the market that it continues to enjoy even now. More so because Nvidia — and again Huang hedged his bets right — did not just bring the chips to its customers. It also gave them the tools to use these chips in the best possible way. This was done through CUDA, a proprietary software stack that became essential in the AI industry.

Think of CUDA like MS Word or Adobe Photoshop. Even if tomorrow there is a better tool available for writing or editing photos, most people will still continue to use MS Word and Photoshop. That is because it has become a habit. CUDA, to simplify, has a similar status in the world of AI. And CUDA works only with Nvidia chips. So when OpenAI or Anthropic engineers want to work on next-gen AI technologies, they want to do so through CUDA. And because they prefer CUDA, OpenAI and Anthropic buy Nvidia chips.

Finally, there is the third bit that actually made Nvidia — until recently — the world’s largest company. That is Jensen Huang and his cross-border connections. In the last 10 years Nvidia has entered into many long-term corporate deals on both supply and demand side of AI. And many of these deals have been made possible because of the relationships Huang has in various segments of the tech industry.

At a time when even giants like Apple and Google have struggled to get enough memory chips, Nvidia is getting all the memory it needs for its chips from suppliers like Samsung and SK Hynix. At a time when other companies have struggled to get their chips made at the best TSMC processes, Nvidia seemingly has an open access to all that the Taiwanese giant offers, probably thanks to Huang. In the 1990s he started a close collaboration with TSMC founder Morris Chang. At that time TSMC was a company as scrappy as Nvidia. But together they grew. That memory is still probably shared strongly by both Nvidia and TSMC.

On the supply side, Huang has used his relationships to land deals after deals from AI and data centre giants. Nearly 10 years ago when OpenAI was still a small startup and Elon Musk was still there, Huang was hand-delivering the new AI chips to it. That relationship, started 10 years ago, is now paying dividends.

At the same time, Huang has deepened Nvidia’s ties with AI companies by ploughing back AI profits into the industry. Nvidia in the last few years has invested liberally in AI companies, by giving them money that these companies have then used to buy more Nvidia chips. The result has been the current AI ecosystem in the world. Many people call it a bubble but Nvidia sees it a success.

With Huang no longer in the driving seat, Nvidia may have to reckon with some of the challenges that the company has so far managed to stay ahead of. Its CUDA moat is now finally shrinking as several companies, including AMD and Apple, work to minimise the advantage Nvidia holds. As AI becomes more and more important, companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and even OpenAI are hedging bets on their own in-house AI chips. Apple, which is a chip-powerhouse in its own right, is now threatening to enter the enterprise AI business. AMD, which has been an arch rival of Nvidia since the 1990s, is trying to close the gap.

More importantly, with Huang no longer there to flex his personal connections with suppliers across Asia, and companies across Silicon Valley, Nvidia may have to compete harder on both sides. Can it continue to stay ahead of everyone else? I am sure it can. As noted earlier, modern companies are extremely resilient. But it is true that if there is a tech company at the risk of falling apart after losing its CEO it is the Nvidia of 2026.

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