By Amara Osei

Nvidia invested in 42 of the 100 most important private companies in artificial intelligence (AI) as co-founder Jensen Huang abruptly departed as chief executive. Hundreds of founders, investors and executives at Thursday’s Cerebral Valley AI Summit in San Francisco asked whether Nvidia could retain its influence. Huang founded Nvidia 33 years ago and built it into the world’s most valuable chipmaker.

Nvidia named longtime CFO (chief financial officer) Colette Kress interim CEO after Huang resigned on Thursday morning. Reports of extramarital affairs preceded his ouster, including one involving a woman whom US intelligence officials suspected of spying for China. One venture capitalist, wearing black, asked reporter Katie Roof whether she was attending Huang’s funeral.

At Thursday’s summit, the jokes masked a substantive concern about AI financing. Hours after his ouster, Huang used a giant GPU (graphics processing unit) to defeat Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in “Cerebral Kombat,” an arcade game for summit attendees. The summit’s more serious question was what would happen to the AI boom when one of its biggest financial backers disappeared.

What does Huang’s exit mean for startups?

Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Nvidia-backed Databricks, described Huang as a safety net for AI startups. He said investors sought Huang’s reassurance during bubble concerns and that Nvidia would help sustain the industry. His warning was direct: “On the margin, I think that starts hurting a lot of startups.”

Nvidia’s role extended beyond supplying the chips that powered AI. Under Huang, the company became a leading Silicon Valley investor and acquired the reputation of the “central bank of AI” by bankrolling startups that often bought its chips.

Bessemer Venture Partners and Newcomer, the publication that organized the summit, published a list of the world’s 100 most important private AI companies. Nvidia had invested in 42, according to Bessemer partner Talia Goldberg.

General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja compared Nvidia with major banks during the 2008 financial crisis, implying that the chipmaker had become too big to fail. “This is not a normal company,” he said, “and we all need to make sure the continuity of leadership in AI for us as a nation and for the industry at large remains.”

Can Nvidia’s technology and culture survive?

Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, focused less on chip technology than on losing Huang, whom he described as an unusually generous champion who lent his time and influence to open-source AI and cybersecurity. He expected short-term instability as parts of the ecosystem reassessed where their champions lay.

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of cloud platform Vercel, said Nvidia’s support for open-source AI and extensive partnerships might preserve Huang’s vision, although an Nvidia without Jensen would be challenging. The stakes included Nvidia’s September agreement to acquire popular open-source model platform Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion.

Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO of AI-model developer Pathway, said Nvidia had been an unusually attentive partner whose employees continually sought collaboration opportunities. She could not determine whether that culture would survive without Huang.

Hassaan Raza, CEO of Tavus, which develops AI-powered video agents, warned that a stumble under new leadership could set back America’s broader AI ambitions. He said even one disappointing quarter in the next year could send shock waves through the industry.

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of AI-search startup Perplexity, met Nvidia executives earlier Thursday and found business proceeding as usual. The startup counts Nvidia among its largest investors. Srinivas said Nvidia’s technical advantages in inference (running trained models) and training (building models) would not disappear overnight and expected the company’s GPU leadership in both areas to remain established for years.

Databricks CEO Ghodsi expected Nvidia to remain strong for at least another two or three years because chip development cycles run long. He did not extend that confidence beyond that horizon.

Who gains from the disruption?

For Nvidia competitors, Huang’s abrupt exit created a commercial opening. Robert Wachen, cofounder of Etched, which develops specialized AI chips to challenge Nvidia, said a large opening was likely and that his startup planned to capitalize on it.

Taneja said the upheaval could push startups toward AMD and Google alternatives rather than deepen their reliance on Nvidia. Raza agreed that competition could benefit AI, but said the forced transition was not the best method for achieving it.

The summit’s operative judgment was conditional. Ghodsi’s two-to-three-year technology outlook left Kress responsible for preserving founder-led culture, open-source commitments and investor confidence during the leadership transition. The immediate exposure reaches 42 AI companies on Bessemer’s 100-company list, while longer-term disruption could redirect startups toward AMD, Google and specialized challengers such as Etched.