SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
With Huang out as CEO and his chief financial officer, Colette Kress, stepping in, people have a lot of questions. Kress is relatively unknown to the public. So for some insight, we turn now to Kevin Roose, co-host of NPR's Machine Gods podcast. Hey, Kevin.
KEVIN ROOSE, BYLINE: Hey, how's it going?
DETROW: Before we get to Kress, I just want to start with kind of that big unanswered question that John was talking about there. Some companies that everyone sees as a one-person company - I'm thinking about Apple and Steve Jobs - are quite fine when that CEO leaves or is off the scene, and they keep growing. Others really do fall apart. What are you thinking with NVIDIA? Like, how much was Huang really part of this in terms of what comes next?
ROOSE: Well, he was essential to the company's success, and he took the company from being sort of a niche hardware manufacturer, making chips for video gamers, into one of the largest companies in the world. And he largely did that by betting on AI and other areas of computationally intensive work. These chips that NVIDIA makes, these GPUs, turned out to be the essential ingredient in modern AI, and Jensen Huang was really there at every step of the way. Now, could he be replaced? Could the company, you know, do fine without him? We'll see. But I think a lot of people are nervous that it wasn't just his acumen and his scientific expertise that made the company work, but it was his relationships. He really had deep yearslong relationships with people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman...
DETROW: Yeah.
ROOSE: ...The people who are driving the AI boom. And so people are kind of worried about what happens when him and his Rolodex disappear.
DETROW: So Kress steps in. What should we know about her background?
ROOSE: Well, she's a lifer. She joined NVIDIA in September 2013. She's been the chief financial officer, and she was there through this whole transition from a video game graphics company to an AI kingmaker. She's been on NVIDIA calls. Investors are familiar with her, but she's more of a mystery to the rest of the AI ecosystem. She's not a household name or a product visionary. And that was sort of Jensen's role. He was not just the CEO, but he was really the cheerleader for this entire industry.
DETROW: Yeah. There are big financial stakes here in terms of the overall stock market. There are geopolitical stakes in terms of how much national defense is built in. Like, NVIDIA chips are powering wars right now, literally. I mean, what do you think her top priorities should be in this crisis moment?
ROOSE: Well, I think the first thing that she has to do is just to keep people calm, right? Customers, employees, investors. People are already worried about, you know, momentum shifting to AMD or another rival. The second would be the money. I mean, NVIDIA has been acting as a kind of bank for the entire AI industry. It has deals with all of the biggest AI labs, including hundreds of billions of dollars of commitments and circular financing deals. And Colette Kress signed off on many of those deals, but she has to now decide whether to keep writing the checks. And then I just think she's going to have a lot of investigations to deal with. There's going to be this board investigation, an FBI inquiry. I imagine a bunch of congressional subcommittees and committees are going to be looking into what was going on with NVIDIA's chip sales in China. So I think she can look forward to a lot of new scrutiny.
DETROW: There has been so much focus this week on the total lack of a succession plan at NVIDIA and how much power Huang had himself. You know, no succession panel, like I said. Board didn't have a chair until now. Did anyone raise these concerns before this crisis point of, like, this is a pretty big company - we need a plan?
ROOSE: Not loudly, if they did. Jensen Huang was very open about he didn't believe in succession planning. He had all these direct reports. It's a very unconventional company in its org chart, and that was fine for investors for many years because the stock was going up and up and up, and nobody wanted to push the founder on it or upset the apple cart. This was despite the fact that Jensen Huang didn't have what many other tech CEOs who came along later had, which were these special share classes that would protect them from being fired by the board. He didn't have any special voting control, and so that's why the board was able to actually make him go.
DETROW: Kevin, we got about 30 seconds. Walk me through some of your biggest questions going forward that you'll be looking for.
ROOSE: I'm looking for the regulatory response to this in Washington. NVIDIA, and Jensen Huang specifically, were driving a lot of the Trump administration's policies on things like export controls on chip sales. So I'll be looking to see whether, without him in the driver's seat, the company changes its posture and says, well, actually, maybe we don't want to sell our most powerful chips in China.
DETROW: Kevin Roose, co-host of the Machine Gods podcast on NPR. Thank you so much.
ROOSE: Thank you.
DETROW: And if you want to better understand the people and the technology behind AI, you can check out the Machine Gods tab on the NPR app, where you can find every episode and interview from the show. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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