SemiAnalysis：黄仁勋离职与英伟达未来架构分析

Jensen Huang is no longer the CEO of Nvidia. Nvidia’s board was investigating Jensen’s conduct and weighing his future at the company he founded, and clearly the conduct issue is real; it is ethically problematic to have relationships with a customer who is a Chinese CCP asset and with multiple subordinates.

Additionally, we believe there is more at play with his resignatiom after only four days. We believe it is directly tied to the vast smuggling of GPUs. Our Accelerator Model tracks every AI chip’s production and destination, and our data shows more than 1.5GW of Nvidia chips, which are restricted, still ultimately ended up in China. This figure doesn’t even include chips that Nvidia created to circumvent US rules, a story we originally broke.

We believe the US intelligence community is a large part of the push to get Jensen out of Nvidia. Specifically, we believe it is likely that RASA or similar legislation, which has already passed the house, will move forward. AI and chip restrictions on China are going to ramp now much faster with the biggest defender Jensen, gone. We are strong believers in some restrictions, but poorly shaped ones are damaging to US interests.

This sort of legislation will have consequences, and we don’t think politicians are thinking them through.

Here are the clear benefits of the current regime where Chinese labs are able to access GPUs remotely, and NOT in China:

• Profits flow to American companies.
• The US can monitor what Chinese labs are doing.
• The US can cut off their access to the GPUs through politics or by force almost instantly, if they choose.
• American companies such as NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Supermicro, and Dell all depend on Chinese companies in their supply chain.
• American companies such as NVIDIA and AMD employ Chinese engineers (who live in China, to be clear) to develop hardware and low-level software for their GPU systems. Without these engineers, we are certain that the user experience for these GPUs would be materially worse than it is today.
• American companies, especially the entire startup ecosystem benefit from the open source research that Chinese companies, students and independent researchers publish using these GPUs today.
• China is (even slightly) less motivated to use their domestic accelerators.
• Innovations from China flow globally through open innovations of wide expert parallelism, OSS kernel libraries: MSA, DeepEP, DeepGEMM, etc.

With that said we do believe in some AI restrictions to China, but those are more shaped like the MATCH Act then RASA. Biden style diffusion rules make the most sense.

Maybe biggest of all: open source is under attack. It’s an open secret that Nvidia works directly with the Chinese labs on open source and helping them optimize GPUs and models. These labs utilize Blackwell GPUs, which Nvidia knows. The US open source ecosystem and many startups rely on Chinese AI models. This is significantly impaired with Jensen gone and the China hawks winning.

But the question that matters for shareholders (and the AI supply chain) is a different one: what is Nvidia without Jensen?

Our view is that the company was never built for him not to be there. He was at the helm for 33 years, and even though the board pressured him out (or he “resigned”) Nvidia would still be materially better off with him there instead of gone. The company was uniquely built to suit the man himself. The company without the man might be an entirely different beast. SpaceX and Tesla don't function without Elon, Nvidia doesn't function without Jensen.

One King, 60 Direct Reports

Nvidia’s corporate structure is odd for a company of its size and scale. Jensen has roughly 60 direct reports, according to his public statements. He has said that CEOs should have the most direct reports because those people require the least amount of management and that he doesn’t have one-on-one meetings with them.

But few of them can do things without Jensen. The company is run like a kingdom with one king, with everyone else, regardless of seniority, a peon doing his bidding. Jensen has said that it doesn’t matter who reports to who as their title isn’t related to how important their job is, and it’s one of the reasons why Nvidia is the “smallest large company in the word” and has so much fewer employees – about 42,000 – despite its big market cap. At Nvidia, there is less politics as a result. Jensen has said this flat network empowers employees and allows the company to adapt more quickly because its technology is also moving so quickly.

This is one of the reasons Nvidia moves fast. Once Jensen set a direction, everyone moved on it together. Former employees have told us that product development and engineering often happen until the last minute so the company can change its mind if it needs to. For example, the GB200 design came together a lot closer to the product cycle than probably anyone would have liked, one former executive told us. Jensen has said he wishes he could keep the company in startup mode forever.

The cost of that structure, however, is that Nvidia doesn’t have a deep bench of successors. Look at Nvidia’s website: only five others, two of whom are legal and finance executives, are featured prominently among his reports. Most of his direct reports aren’t trained for the spotlight and are actively discouraged from seeking it. Few leave to become CEOs of other major companies, with Rene Haas at Arm the rare exception. Few at Nvidia get the chance to shine externally because Jensen makes all the big decisions. But much of Nvidia’s executive team doesn’t mind because heavy is the head that wears the crown, and many are happy to stay until retirement age because they’re well paid, treated well, and believe in the mission and their leader.

No One Wants the Job

Colette Kress has been named interim CEO, but Nvidia is looking for a permanent CEO. That cannot be someone with finance background. The obvious internal names being floated to succeed Jensen on the technical side are Ian Buck and Jonah Alben. Buck, who created CUDA out of his doctoral research at Stanford, joined Nvidia in 2004 and now runs the datacenter business as vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing. He is often placed in charge of things while Jensen travels and frequently speaks at conferences.

Alben, who has been at Nvidia since 1997, is senior vice president of GPU engineering and oversees the design of the company’s GPUs. But realistically, no one person can run it all. We don’t think Buck is capable of running the technical hardware engineering side of the house. Alben and others on his team have technical autonomy, but even he doesn’t control the entire chip side, where other senior leaders who handle many major technical and business divisions also report directly to Jensen. Both are amazing but likely not able to exert the supply chain mastery Jensen has.

There is also the question of whether anyone wants to do the job of CEO. An executive told us earlier this year that “Ian would rather die than succeed Jensen and wouldn’t want that job. Jonah is more respected and people say he could, but again, no one would really want that job.” Circumstances, though, have obviously changed. Kress is the interim CEO, but wrangling more than 60 VPs to a cohesive vision of the company takes a certain kind of person, and otherwise the firm’s direction risks dissolving into noise.

Founder Bets Do Not Survive Professional Managers

Jensen is one of the last old-school tech founders, of the same generation as Elon Musk and a bit older than Mark Zuckerberg. The other companies that came up alongside Nvidia have all transitioned to professional managers, including AMD, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.