CEO’s affair and resignation has brought company’s murky corporate contracts and supply chains into sharp focus

Can the AI economy survive without its “central bank”? What does Jensen Huang’s fall mean for the world’s second-most valuable company, and what might a tremor in its fortunes mean for the world?

Nvidia’s sky-high valuation is based on the fact that it designs and sells the advanced AI chips – called graphics processing units (GPUs) – that underpin the AI economy. Without these, AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude could not be trained and would not run.

This has made the chipmaker arguably the most important player in AI, and – at times – the most valuable company in the world. Huang’s departure sent shares in Nvidia plunging 13% in early trading.

Nvidia is not the only company in the world that designs these chips. Most leading tech companies, including Microsoft, Meta and Google, are trying to make their own lines of AI chips. Some of these, like Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs), appear to be at least as good as Nvidia’s, and even better for certain purposes.

What makes Nvidia irreplaceable – and far more integral to the AI economy – is its web of relationships, most of these led by Huang himself.

One aspect of this is Nvidia’s complex web of ties with the companies actually building AI infrastructure, a mess of circular finance that implicates US tech giants and many of the world’s governments.

In recent years, Huang has been the kingmaker when it comes to AI.

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