NVIDIA Won’t Be the Same Without Jensen Huang — Tae Kim

Tae Kim argued that Jensen Huang’s removal would leave NVIDIA fundamentally different, not because the company stops making great chips, but because Huang personally fused product vision, deal making, recruiting, and public-facing leadership. He said the board’s response to the conduct allegations makes a return unlikely, and that the real challenge is preserving NVIDIA’s culture and top engineering talent through a transition rather than finding a single replacement who can do everything Huang did.

Kim said the most plausible successors are Renee James, now CEO of Arm, and Ian Buck, who created CUDA and runs NVIDIA’s data center business. In his view, a split leadership model could work: one CEO handling external relationships and management while technical leaders keep autonomy over engineering and product strategy. He also stressed that NVIDIA must retain a small bench of key executives, especially around GPU engineering and data center operations, or risk seeing rivals recruit them away.

On the business side, Kim expects Congress and regulators to close the loophole that allows Chinese access to NVIDIA chips through international data centers, which he thinks would reduce some revenue on the margin. Still, he said overall AI compute demand remains overwhelming. He also expects Chinese AI labs to fall further behind U.S. labs as Anthropic and OpenAI tighten distillation, and he thinks Anthropic’s IPO could be well timed after a valuation reset and a strong October ARR print.