Jia Yangqing left NVIDIA after only one year of employment, as the operational performance of DGX Lepton fell short of expectations.

According to Beating monitoring, just one year after Nvidia acquired AI startup LeptonAI for hundreds of millions of dollars, LeptonAI founder (who later served as Nvidia's vice president of system software) Jia Yangqing has left Nvidia. According to SemiAnalysis, the main reason for the split was that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was dissatisfied with the poor operational performance of the DGX Cloud Lepton project, and there were disagreements over product execution and open-source commitments.

Nvidia acquired LeptonAI in April 2025 and relaunched the platform as DGX Cloud Lepton in June of the same year, positioning it as a unified AI computing power marketplace. Nvidia initially promised to open-source LeptonAI's core software platform by 2026, but has yet to deliver. Outsiders speculate that Huang changed his mind after the acquisition and refused to approve the open-source plan, and the multi-year equity vesting agreement failed to retain Jia Yangqing.

In addition to internal cultural and strategic differences, the rise of AI agent programming tools represented by Cursor and Claude Code is also reshaping the middleware market. These programming tools lower the engineering threshold for developers building applications, diluting the engineering value of infrastructure platforms like LeptonAI. Jia Yangqing has been confirmed to have been invited as an advisor to GPU cloud service provider Hyperbolic, providing technical support for multi-chip systems and computing power efficiency.