With Jensen Huang’s abrupt ouster from Nvidia, Wall Street has lost its most powerful and profitable dealmaker.
As Mr. Huang built Nvidia from a regional chipmaker into the world’s largest company, he dispensed with the usual careful, corporate hand-wringing. He personally directed splashy deals and complicated financing structures that pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into would-be competitors, suppliers and customers.
If that made him, in the public eye, a face of the global A.I. build out, on Wall Street he represented something else: manna. His deals produced billions of dollars in fees for banks, asset managers and advisers, and Nvidia was, up until this week, spending or promising money at a speed and magnitude of little precedence.
Now Wall Street bankers, traders and even some of Nvidia’s competitors are wondering and worrying about whether Mr. Huang’s departure will slow the breakneck pace of Nvidia’s investments.
Some say that the fundamentals of Nvidia’s power are still intact, like its extreme control of the global supply of chips, the A.I. boom’s scarcest resource, the company’s deep cash coffers and the Trump administration’s warm support for the industry’s regulatory agenda. But Mr. Huang was the leader who harnessed all of those assets into a deal-making machine.
“Nvidia is the central bank of A.I.,” said Michael Edwards, director of Forum Markets, an A.I.-focused merchant bank. “Imagine the Fed without a chairman.”