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Nvidia’s board says it is too early to discuss who will succeed Jensen Huang. GeekWire editors Todd Bishop and John Cook clearly do not intend to follow this advice. In a podcast recorded on November 13 and an article published on November 14, they offered a clear judgment: what Nvidia needs now is not another technical genius, but a crisis manager capable of steering the company through turbulence.

The analogy for this argument draws on Alan Mulally’s move from Boeing to Ford, and Dara Khosrowshahi taking over Uber after Travis Kalanick was ousted. Cook stated in the podcast that Nvidia needs someone who can lead the company through chaos, not just a great technology expert. This judgment rests on a background fact: Jensen Huang has been resistant to succession planning. Arm CEO Rene Haas quoted Huang in a 2024 interview as saying, 'He didn’t like the idea; he believed it would create competition among executives and cause division.'

Huang himself said in an October 14 Bloomberg interview that he hoped his successor was already inside the company. However, the board stated it would consider both internal and external candidates, and its Friday statement indicated it was still selecting a search firm and had not formally engaged any candidates. The article lists 11 mentioned candidates spanning chip design, cloud computing, consumer electronics, and storage. Besides Haas, who had previously been reported by the Financial Times, the list includes AWS CEO Matt Garman, Amazon’s head of chips and AI Peter DeSantis, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, Apple Executive Chair Tim Cook, and several Microsoft executives.

Several newly disclosed facts in the article are worth noting. Nick Parker is a veteran who spent 26 years in Microsoft’s sales system; he joined Nvidia in August this year as Executive Vice President of Global Field Operations, with a compensation package valued at over $40 million. Peter DeSantis currently oversees Amazon’s AI models, custom chips, and quantum computing business, reporting directly to CEO Andy Jassy. Dave Treadwell worked at Microsoft for 27 years before joining Amazon in 2016, and took over AWS compute and machine learning services in August this year.

These personnel changes themselves constitute a facet of the competitive landscape in the AI industry. The article points out that whoever ultimately succeeds will face a market where customers are trying to reduce their reliance on Nvidia. In his annual shareholder letter in April, Jassy wrote that if Amazon’s chip business sold to AWS and third parties like other chip companies, its annual revenue run rate could reach approximately $50 billion. DeSantis also told Bloomberg in June that Amazon was negotiating to sell Trainium AI chips to other companies.

Haas’s case involves a notable complex relationship. He served as Vice President of Sales at Tensilica, whose co-founder Harvey Jones was appointed as Nvidia’s first board chairman this week. Meanwhile, SoftBank appointed Haas as CEO of SoftBank International in April to coordinate its international chip and AI portfolio, which includes Project Izanagi, an initiative aimed at competing with Nvidia. The article lists this as a 'complicating factor' in Haas’s candidacy, rather than a confirmed conflict of interest.

South Korean securities IT firm DefiSoft has officially launched its market analysis and investment platform, "Paave 2.0," in the Vietnamese market. The core innovation of this version allows users to build their own AI agents capable of automatically analyzing real-time quotes, financial statements, and public disclosures from the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HOSE), Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX), and UPCoM, and executing simulated stock trades using virtual funds.

Through the "Agent Studio" feature, users can define analytical perspectives and prompts to create researcher agents that write market reports or investor agents that execute buy/sell orders. All simulated trading results generated by these AI agents are recorded on the same leaderboard as human users, with trading logs made public to the community. This mechanism aims to lower the barrier for individual investors to use AI tools for market analysis through gamified competition.

Currently, Paave 2.0 supports only simulated trading with virtual funds, but DefiSoft plans to integrate real-money trading within the year, enabling users to place orders via their own accounts through partnerships with local Vietnamese brokers. Additionally, the platform includes a conversational analysis tool called "Paave AI" and supports connecting external large language models like Claude or ChatGPT via the MCP protocol to query market data directly.

Two major institutional investors in Nvidia—Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management—published an open letter on Friday urging the chipmaker's board to pursue a "slow, measured, and deliberate" process for selecting a new CEO, explicitly stating that the option of founder and former CEO Jensen Huang's return should remain on the table.

The firms collectively hold approximately $2.13 billion in Nvidia stock. The letter acknowledges that interim CEO Colette Kress is capable of leading the company but argues that Huang, as the long-time leader, has earned the right to a careful evaluation before any hasty replacement decisions are made. This move serves as a direct counterweight to widespread media reports suggesting the board was preparing to permanently oust Huang.

Huang resigned on November 12 amid allegations involving personal relationships and an investigation into suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang. While the market largely anticipated his permanent departure, this shareholder intervention highlights a growing divide among investors who believe Huang's removal could inadvertently benefit China by weakening Nvidia's strategic advantage in AI hardware. The resulting governance uncertainty adds complexity to Nvidia's leadership transition in the coming weeks.

