- Analysts said Nvidia's sudden power vacuum is a key opportunity for rivals in chips and networking
- The imapcts may not be felt right away given existing order pipelines, but it could be a very different story in a year or two
- Neoclouds could also feel a crunch if financing is harder to come by
Nvidia’s co-founder and longtime CEO Jensen Huang is gone. The big question hanging in the air now is what happens next. The answer is that it may take some time to really feel the fallout.
J. Gold Associates Principal Analyst Jack Gold said he doesn’t expect significant near-term fallout for Nvidia buyers like Dell, HPE and the like because deliveries are likely set up for at least the next several quarters. HyperFRAME Research CEO and Principal Analyst Steven Dickens agreed, noting that the company’s supply over the next two years is “largely allocated.”
But a year or two from now? Well, that could be a different story.
“The leadership change opens a window for every Nvidia competitor. It comes at a pivotal time when open networking standards and shifting workload profiles are challenging the centrality of the Nvidia GPU to the build-out,” Futurum Group Research Director Brendan Burke told Fierce. “The real opportunity sits in the rack architecture decisions hyperscalers make over the next three quarters for 2028 deployments. Those customers now have a strong reason to demand open multi-vendor options.”
Gold noted there will likely be increased competition in the chip space from AMD, Intel and others, including major cloud hyperscalers like AWS, Google and Microsoft, which have already begun creating (and, in Google’s case, selling) their own chips.
Burke tipped AMD to be in the best position to capitalize on Nvidia’s power vacuum since it already sells a complete open rack. But he added “Google’s TPU stack proves frontier AI can run on alternative silicon and will gain ground as it opens to outside customers.” Intel, meanwhile, can expand its enterprise CPU relationships with GPUs and physical AI silicon, he said.
Linthicum Research Founder David Linthicum offered a similar take, flagging AMD and hyperscalers as key potential beneficiaries.
"Jensen has been central to Nvidia’s identity and to the AI infrastructure boom, so his departure creates uncertainty. That uncertainty gives competitors a chance to get into conversations where buyers were previously defaulting to Nvidia," he told Fierce.
Dickens said the way the company innovates going forward will be a critical factor to its long-term success. To thrive, he argued Nvidia needs to bring in a fresh professional executive leadership team and work on corporate governance.
“This is obviously an opportunity for competitors; I see this as akin to when Steve Jobs died, and Apple had to adapt. Same with Microsoft and Bill Gates,” Dickens said.
More opportunity than just chips
It’s not just Nvidia’s chip dominance that could be in limbo over the long term. Gold pointed to the potential for increased competition in the networking space (i.e. from Cisco and the like), as well as in software, with potential movement away from Nvidia’s flagship CUDA product.
Likewise, Burke said while Nvidia’s new business lines – like its Ethernet-based Spectrum-X networking platform, and CPUs and storage options – have shown green shoots to date, they face an uphill battle against entrenched incumbents.
“Cisco and Arista defend networking. AMD and Intel defend CPUs. Established vendors defend storage. These incumbents now have their best opening in years,” Burke said. “Any execution slip during the transition hands sockets to rivals with customers who prefer multi-vendor Ethernet and open racks.”
Linthicum, too, said Cisco, Arista, Broadcom and others in the networking space "may have an opening if customers start questioning the wisdom of buying the whole Nvidia stack."
"That said, I would not overstate the power vacuum. Nvidia still has CUDA, the developer ecosystem, strong systems engineering, a deep roadmap and huge demand. None of that disappears because of a CEO change," Linthicum cautioned. "The winners are the companies that can use this moment to push optionality. The losers are anyone too dependent on Nvidia’s roadmap, supply priorities or ecosystem pull."
What it means for neoclouds
One cohort that could see nearer-term impacts is neoclouds.
Nvidia has notoriously been involved in a series of circular financing deals with neocloud and AI leaders. Some of those, Gold speculated, might be “cancelled or delayed.”
“That could have an effect on availability of neoclouds and other startups that were largely financed by Nvidia, since I assume the financing will be much more cautious under new leadership, especially if the stock price gets hit as I expect it will,” he explained.
Indeed, Nvidia's share price was down 4.34% as of the end of trading Thursday. CoreWeave stock was down 6.86%, while Nebius was down 16.84%, IREN down 6.53%, and Applied Digital down 5.36%. Nvidia has backed CoreWeave, Nebius and Applied Digital, while IREN inked a strategic partnership deal to deploy Nvidia chips which gave Nvidia the right to purchase 30 million shares of its stock.
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