黄仁勋被董事会罢免，CFO暂代CEO并面临出口管制审查

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Wall Street, AI investors, and Nvidia itself find themselves this morning in a position few might have thought possible just a few short days ago, thinking about the direction of the AI industry without Jensen Wong at the helm of Nvidia, the company he founded more than three decades ago. The AI chip giant's now leaning on its chief financial officer Carolyn Crest to lead the company for now after Wong's ouster by its board following reports of multiple extrammarital affairs including with a woman who may be a Chinese spy.

Gregory Allen with Decision Tree Research says Nvidia is now in a very tough place.

Jensen has previously described Nvidia, the company, as the F1 car built around him as the driver. Everyone else in that company is a specialized component, an engine, a wheel, an axle, a turbocharger. There is no one else who is set up to be a leader. That's Decision Tree Research CEO Gregory Allen. Joining us for more analysis this morning after Hong's departure are two of some of the biggest names when it comes to the tech space on Wall Street.

Dan Ies with us this morning in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Dan is the founder and managing partner at Yorkville Lives and Gene Munster is with us as well, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Research. It's great to have both of you with us this morning on Daybreak and to think about Nvidia as this sort of F1 supercar. Uh gets to your note, Gene, uh out this morning after that the the challenge for Nvidia, the central challenge is to maintain urgency.

How difficult is it going to be for Nvidia to uh stay in the lead to keep the AI race going without Jensen Wong in the cockpit? Good morning.

Good morning. Uh well, I'll start with I'm a shareholder of Nvidia, so I think that the near-term I would describe that as the next couple years are going to be in a great place. Uh the to answer your question about how difficult is it long term, it's extremely difficult. And to put it into perspective, if you look at the playbook for companies that have been generational tech companies that have had these spectacular outcomes, and that's if you're investing today, what you're looking for, one of the the the key common characteristics is that it's founder-ledd, number one, and number two, those founders tend to have a wartime or really intense sense of urgency.

And I mean we can go through everything from jobs to Zuckerberg uh to cart from Palunteer, Elon and then of course Jensen. And so there I can't think of a a great example of a company that has had these exponential returns once the founder has left. I do want to mention though that urgency is not binary. It's a there's a scale on it and so it will not have I mean I think it's by def it's definitionally impossible for Nvidia to have founder urgency because the founder is no longer there but that doesn't mean that they cannot have urgency and I would kind of pull it all together is that if you think about the job of the board right now it's to do I think their number one goal should be to try to find someone who has that sense of urgency because I think that ultimately is going to what's going to keep them competitive in years three through And

Dan Ives, let's bring you into the conversation as well. You have called Jensen Wong the godfather of AI. Now that Jensen Wong is out, who potentially steps in? Is there someone who can lead Nvidia at the kind of level that Jensen Wong has, not just for Nvidia, but for the AI industry as a whole?

Yeah, I thought Jean put it perfect in terms of some of the challenges as well as some of the opportunities for Nvidia. Look, in in my opinion, I I just think you when you look at Jensen and you look at going forward, it's a dark day for Nvidia. It's a it's a black eye moment for Jensen, but the reality is I think they're going to need someone from the outside. I mean, we've talked about Tim Cook and Nesh from Powalt Curran from from Google that that probably leads them forward.

Colette, I think that is the best candidate internally. She has so much respect internally and externally. But there's a gut check moment for Nvidia and you know and it goes back to as I used to refer to Jensen as the godfather and all the stuff that he created. It's a blessing as it goes up. It's a curse as it goes down. Especially with no succession plan that Nvidia had.

Uh Gan, what do you think about potential successors here? We have heard uh Tim Cook uh the former Apple CEO floated by none other than President Trump as a a legend replacing a legend as as the president put it. Uh but are are there certain candidates that you look at who could uh who could step into Jensen Wong's shoes?

Yeah, I think uh I mean that's a Dan did a awesome list there. There's not much more that I can add beyond I don't think it's Cook. I mean Cook's passion is Apple. I mean this is uh like his true love is Apple. I'd be surprised if he moved in a different direction. The chairmanship role is something that he spends time I think he was like in Turkey last week or just I mean he's still on the move with Apple. Uh, but I think as you think about Dan's list there, you know, those names are not household names.

And like Dan said, I mean, he is the godfather. And so I think regardless of who it is, it's just not going to have the same kind of uh drive. Just kind of some perspective about how hard Jensen drives to be the Godfather. Stan talks about uh last year he had six meetings with Trump. That's a form of branding. They had four major conferences, GTC's in one year. uh he did 16 individual interviews with Bloomberg, CNBC and Fox Business.

I mean, this guy's everywhere and there's just nobody who kind of even comes close to that. And so that's that dark day that Dan's talking about. I mean, there's no way to sugarcoat it. Probably the only positive here for those who uh like his evangelism around the AI is that he's not going away. He's going to he will show up in some capacity with some company down the road. He's just uh despite all the disgrace that has been around him more recently uh he still I think has is going to have a measure to make some money and I think that that will probably draw investment dollars.

Yeah. To that point, we've heard Elon Musk even say that he'd be honored to hire Jensen Wong to one of his companies as well. But Dan, I got to ask you whether this could be more than just a dark day for Nvidia. Uh when we have reporting here from Bloomberg News that uh the Mega Speed executive uh at the center of the scandal, the suspected Chinese spy uh was able to bring advanced Nvidia chips into China. Isn't there going to be a lot more regulatory scrutiny now even than we might have expected uh after the Democrats midterm wins last week

on both sides of the aisle? this not even, you know, Democrat versus Republican because when it comes to export controls, the loopholes in Singapore, the worry about, you know, how many chips, what percent was ultimately for Nvidia, if that was 15% overall chips, and then you have in the US, you have a weight list where today if you want Nvidia chip, you probably don't get it till 2028. So why are they getting in China when they should be getting here?

And I think these are all like just as Jean's talking about the global personality and what Jensen built on the upside was unbelievable and it's really what built Nvidia today. We won't be talking about the AI revolution. Nvidia is going to continue to be the most dominant chip in the world and they're two to three years ahead of anyone. But right now from a regulatory perspective in the beltway I mean you are going to see just so many different investigations relative to Nvidia chips mega speed and you know and then at the same time we're even talking you know Microsoft sitting here where we're all going to have to you know give do faxes and get our fax machines ready and thi