alt Hacker News>, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA. [...] Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
The key is that NVIDIA is in a fast-changing technology sector and that means the core business requires NVIDIA to keep innovating new and better products that beat the competition. Having a company continuously adapt and iterate future products requires a visionary leader that pushes the company to stay on the cutting edge. Competitors and alternative products like Google TPU, Amazon Trainium, AMD, Cerebrus, etc are not standing still; they're innovating too.
Many shareholders (including employees with RSU stock) are worried that NVIDIA without Jensen puts them in a weaker position for the future unless they can find someone with equivalent influence and vision.
Intel was once on top of the world with CEO Andy Grove running things. But then the followup CEOs didn't keep Intel at the cutting edge and they lost market leadership to TSMC, AMD, and Apple Silicon in various areas. The world kept changing and Intel didn't adapt fast enough.
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It very much clashes with the idea held by some that CEOs are fungible and that the value is all created by ICs. But yes, semiconductors are at the forefront of human technology and you need the whole company (including c suite) firing on all cylinders.
So IMO, it really doesn't seem to be that much of a fast changing sector. Moores law is long dead, my 6 year old 3080 laptop gpu is still damn powerful, rather we are seeing power efficiency/optimization now between GPU generations.
Its more of a 'race to the bottom' for price efficiency/hardware deg efficiency against price of electricity and price of the chips over lifetime, than it is a fast changing tech sector where breakthroughs are being made everyday that change the entire game like say with OpenAI and Anthropic.
So basically like a blue chip.