Reed’s view
Nvidia has been battered over the past couple of days, but it could get worse.
That is, if founder and CEO Jensen Huang is forced or chooses to step down, or if investigations pin him down for doing something illegal.
In most sectors of the economy, CEOs are expected to run businesses well, but they are generally interchangeable parts — albeit expensive ones. Google and Apple show that founder CEOs, which are harder to replicate, can be replaced. But even among founder CEOs, Huang stands apart for bold bets that helped him endure short-term suffering in return for long-term gain. Most people know Nvidia for the climbing stock in their portfolios, or the GPUs on every tech company’s Christmas list. But his creation of the CUDA platform in 2006 is perhaps the best example of how he’s been able to step ahead of the industry for decades. Nvidia’s computing platform and programming model, the software that essentially underpins the modern AI industry, created one of the most valuable moats in business history.
A half dozen years later, seeing the progress in neural networks, he pivoted to AI. Huang realized AI would require massive data centers with interconnected chips, and concluded that networking would become the bottleneck.
