For years Jensen Huang has joked that it would be nearly impossible to replace him as CEO at Nvidia, the company he co-founded and ran for more than three decades.
“There will never be one like me,” he said in a January interview. “And the reason for that is because I was raised at the company.”
But Huang’s abrupt resignation Thursday has thrust Nvidia into the unenviable task of finding a successor to a CEO who has long cast himself as irreplaceable.
Though Huang has kept a low profile, he is participating in the process and has called at least one potential candidate, said a person familiar with the discussion, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Huang fashioned Nvidia into a company unusually dependent on one person: himself. A flat management system giving Huang roughly 60 direct reports meant decisions were centralized in him. The board of directors did not have a chairman, so no one could overrule him. Both his children were appointed to senior managerial roles at the company.
Nvidia became deeply intertwined with Huang’s own personal vision, relationships and larger-than-life persona. He personally cultivated many of the company’s most important external ties, from courting President Donald Trump to developing an unusually close relationship with Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, helping to secure Nvidia priority access to scarce manufacturing capacity.
And his instincts helped Nvidia place early bets on technologies like AI ahead of rivals, turning the company into one of the world’s most valuable firms.
That concentration of power makes finding a successor especially daunting. Andy Wu, a Harvard business professor, calls it “the hardest CEO job to fill in at least 10 or 20 years.”
Nvidia’s highly technical chips business means that likely only an engineer can fully understand the technology, while the company’s future now sprawls across a range of fields, including the metaverse, autonomous vehicles and robotics. “The intersection of people who have a PhD in electrical engineering and have management skills is a relatively small set of people,” he said.
“Our partnership with TSMC and the broader supply chain is strong as always,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement. TSMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tae Kim, author of the book The Nvidia Way, said that Huang wore many hats within the company, making him difficult to replace. “He’s the number one tech evangelist, the number one product visionary, the number one business strategist, the number one marketer, and the number one HR lead, by recruiting people and cultivating talent,” he said.
Kim said that Nvidia’s future prospects will depend in part on whether the company can retain Huang’s top deputies, who carry the culture and institutional knowledge. That includes Ian Buck, who led the creation of CUDA, the valuable software that broadens the use of GPUs to many applications; Jonah Alben, who runs GPU engineering; and Colette Kress, the CFO who has been named interim CEO. “The board needs to lock them down right now,” he said, “and make sure Nvidia retains the best talent that Jensen was able to cultivate.”
Even with a competent replacement, tech companies can lose their innovative edge with the loss of their founder, as a successor often lacks the centralized power and magnetism to convince staff and investors to take huge risks.
“Investing in the future fundamentally requires making risky bets that can in many ways appear irrational in the short term,” said Wu, who wrote a case study on Nvidia’s pivot into AI. “It takes a founder-CEO, or someone with that level of control, in order to have the flexibility with investors, and the inspirational capacity among the employees, to motivate the company to do things that otherwise the outside would consider kind of absurd.”
Nvidia has lost around a trillion dollars in market value in the wake of the scandal, reflecting deep uncertainty over whether the company can retain its successful trajectory.
Huang’s departure has roiled Nvidia’s stock, with financial analysts alluding, in their jargon, to “key person risk.” Bernstein Research halved its price target for Nvidia’s stock from $400 to $200 on Thursday, saying it doubted “the ability of any new CEO to truly fill Jensen’s shoes.”
The risk that Nvidia might not fully recover has broader implications than it would for most companies. Amid a tense AI race with China, the U.S. government would likely need to adjust its strategy if it can’t be assured of Nvidia retaining the technological lead on behalf of the United States. In a rare case of the president weighing in on a corporate succession, President Trump has publicly recommended former Apple CEO Tim Cook to take on the role.
Since founding Nvidia in 1993 with two friends, Huang has made big, risky bets on the direction of the company that ultimately reaped rewards. Nvidia invented and popularized the graphics processing unit, or GPU, first as a video-gaming chip, and then adapted it more broadly for computing. Huang also made an early decision to pursue AI development.
He drove the business through personal friendships with suppliers, notably Chang of TSMC. Chang told the Acquired podcastthat he and the Nvidia founder were able to smooth over business disagreements through pizza dinners with their wives. He wrote in his memoir that he even tried to convince Huang to join TSMC and become his successor (Huang declined, saying he already had a job).
Wu, the business professor, says there is a risk now that Nvidia could lose some of its “disproportionately large” manufacturing capacity with TSMC, with other buyers like Amazon and Google scrambling for limited capacity. “There’s an unusually large amount of trust between TSMC and Nvidia that TSMC doesn’t have with any other company,” he said, “and a lot of that is specifically embodied in Jensen Huang.”
David Yoffie, a business professor and former Intel board member, said that at some companies, like Intel, there are systematic succession processes, with annual evaluations of candidates. That hasn’t been the case at Nvidia.
The successor will need to be able to balance the conflicting interests of Nvidia’s vast ecosystem of partner companies, build bridges with the Trump administration, and chart a path for future innovation.
“Jensen didn’t believe in succession planning. He was very public about that,” he said. “The board apparently did not force it on him, and therefore they’re sort of stuck now.”
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