If the board had let Jensen stick around, he’d have brought more problems than his cachet was worth.
Colette Kress is the interim CEO. She’s been at Nvidia since 2013, she was high up at Cisco and Microsoft before that, and she was part of the team that took Nvidia from a few hundred million dollars to the biggest company in the world.
I believe Nvidia is in good hands.
Not everyone agrees with me. According to SemiAnalysis, one of the most closely followed research firms in the chip world, Nvidia was built around one man. Jensen had roughly 60 direct reports, and the firm says the company never built a deep bench to replace him.
The Winners
They believe Jensen personally locked up memory in South Korea and chip capacity in Taiwan, CEO to CEO. The firm estimates Nvidia’s price for SK Hynix’s next-generation memory runs about $3.00 to $3.30 per gigabit, while AMD, Broadcom, Amazon and Google pay roughly $3.70 to $4.10.
And without Jensen at the table suppliers won’t put Nvidia first the way they used to. It thinks more than 70% of total capacity is likely to be non-Nvidia by 2028. AMD and Broadcom win from that, and so do Amazon and Google, which are building their own chips.
The Losers
Neoclouds are the companies that rent out AI computing power, names like CoreWeave and Nebius. A lot of them raised money because Jensen backed them, not because they shopped around for the best chip.
Nvidia carried $530 billion in off-balance-sheet guarantees as of its last quarter, including $36 billion of revenue floors under neocloud capacity. SemiAnalysis calls it the “Jensen put,” and it warns that without it, the whole ecosystem may shrink.
You can already see it on the tape. Nebius reported disappointing earnings, and CoreWeave rolled over a little on the back of it.
As for Nvidia, I think this is much more company specific than macro. Nvidia is the second-largest company in the world, so it matters, but I don’t see it cascading across the rest of the market for more than a day or two.
As for the stock, buyers stepped in at the lows this morning.
This may be a tradable bottom between now and Tuesday night, when Nvidia reports earnings for the first time without Jensen in charge. If that $148.80 low gives way, I’m wrong, and I’ll get out of the way.
Your only option,
P.S. Find out what this all means to Anthropic’s upcoming IPO.