Some Silicon Valley executives are quietly celebrating Jensen Huang’s ouster from Nvidia and the national furor over chip exports to China. The good news for American companies is that tech exports that were going to China are now expected to be redirected to US firms, one person told me. That could accelerate the growth of the big AI labs and other Silicon Valley companies, and hobble Chinese rivals.
In the short term, they’re probably right. There’s strong evidence that export controls have successfully slowed China’s technological progress. The problem is that the US can’t win the technological race with China in the long term by slowing its rival down. The bigger and more difficult part of that victory is speeding up American innovation.
And that’s where Huang’s ouster is a counter-force to the gains made on China policy. Huang is one of Silicon Valley’s great innovators. In the short term, his ouster won’t be terrible for Nvidia. Nvidia may actually become a more profitable company now, because any new CEO will optimize for profitability, as Apple did under Tim Cook. Innovators burn a lot of money thinking about the long term. And Nvidia will never be as innovative as it was under Huang.
Huang was Nvidia’s one-man, long-term moat.
