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IT Home reported on November 15 that this is a personnel change that has shaken the global technology industry. Jensen Huang, who led Nvidia for 33 years and co-founded the chip giant, has officially resigned as CEO. TechCrunch quoted the founder of an emerging cloud computing company as saying his first reaction on hearing the news was: “It was like a bomb suddenly going off.”
Over the past few years, Nvidia has been a major investor in technology startups, investing tens of billions of dollars in them each year. According to PitchBook, Nvidia participated in 105 funding rounds this year alone, often as the largest investor.
Maria Davidson, founder of Relational Capital, said: “If Nvidia changes course, it will be a heavy blow to many young companies.”
Several investors believe Huang’s departure means the startup ecosystem has lost one of its most important supporters and will face a substantial drop in funding in the short term. This could have a major impact on funding deals, company valuations, capital availability and even the industry’s competitive landscape.
Shamillah Bankiya of Dawn Capital said: “From application-layer startups to emerging cloud computing providers, Nvidia has supported almost the entire AI-native startup ecosystem.”
Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, said many of Nvidia’s major startup investment decisions often came directly from Huang himself. Padval previously served on the board of networking chipmaker Mellanox Technologies, which is how he came to know Huang. Nvidia acquired the company in 2020 for about $7 billion (IT Home note: approximately RMB 46.828 billion at current exchange rates).
Although investors hope Huang’s successor will continue the company’s previous active investment strategy, they do not believe that will happen in the short term.
Nvidia’s interim CEO, Colette Kress, is expected to make some adjustments to the company’s investment strategy, particularly its investments in AI startups. These companies are at the center of a data center construction boom worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and Huang’s frequent investments in the sector had already raised concerns on Wall Street.
One investor said of Kress: “Her style is much more conservative. I don’t think she will commit the same amount of money to continue supporting the early-stage startup ecosystem.”
Areas Nvidia previously prioritized for investment include emerging cloud computing providers, AI inference service providers and open-weight models. These businesses typically require large amounts of capital, and smaller companies struggle to bear the construction costs on their own.
Zain Javaid, founder of hardware company Ghost, said: “Although building in these areas is costly, Huang’s initiatives were an important reason the related startup ecosystem was able to take shape.”
For example, Nvidia invested in CoreWeave while it was still a private company and participated in 2 funding rounds for Crusoe, including a $1.4 billion Series E round (approximately RMB 9.366 billion at current exchange rates).
This year, Nvidia also acquired Hugging Face for $13 billion (approximately RMB 86.966 billion at current exchange rates), with the transaction expected to be completed in 2027. Nvidia has also invested in companies including Mistral AI, Lambda and Black Forest Labs, and has been the largest investor in many funding deals.
The Wall Street Journal reported that last year Nvidia wrote Reflection AI a check for $800 million (approximately RMB 5.352 billion at current exchange rates) as part of its $2 billion Series B funding round (approximately RMB 13.379 billion at current exchange rates). At the time, the startup, which focuses on open-source models, had yet to generate substantial revenue.
Bankiya believes Huang’s willingness to invest heavily in AI companies around the world was closely tied to the importance he placed on open-source technology and the European market. She said that if Nvidia stops supporting regions outside the United States, particularly Europe, those regions will face a huge funding gap, and their broader startup ecosystems could be left with a void that is difficult to fill.
Of course, Nvidia’s influence in the AI startup ecosystem has also grown so strong that it sometimes feels as though the company has established a kind of monopoly.
By providing substantial financial support to a large number of startups, Nvidia has, to some extent, also tied those companies to its own chips, further cementing its dominant market position.
If Nvidia tightens its startup investments in the future, other chipmakers and smaller competitors may gain more room to grow. Coincidentally, as the fallout from Huang’s departure continued, Google also announced 2 new specialized chips this week.
Some investors interviewed by TechCrunch hope large cloud computing companies and other chipmakers will take up Nvidia’s role, providing funding to startups and filling the potential investment gap left by Huang’s departure.
Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, expects Nvidia’s technology giant rivals to compete for its leading position in startup investment.
He said who ultimately takes on that role will depend on which company can offer strong products, an ecosystem and developer community that can compete with CUDA, and the financial resources needed to support the development of the entire ecosystem.
CUDA is Nvidia’s software platform that helps developers run AI models on its GPUs.
Thakker believes companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and AMD may invest in more mature startups to promote adoption of their own chips and cloud services, but he doubts whether they would be willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure startups that have yet to generate revenue, as Nvidia previously did.
One venture capitalist disclosed that during Huang’s tenure at Nvidia, some infrastructure companies needing to spend $100 million to $500 million (approximately RMB 669 million to RMB 3.345 billion at current exchange rates) on GPUs were often able to obtain financing from Nvidia worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even receiving funding at company valuations of $1 billion (approximately RMB 6.69 billion at current exchange rates) or higher, allowing them to launch their businesses.
Nvidia’s involvement also gave other investors greater confidence, making them willing to continue investing in these companies even at high valuations.
The market now expects Nvidia to be more selective about new investments while reducing the size of individual investments in companies already in its portfolio, which could further depress those companies’ valuations.
Padval said: “As long as Nvidia appears on the list of investors in a funding round, everyone feels reassured.”
Investors believe that without Nvidia’s support, traditional venture capital firms may become more cautious about funding these startups and may even put some investment deals on hold.
However, few believe that a slowdown in Nvidia’s investments alone would be enough to end the boom across the AI industry.
Although everyone agrees that Huang’s departure is a major loss for Nvidia, Amulya Vishwanath, a former employee of Huang’s who has since founded her own venture capital fund, said: “Entrepreneurs and business leaders must be accountable for their actions.”
She also stressed that the startup ecosystem depends on far more than any 1 person. “These people will continue to grow, and they must continue to thrive.”