I think I remember reading Huang had something like 60 direct reports, team-of-rivals style?
Very few people will ever have got close to taking over and the CFO might only have a few months of her colleagues tolerating her getting the job.
It may take someone from the outside coming in, saying, fuck no, we're going to have a little hierarchy, and dealing with it, because they don't have their own internal loyalties and friendships to ruin.
Among other things, the distaste for intense scrutinization of productivity, the extremely deep involvement of the CEO in all facets of the business, and intent to distribute profit to employees as much as possible (something Jensen insisted on in company wide meetings a lot) to name a few big ones.
60 direct reports and the amount of time Jensen travels and was at conferences and on TV mean "extremely deep involvement in all facets of the business" (or in much of anything) is not possible.
I don't care if Jensen is superhuman... there are only 24 hours in a day and he has to sleep at least 4-6 of those. The remaining 18 hours is simply not enough time for anyone to get deeply involved in more than few focused areas at any one time.
On the flip-side... some CEO's with technical backgrounds like it to seem like they are intimately involved in crucial technical brainstorming, invention, and design sessions. The reality is, in almost all cases, the hard and deeply-innovative work was done by a group of subject matter experts (who had the time and expertise to get extremely deeply involved) before the CEO ever stepped foot in a meeting room on the topic. The meeting is there to make the CEO feel like they were deeply involved and win their buy-in for the decision that has already been made.
Edit: Jensen is one of the all-time great tech CEO's ... not trying to cast shade on him. I have made a lot of money off nVIDIA over the last 10+ years and think they are worse off without him.
HR essentially reviews us once at the end of every year. It is primarily our managers who oversee our productivity, and they're all too busy to micromanage anyone (and discouraged from it anyways). There are no quarterly reviews, no regularly scheduled layoffs, no extremely deep management hierarchies, etc.
Compared to Google, Amazon, or Meta, we have a huge amount of freedom as well as very open insight into most of what other teams are doing on Slack. I follow several developer Slack channels for software I was a fan of prior to onboarding.
I read online that there isn't a standard hiring procedure, but in my interviews they didn't give me esoteric coding puzzles, they mainly wanted to discuss computers and let me yap about my interests. The whiteboard problems were trivial.
so, I assume you don't believe Huang violated export controls and didn't cause NVIDIA to have heavy liabilities both from government oversight and from the circular financing.
I have no idea whether he violated export controls. It sounds plausible, but there's no evidence to this yet as far as I am aware. I suspect he may be stepping down out of shame for his actions, especially since his children have roles in the company, but I have no insight into his mind or personal life.
It's amusing how people mentally backflip through the dots like they're unwilling to do any mental math that might shatter the soothing tail of people just being mere happenstance and human rather than some power above others.
I think you should read more reports on both the circular financing and the smuggling of chips into China. Or the evidence of the Chinese models being trained on blackwell chips.
All the stars are there, either he's complicit or ignorant. Choose which you're asking to lead you.
Someone else read the NVIDIA book huh? What an eye opening book. I knew of NVIDIA for the majority of my life but I had NO idea how much they really achieved and what they persevered against. Its insane. After internalizing how they operated, they are screwed without Jensen.
Yeah, I feel like you have to kind of be careful about "culture".
Sure, "culture" can be good. It can also be bad sometimes. Depending on what's going on inside NVidia, you may need someone to come in and let everyone know in no uncertain terms that NVidia is neither frat/sorority house, nor a swinger's party.
Love the innovation.
But we can't really have the rest of it.
For better or worse, NVidia has become a place where the FBI is watching. Probably not fair, but that's just the way it is. In that kind of situation, some actions start to cast suspicion on people who may have nothing to do with any of these "culture" based excesses.
There is misogyny in the Slack, sure. Let's not forget they still intend to release a product named Feynman. When this was announced, some women (including myself) complained, and this mostly fell on deaf ears except for some man who said like "I don't know anything about this but my friends used to be his neighbors and they liked him" then disappeared when a lady scrutinized him defending another man he knows nothing about.
I've also been treated like a sexual object by several colleagues outside of work settings.
But at least our CEO never said we need more masculine energy on Joe Rogan's show, and he installed a lot of powerful women in the C suite and board of directors.
> Haas [...] worked at Nvidia for about seven years more than a decade ago, and still has a strong relationship with both Huang and some members of the company’s board.
