Nvidia’s Jensen Huang faces scrutiny as the AI industry leans on one man

Nvidia's CEO has become the gatekeeper of the world's most coveted chips, and nobody has been named to replace him Most CEOs sign quarterly reports. Jensen Huang signs posters, books, and occasionally people’s skin. The 63-year-old Nvidia chief draws crowds who mob him for autographs. That level of celebrity is unusual for a semiconductor executive. It also points to a quieter, more serious problem: the AI industry has become deeply dependent on one person, and that person has no clear successor. The gatekeeper of the GPU Nvidia makes the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that power modern artificial intelligence. These chips do the heavy lifting of training AI models. They also run consumer services like ChatGPT once those models are built. Huang sits at the controls of who gets those engines and when. His role as the gatekeeper to Nvidia’s chips has given him a kind of leverage few executives ever hold. Consider the customers. Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are two of the richest people on the planet. In a private setting, both were once reduced to “begging” Huang for his company’s AI chips. A company built around its founder Huang is not a hired-gun CEO brought in to steady the s...