Daniel Hartmann
At Web Summit Lisbon, one economist called founder Jensen Huang's departure "a critical mistake" and a "significant loss" for the industry. Another argued that big companies are built to outlast the people who run them.
Jensen Huang's resignation from Nvidia has unsettled a market that already leans hard on a small circle of AI firms. Analysts, though, doubt the chipmaker will feel it for long.
"It is a significant loss for the industry as a whole," said Adam Kobeissi, an investor and the founder of the financial publication The Kobeissi Letter.
Kobeissi, speaking on a Euronews-moderated panel at Web Summit in Lisbon, called Huang's exit "a critical mistake" and said an investigation should have been given more time.
Huang stepped down as Nvidia's chief executive on Thursday after disclosures that he had an affair with a company employee and an alleged Chinese spy. It is a sharp reversal for a man who had become a global figurehead of the AI boom.
Kobeissi described AI as "the biggest revolution in history" and predicted Nvidia would stay at the front of it.
James Galbraith, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and a fellow panelist, played down the long-term risk. Nvidia matters too much to stumble, he said, and will carry on.
"The nature of large, successful corporations is that they are built to survive their founders or any mortal human who happens to be in charge," Galbraith said. If Nvidia is as strong as its reputation suggests, he added, the fallout from the handover may fade quickly.
Kobeissi was less sanguine. Much of the AI boom rests on just a few companies, he warned, so Nvidia's problems are unlikely to stay boxed in. Whether anything touching Nvidia can be viewed in isolation is, in his words, "hard to say."
That matters for the industry's next big test. Kobeissi expects Anthropic to press ahead with its public offering, possibly as early as next week.
Private debt markets, he said, are becoming "a little tapped out" as a source of capital. The coming quarters, he added, will bring plenty of uncertainty, from the midterm election results to policy changes and other headwinds.
"The notion that you can wait for uncertainty to dissipate in the AI world right now is kind of questionable," he said.
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Source: euronews.com