Rare was a legendary game publisher in the UK owned at the time by the Stamper brothers (some of the richest people in the UK). They developed a culture of people working horrendous hours under immense pressure and entire teams quitting after a game release. However despite that they would release game after game that would become cult classic and historic. Furthermore the teams that would quit would often have the skills to develop excellent game studios on their own. Microsoft buys them in 2002, institutes "work life balance" and the historic magic that they were known for completely vanishes to the point where even Microsoft having dumped endless amounts of money loses hope. I don't think they have released a single historic title on Microsoft platforms since they were acquired 24 years ago.
There is no such thing as a free lunch in life. If you want to be top 1% you have to make sacrifices. While I feel for the devs as I am one as well, I must also feel bad for the current people to be in a position where fans once clamored for every new title transitioning to the public accepting the greatness is gone.
If you read into NVIDIA's history you'll know how much Jensen set the culture and enforced it.
Not sure what you’re getting at with this comment. It seems pretty obvious Jensen could lose 99.9% of his net worth and still not spend all his money for a lifetime. The cultural obsession with money these days is jarring.
He cares about his company that he built and his marriage. Both of those things are irreplaceable.
He is currently a landmine and any publicly traded company taking on that risk would be a violation of fiduciary duty.
This guy fucked up big time possibly committing multiple felonies. You'd have to be stupid if you wanted to take on any government contracts having him in your business.
I can’t see Elon giving up spotlight that way. I also don’t know that Huang would like the idea of working for Elon. There is a lot of personal bias in both those opinions, though.
I was going to say Elon going to try to bring him in somehow. Just means he gets a big name the "there no bad publicity" effect and Jensen will be beholden to him. I can see them try to kick off a chip business to go with X.ai.
Ignoring my loathing for Elon this makes sense and feeds into his narcissistic side.
Alternatively Jensen can just go live in a cabin and ignore the world for a while. He's rich enough. Doubtful, people like him hate not being in the center of attention.
Because companies are lining up for CEOs who might spend the next few years in federal court, and ultimately in prison or banned from fiduciary responsibilities?
What if Huang wanted to resign at the top of success because more and significantly worse news is coming? For example all circular deals could collapse soon.
Then the new CEO will be blamed and Huang retains the tech wizard and visionary label. So maybe no CEO wants this job. Tim Cook, named by Trump, certainly won't ruin his reputation by taking over this mess.
This theory sounds suspiciously like what happened to Disney pre-Covid. Iger left and appointed Chapek, who took the fall for the majority of the covid-era failings.
Nvidia was forcing companies to buy hardware they did not need to drive up production so Jensen could smuggle more gpus to china. If that all ends, most large data center projects are dead. There never was any demand for large data centers and they require billions if not trillions in grid upgrades that these companies were trying to get everyone else on the grid to pay for.
If we put a gpu in every home, no one has to spend money upgrading the grid. Take all those gpus and put them in a single data center, now you need a trillion dollars to fund grid upgrades and gain absolutely nothing.
The only thing these large data centers do is give a massive tech company the ability to use the hardware they are renting to you, to undermine you and front any work you are doing.
We should see hardware prices drop fast if nvidia is actually stopped from doing their criminal activities.
This is…. Massively underselling the actual demand for these GPUs. Even if you only include OpenAI and Anthropic, they would probably buy every single GPU, TPU, and XPU that TSMC, Samsung, and Intel could produce if they had sufficient money, land, and power. They’re all completely convinced by scaling and recursive self improvement (and they seem to be right)
Also, the demands of HPC computing requires these to be collocated and on a high bandwidth low latency network, so saying these DCs are equivalent to sticking a GPU in each house is simply wrong.
> Even if you only include OpenAI and Anthropic, they would probably buy every single GPU, TPU, and XPU that TSMC, Samsung, and Intel could produce if they had sufficient money
The idea that everyone having their own personal at-home GPU (which will sit idle 99% of the time) is more efficient than everyone sharing a pool of GPUs in a data center baffles me.
Resilience versus optimisation. If the data centre goes down thousands of people cannot use them, if your laptop burns down, the other thousand users are unaffected.
There is also latency, security, control... there are many reasons to prefer local placement and direct ownership versus a shared pool resource in an undisclosed location that people unrelated to you can physically access
My local AI server at home stayed up yesterday. Copilot didn't. I can troubleshoot it if it goes down. My hands are kinda tied if somebody else's does.
GPUs in every home would be wildly inefficient. Hyperscalers have massive economies of scale by consolidating the inference. That's why it's cheaper to pay per api rates for deepseek than it is to run it locally on your home server and pay for electricity, even if your server is FREE.
