Nvidia Falls From the Top of the AI Pyramid as Jensen Huang’s Exit Takes Its Chief AI Promoter
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) will survive Jensen Huang’s exit, yet it has slipped from the top of the AI pyramid, says 24/7 Wall St. co-founder Douglas A. McIntyre.
McIntyre opens with a line that captures the mood around the industry: AI is the greatest invention of all time, even if it kills all of us. Nvidia sits at the center of that story. It builds the chips that power AI, and under Huang it also wrote the checks. A number of big AI companies are in business because Nvidia helped fund them, and that money came back to Nvidia through chip sales. McIntyre calls the setup a little circular, and brilliant.
Then Huang was suddenly gone. He resigned as chief executive this week after reports that he had an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence officials considered a Chinese spy. Nvidia gave no reason for his departure and named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent replacement.
McIntyre says Nvidia is far from doomed. Its chips will still be used all the time. What the company loses is a CEO who could travel the world and pitch AI to everyone, the executive who told audiences that AI was the greatest invention in the world. That raises a bigger question: who takes the top spot now?
He ends on Huang himself. He may have been everything he claimed, McIntyre says, but because he could not control himself, he is gone now.
Investors get their first read on Nvidia after Huang when the company reports quarterly results on November 17.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