The departure of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has triggered widespread reactions across Asia. Some governments have moved quickly to confirm chip supply commitments, while others are monitoring the impact on local projects or addressing ongoing investigations.

In South Korea, the Ministry of Science stated that Nvidia had reaffirmed its plan to supply 260,000 advanced GPUs to the country and to continue joint AI projects. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, major suppliers of memory chips for Nvidia's AI processors, maintain close ties with the company. Additionally, South Korea's government AI strategy council held an emergency meeting on Friday to assess the potential impact of Huang's departure on the country's AI industry.

In Singapore, the Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed that the investigation into Alice Huang, former CEO of Megaspeed, remains ongoing. Authorities seized her passport in June 2025 to investigate possible false declarations regarding server purchases. In February 2026, police found insufficient evidence to establish offenses related to these declarations but noted she knowingly provided inaccurate information about her role at Megaspeed. She was issued a warning and barred from re-entering Singapore. Singapore also mentioned receiving limited assistance from U.S. authorities despite repeated requests for information about server maker Supermicro.

In China, the Foreign Ministry rejected allegations linking a Chinese businesswoman to espionage as "groundless." A Reuters review indicated that Huang's exit has raised uncertainty over more than $3 billion in Chinese AI computing projects reliant on Nvidia's restricted processors. Many of these chips are subject to U.S. export controls, making them difficult for Chinese companies to obtain.

In Taiwan, Economy Minister Kung Ming-shin said Huang's departure was unlikely to significantly change the growth of the global AI industry. The Taipei city government stated that Nvidia's planned overseas headquarters in the city remained on track despite the leadership change, noting the company has met its contractual obligations so far.

In Japan, the Industry Ministry said the government would closely monitor Nvidia, describing the chipmaker as an important player in Japan's AI semiconductor industry. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said it was too early to assess the impact on the global AI industry, while stressing Japan's commitment to ensuring a stable supply of semiconductors.

In the week when Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang resigned, AMD shares rose nearly 13%, Broadcom posted similar gains, and the Nasdaq Composite recorded its best single-week performance since August. When one company encounters trouble, the entire sector strengthens—a seemingly contradictory market reaction that two AI-themed ETF managers view as an investment thesis worth explaining, rather than simple panic-driven rotation.

Dave Mazza, CEO of Roundhill Investments, proposed a core mechanism on CNBC's "ETF Edge": if investors lose trust in Nvidia, they will not stop buying AI chips but will instead turn to other suppliers for compute power. This means Nvidia's trust crisis creates a window for demand transfer to competitors in the short term. The Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS) managed by Mazza closed the week up less than 1%, while the Roundhill Neocloud ETF (NCLD), which focuses on small- and mid-cap specialized cloud computing companies, rose more than 1%, despite having fallen cumulatively by 39% since its launch in August 2026.

Mazza further pointed out that hyperscale cloud service providers may benefit from Nvidia's difficulties because they already possess available compute infrastructure. With demand remaining constant and new supply constrained, the value of existing compute capacity rises.

Dan Ives, partner at Yorkville Ives, added a political dimension to the analysis. Following the U.S. midterm elections on November 3, 2026, where the Democratic Party gained control of Congress, Ives estimated that this political shift could prevent 10% of planned data centers from being built, with high-end estimates ranging from 15% to 20%. However, his conclusion was not bearish on AI compute; rather, he reasoned inversely: given that demand still exceeds supply by approximately four to one, tighter regulation makes existing compute scarcer and therefore more valuable. Before Nvidia's Q3 earnings report, Ives lowered his price target on Nvidia from $300 to $225 but maintained a buy rating, arguing that a valuation of roughly 10 times 2028 earnings per share remains too low.

The applicability of this argument comes with important caveats. First, the 4:1 supply-demand ratio is Ives' personal estimate and has not been independently verified. Second, the Neocloud ETF fell 39% just three months after its launch, indicating that not all market participants accept the linear logic that compute scarcity equals value enhancement—balance sheet pressures and ongoing concerns about Nvidia's role in financing AI infrastructure building may offset premiums derived from scarcity. Third, Nvidia's Q3 earnings are due soon; if its data center revenue is not significantly impacted, the urgency of the substitution logic will be weakened. Essentially, the managers' argument is a bet on asset repricing under supply constraints, not a denial of Nvidia's long-term competitiveness. Ives explicitly stated that Nvidia remains about two to three years ahead of competitors, and its strategic roadmap and chip development pace driven by 42,000 employees will not change due to the founder's departure.