NVidia was selling its GPUs at a price well below what the market would bear so that they could pick and choose customers and make demands of them, like insisting that OpenAI not oppose their plans to sell to China.
So I expect that if they get a CEO who is more conventional and stays out of politics prices are going to go up.
To be fair, having the CFO be an interim CEO is quite common practice since they’re ostensibly there to keep the lights on for a short period of time (hopefully)
I really hope they don't bring in someone external. Nvidia has a unique and special work culture that should be preserved by someone inside.
I think I remember reading Huang had something like 60 direct reports, team-of-rivals style?
Very few people will ever have got close to taking over and the CFO might only have a few months of her colleagues tolerating her getting the job.
It may take someone from the outside coming in, saying, fuck no, we're going to have a little hierarchy, and dealing with it, because they don't have their own internal loyalties and friendships to ruin.
What's so special about their work culture?
Among other things, the distaste for intense scrutinization of productivity, the extremely deep involvement of the CEO in all facets of the business, and intent to distribute profit to employees as much as possible (something Jensen insisted on in company wide meetings a lot) to name a few big ones.
60 direct reports and the amount of time Jensen travels and was at conferences and on TV mean "extremely deep involvement in all facets of the business" (or in much of anything) is not possible.
I don't care if Jensen is superhuman... there are only 24 hours in a day and he has to sleep at least 4-6 of those. The remaining 18 hours is simply not enough time for anyone to get deeply involved in more than few focused areas at any one time.
On the flip-side... some CEO's with technical backgrounds like it to seem like they are intimately involved in crucial technical brainstorming, invention, and design sessions. The reality is, in almost all cases, the hard and deeply-innovative work was done by a group of subject matter experts (who had the time and expertise to get extremely deeply involved) before the CEO ever stepped foot in a meeting room on the topic. The meeting is there to make the CEO feel like they were deeply involved and win their buy-in for the decision that has already been made.
Edit: Jensen is one of the all-time great tech CEO's ... not trying to cast shade on him. I have made a lot of money off nVIDIA over the last 10+ years and think they are worse off without him.
> the distaste for intense scrutinization of productivity
Do you mean a lack of KPIs driving HR decisions?
HR essentially reviews us once at the end of every year. It is primarily our managers who oversee our productivity, and they're all too busy to micromanage anyone (and discouraged from it anyways). There are no quarterly reviews, no regularly scheduled layoffs, no extremely deep management hierarchies, etc.
Compared to Google, Amazon, or Meta, we have a huge amount of freedom as well as very open insight into most of what other teams are doing on Slack. I follow several developer Slack channels for software I was a fan of prior to onboarding.
I read online that there isn't a standard hiring procedure, but in my interviews they didn't give me esoteric coding puzzles, they mainly wanted to discuss computers and let me yap about my interests. The whiteboard problems were trivial.
so, I assume you don't believe Huang violated export controls and didn't cause NVIDIA to have heavy liabilities both from government oversight and from the circular financing.
I have no idea whether he violated export controls. It sounds plausible, but there's no evidence to this yet as far as I am aware. I suspect he may be stepping down out of shame for his actions, especially since his children have roles in the company, but I have no insight into his mind or personal life.
So, he was either complicit or ignorant.
It's amusing how people mentally backflip through the dots like they're unwilling to do any mental math that might shatter the soothing tail of people just being mere happenstance and human rather than some power above others.
I think you should read more reports on both the circular financing and the smuggling of chips into China. Or the evidence of the Chinese models being trained on blackwell chips.
All the stars are there, either he's complicit or ignorant. Choose which you're asking to lead you.
The CEO is very hands-on.
Isn’t that what led to this situation in the first place?
So it's a matter of CEO, not internal culture.
Speed of light
Someone else read the NVIDIA book huh? What an eye opening book. I knew of NVIDIA for the majority of my life but I had NO idea how much they really achieved and what they persevered against. Its insane. After internalizing how they operated, they are screwed without Jensen.
they flirt with chinese models not just american ones
Yeah, I feel like you have to kind of be careful about "culture".
Sure, "culture" can be good. It can also be bad sometimes. Depending on what's going on inside NVidia, you may need someone to come in and let everyone know in no uncertain terms that NVidia is neither frat/sorority house, nor a swinger's party.
Love the innovation.
But we can't really have the rest of it.
For better or worse, NVidia has become a place where the FBI is watching. Probably not fair, but that's just the way it is. In that kind of situation, some actions start to cast suspicion on people who may have nothing to do with any of these "culture" based excesses.
