Jensen Huang’s departure blasts big hole in AI startup funding, VCs and founders say
Nvidia poured tens of billions into AI startups under Huang. Without him at the helm, founders and VCs are bracing for smaller checks and lower valuations.
Jensen Huang, the renowned CEO of Nvidia, has officially resigned after 33 years of leading the company. Nvidia, once a major investor in AI startups, has poured tens of billions into these companies over the years, making it the largest investor in over 105 rounds this year. With Huang's departure, the startup ecosystem is left without a major champion and a significant source of capital, potentially causing major disruptions in dealmaking, valuations, and competition.
Some experts believe that Nvidia's interim CEO, Colette Kress, is more conservative and may invest less in early-stage startups, which could further impact the ecosystem. Nvidia's support for neoclouds, inference providers, and open weight models has been crucial, with the company backing several significant deals, including CoreWeave, Crusoe, Hugging Face, and Mistral AI.
Huang's investments often came with generous checks, effectively locking startups into using Nvidia's chips and reinforcing its dominant position in the market. While some investors hope that large cloud companies and other chipmakers will step in to fill the void left by Huang, it remains unclear if they will be willing to invest in the same way Nvidia did, particularly in pre-revenue infrastructure startups.
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