#黄仁勋辞职 #每周来晒 33 Years, $4 Trillion, An Overnight Curtain Call: The End of the Jensen Huang Era—Where Does Nvidia Go from Here?

01 Breaking: First CEO Change in 33 Years
On November 12, U.S. Eastern Time, Nvidia published an announcement on its website: co-founder Jensen Huang resigned as president, chief executive officer, and board member, effective immediately.
The announcement gave no reason and provided no transition period. This is the first CEO change since Nvidia was founded in 1993. In the days before, reports concerning his personal affairs continued to gain traction, and Nvidia’s board had launched an independent investigation; details remain subject to company announcements and subsequent disclosures by authoritative media. From the news breaking to his formal resignation, only four days passed.
More revealing than the resignation itself is the transition plan announced alongside it.
Colette Kress | Interim CEO
The current executive vice president and chief financial officer joined Nvidia in September 2013 and has experienced the company’s entire journey from graphics chips to a leading AI computing powerhouse. Until a permanent successor is appointed, she will also continue to serve as finance chief.
Harvey C. Jones | Board Chair
The former CEO of Synopsys becomes the first independent board chair in Nvidia’s history. The company had never had such a position in its previous 33 years.
CEO Search | Internal and External Candidates
The board has launched a formal search, with both internal and external candidates under consideration. No timeline has been given.
Bloomberg said the board has engaged an external executive search firm. The words “effective immediately” sever 33 years of continuity. No transition period, no deputy, no publicly named successor—that is what the market truly sees.

02 From $40k to $4 Trillion
To understand the significance of this resignation, we must first look back at Jensen Huang’s journey.
Thirty-three years, one company, one person—there are almost no comparable examples.
1993 | A Silicon Valley Restaurant
At 30, Jensen Huang founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, with $40k in startup capital. Back then, the word “GPU” did not yet exist, and gaming graphics cards were a niche market.
1999 | GeForce 256
Nvidia launched what is widely recognized as the world’s first GPU, transforming the graphics processor from an accessory to the CPU into an independent computing unit.
2006 | CUDA
The most visionary and most questioned bet of his career: insisting that GPUs should do work beyond graphics. Wall Street once thought this was a waste of money.
2012 | AlexNet
A deep neural network trained on two GTX 580s won ImageNet. The deep learning era began, and GPUs became the computing foundation of AI.
2022–2026 | From Graphics Card Maker to “Picks-and-Shovels Seller”
ChatGPT triggered global demand for computing power, and H100s became impossible to get; Nvidia’s market cap successively surpassed $3 trillion and $4 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies in human history.
It all began with an architecture sketched on a napkin and $40k. This is one of the very few Silicon Valley founders who “founded the company and took the helm, then steered it to the summit.”
Beyond Musk and Zuckerberg, it is hard to name a third.

03 What Did the “Leather-Jacketed Tough Guy” Leave Behind?
Jensen Huang left the tech world far more than just a company.
A management philosophy
He dislikes hierarchical barriers and departmental silos, and does not favor one-on-one meetings; instead, he convenes management as a group. At the peak, 60 direct reports reported to him; as of this November, the number was still 33.
One thing he often says is: “Our company is always just thirty days away from going out of business.”
A long-term mindset
He did not give up on CUDA after more than a decade of continuous losses; even in the darkest moments, when crypto was in decline and the gaming business was falling, he still bet everything on AI.
A “picks-and-shovels seller” positioning
He does not build large language models or applications, only the foundational computing power and software ecosystem that everyone depends on. This made him a “scarce resource” rather than a “competitor.”
A very small equity stake
He holds only about 871 million common shares, representing 3.58%, yet controls a $4 trillion company. His control does not come from his shares, but from the personal trust he has built over 33 years—and that is precisely the hardest part to hand over.

04 Without Jensen Huang, Can Nvidia Keep Printing Money?
The market has already delivered its answer!
After the announcement, Nvidia’s U.S. premarket losses quickly widened to about 10%; it briefly plunged about 14% after the open, and closed down 4.3% at $166.19. Compared with the October 6 high of $239.24, the stock has now pulled back about 30%; its market cap shed more than $600 billion in a week, equivalent to about 1.2 trillion yuan. On the same day, AMD and Broadcom each rose more than 5%, while Cerebras surged after hours. The bet is not on Nvidia’s collapse, but on orders being spread across suppliers. On November 17, the company will release its earnings as scheduled—that will be the new management team’s first time facing the market alone.
More worth watching than the stock price is the web beyond the balance sheet.
Over the past two years, Nvidia has turned “investment equals customer” into a growth engine through purchase commitments, project guarantees, and equity investments: providing up to $105 billion in phased, conditional guarantees for OpenAI’s data center in Ohio; committing to buy up to $36 billion in cloud services from “neocloud” providers that purchase its chips; and providing up to $125 billion in support for a $500 billion credit program.
Columbia Business School professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh estimates that these guarantees and commitments total about $400 billion. Hence two descriptions: some call Nvidia the “central bank of AI,” while others ask whether it could become the Lehman Brothers of the AI era.
Former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair’s assessment is measured and clear: Nvidia is not a bank and will not face a bank run; demand for its core chips remains, and its massive equity holdings provide a thick cushion. But if it really collapsed, it would be an earthquake-level event.
The real issue is that Nvidia has never had a clear succession plan.
Jensen Huang has dozens of direct reports, major decisions are concentrated in one person, and project financing documents even have to wait until he lands before they can be signed off.
Bernstein’s analysts put it most bluntly: “Jensen Huang is Nvidia, and Nvidia is Jensen Huang.”
The odds on potential successors have already appeared on prediction markets. In contracts launched on November 9, the four leading candidates are:
Ian Buck | 32%
He joined Nvidia in 2004, was one of the core developers of the CUDA platform, and is currently vice president of accelerated computing and high-performance computing, working directly with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI.
Colette Kress | 22%
The CFO of 13 years, she has appeared alongside Jensen Huang at every earnings call. When the market needs a steady voice, she is the most familiar one.
Rene Haas | 9%
The CEO of Arm, he previously worked at Nvidia for seven years and is familiar with the semiconductor industry—a “logical” external option.
Ajay Puri | 3%
One of the company’s longest-serving core executives, with 21 years at Nvidia, he long oversaw global sales and customer relations and became a senior adviser in August this year.

A person spending 33 years at one company, taking it from a corner of a restaurant to the pinnacle of global market capitalization, is a miracle in itself in business history. But the business world never stops for anyone.
The question Nvidia must answer next is: Is the company “Jensen Huang’s Nvidia,” or a machine that can already run itself? Perhaps we will find out at the next product launch—but the person on stage will no longer be wearing that leather jacket.