There is misogyny in the Slack, sure. Let's not forget they still intend to release a product named Feynman. When this was announced, some women (including myself) complained, and this mostly fell on deaf ears except for some man who said like "I don't know anything about this but my friends used to be his neighbors and they liked him" then disappeared when a lady scrutinized him defending another man he knows nothing about.
I've also been treated like a sexual object by several colleagues outside of work settings.
But at least our CEO never said we need more masculine energy on Joe Rogan's show, and he installed a lot of powerful women in the C suite and board of directors.
Everyone dates the CEO.
Efficient package sharing.
Nobody knows where it's appropriate to put their chip in.
> Haas [...] worked at Nvidia for about seven years more than a decade ago, and still has a strong relationship with both Huang and some members of the company’s board.
doesn't the article say he worked at nvidia for 7 years?
For what it's worth, the work culture at Arm is excellent for the most part.
Rare was a legendary game publisher in the UK owned at the time by the Stamper brothers (some of the richest people in the UK). They developed a culture of people working horrendous hours under immense pressure and entire teams quitting after a game release. However despite that they would release game after game that would become cult classic and historic. Furthermore the teams that would quit would often have the skills to develop excellent game studios on their own. Microsoft buys them in 2002, institutes "work life balance" and the historic magic that they were known for completely vanishes to the point where even Microsoft having dumped endless amounts of money loses hope. I don't think they have released a single historic title on Microsoft platforms since they were acquired 24 years ago.
There is no such thing as a free lunch in life. If you want to be top 1% you have to make sacrifices. While I feel for the devs as I am one as well, I must also feel bad for the current people to be in a position where fans once clamored for every new title transitioning to the public accepting the greatness is gone.
If you read into NVIDIA's history you'll know how much Jensen set the culture and enforced it.
That's fair. Not everyone wants to devote their life to work though. Everyone at some point realises how short life can be.
This is a company takeover.
The company will be a zombie that will skimp by for a while until it doesn't. Who would really want that?
Because they replace the CEO? That seems like a bit of an overreaction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
Jenson is going to have 50 job offers sitting on his doormat by Monday morning.
And a handful of them will be worth $1B or more.
63 with billions net worth seems like a good place to retire though, I hope he does and enjoys what he worked for instead of working til he drops.
guys in jensen's position tend to live for the work and don't know what to do without it
Most probably, he'd start his own company. We all know he doesn't need a job.
Ovidia
China will need a new boss eventually. Plenty of tail to chase after.
Not sure what you’re getting at with this comment. It seems pretty obvious Jensen could lose 99.9% of his net worth and still not spend all his money for a lifetime. The cultural obsession with money these days is jarring.
He cares about his company that he built and his marriage. Both of those things are irreplaceable.
not so sure about the marriage part...
In the US, unlikely.
He is currently a landmine and any publicly traded company taking on that risk would be a violation of fiduciary duty.
This guy fucked up big time possibly committing multiple felonies. You'd have to be stupid if you wanted to take on any government contracts having him in your business.
Sounds like a perfect match for SpaceX.
I can’t see Elon giving up spotlight that way. I also don’t know that Huang would like the idea of working for Elon. There is a lot of personal bias in both those opinions, though.
I was going to say Elon going to try to bring him in somehow. Just means he gets a big name the "there no bad publicity" effect and Jensen will be beholden to him. I can see them try to kick off a chip business to go with X.ai.
Ignoring my loathing for Elon this makes sense and feeds into his narcissistic side.
Alternatively Jensen can just go live in a cabin and ignore the world for a while. He's rich enough. Doubtful, people like him hate not being in the center of attention.
Elon has hired big names before like Andrej Karpathy for the self driving system.
> I can see them try to kick off a chip business to go with X.ai.
Terafab?
Boeing might take him ...
Because companies are lining up for CEOs who might spend the next few years in federal court, and ultimately in prison or banned from fiduciary responsibilities?
And deal with daily news of more leaks about more affairs?
Johny Srouji had to be convinced to stay at Apple around about a year ago. Surely he's being considered for this?
He doesn’t have sales chops though. Maybe co-CEO. He does have close ties to Israel though, and Nvidia has a fairly prominent Israeli faction
What if Huang wanted to resign at the top of success because more and significantly worse news is coming? For example all circular deals could collapse soon.
Then the new CEO will be blamed and Huang retains the tech wizard and visionary label. So maybe no CEO wants this job. Tim Cook, named by Trump, certainly won't ruin his reputation by taking over this mess.
This theory sounds suspiciously like what happened to Disney pre-Covid. Iger left and appointed Chapek, who took the fall for the majority of the covid-era failings.
The Nvidia board is dumber than bag of hammers.
hey buddy, are you saying a former Taco Bell CEO doesnt know chips ?
Not the kind I care about. :)
Does anyone regard any post Saxby Arm CEO as successful? What success they have had has largely been down to momentum and Apple.
OTOH if Jensen doesn't make a comeback it's hard to see nVidia keeping their momentum at all, which is likely to be the entire point.
If Nvidia's new boss can ride the momentum (that was there a week or two back) then they're fine for a while.
Nvidia was forcing companies to buy hardware they did not need to drive up production so Jensen could smuggle more gpus to china. If that all ends, most large data center projects are dead. There never was any demand for large data centers and they require billions if not trillions in grid upgrades that these companies were trying to get everyone else on the grid to pay for.
If we put a gpu in every home, no one has to spend money upgrading the grid. Take all those gpus and put them in a single data center, now you need a trillion dollars to fund grid upgrades and gain absolutely nothing.
The only thing these large data centers do is give a massive tech company the ability to use the hardware they are renting to you, to undermine you and front any work you are doing.
We should see hardware prices drop fast if nvidia is actually stopped from doing their criminal activities.
This is…. Massively underselling the actual demand for these GPUs. Even if you only include OpenAI and Anthropic, they would probably buy every single GPU, TPU, and XPU that TSMC, Samsung, and Intel could produce if they had sufficient money, land, and power. They’re all completely convinced by scaling and recursive self improvement (and they seem to be right)
Also, the demands of HPC computing requires these to be collocated and on a high bandwidth low latency network, so saying these DCs are equivalent to sticking a GPU in each house is simply wrong.
> Even if you only include OpenAI and Anthropic, they would probably buy every single GPU, TPU, and XPU that TSMC, Samsung, and Intel could produce if they had sufficient money
That's a key if when it comes to buying things
The GPUs are bought by CEOs with AI psychosis and sit unconnected in warehouses:
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/amazons-nvi...
Look at the Nebius stock for the fake data center hype. It is like 1999/2000.
The idea that everyone having their own personal at-home GPU (which will sit idle 99% of the time) is more efficient than everyone sharing a pool of GPUs in a data center baffles me.
Resilience versus optimisation. If the data centre goes down thousands of people cannot use them, if your laptop burns down, the other thousand users are unaffected.
There is also latency, security, control... there are many reasons to prefer local placement and direct ownership versus a shared pool resource in an undisclosed location that people unrelated to you can physically access
Why own a tv when everyone could go to the movie theatre? Why own a car when you can use public transit?
The prior main use for these cards - gaming - is infeasible over a network. The big boys have tried and failed, networks just aren’t good enough.
My local AI server at home stayed up yesterday. Copilot didn't. I can troubleshoot it if it goes down. My hands are kinda tied if somebody else's does.
Not leaking private data to hostiles isn't that bad.
Network latency would throttle their power consumption!
I can't believe I am reading this on HN. How about companies are chasing Nvidia for all the GPU they could get?
>There never was any demand for large data centers and they
You are making things up as if Datacenter is only about GPUs. Go and ask Intel and AMD on how they are coping with demands.
It's an 87 day old account, I wouldn't take it too seriously.
GPUs in every home would be wildly inefficient. Hyperscalers have massive economies of scale by consolidating the inference. That's why it's cheaper to pay per api rates for deepseek than it is to run it locally on your home server and pay for electricity, even if your server is FREE.
You've got it backwards.
NVidia was selling its GPUs at a price well below what the market would bear so that they could pick and choose customers and make demands of them, like insisting that OpenAI not oppose their plans to sell to China.
So I expect that if they get a CEO who is more conventional and stays out of politics prices are going to go up.
those are some wild accusations to throw around without proof
Whatever copium you're on, I want some of it
> There never was any demand for large data centers
OK, let's stick to the subject and not engage in absolute delusion.
https://archive.is/sTRDf
Fuck that noise. Gabe Newell!
Why would he want to leave his own very successful company that he practically owns?
The faster we get Collette out of there the better.
To be fair, having the CFO be an interim CEO is quite common practice since they’re ostensibly there to keep the lights on for a short period of time (hopefully)
It worked well for Intel after BK. Strangely, the official reason for him being let go was the same thing.