According to BitPush News, NVIDIA’s board is reportedly preparing to remove CEO Jensen Huang and has partnered with external firms to identify potential successors. Following the news, NVIDIA’s U.S. after-hours stock price dropped approximately 9%, while AMD and Broadcom each rose more than 3%, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, gained 0.3%. Some investors speculate that if management turmoil affects NVIDIA’s relationships with clients, competitors may seize opportunities to win more AI chip orders.
AMD has the best chance to directly secure AI GPU orders, while Broadcom and Alphabet may benefit from cloud providers expanding their deployment of custom chips. AMD is NVIDIA’s closest competitor in the AI GPU market, and Broadcom is expanding its business in custom AI chips and networking equipment. Alphabet announced this week an expansion of its TPU product lineup, planning to introduce two new configurations. Mandeep Singh, Head of Technology Research at Bloomberg Intelligence, believes AMD, Google’s TPU, and Amazon all have opportunities to increase their market share in the AI accelerator market. However, Anna Wu, Founder of Floodlines Research, noted that TPUs cannot fully replace GPUs, and migrating existing AI workloads away from NVIDIA’s platform requires time and cost.
Custom chip designers have also attracted significant investment attention. MediaTek rose as much as 3.3% during intraday trading on Thursday after partnering with Google on custom chip development; Silergy and UMC both rose over 8%. Investors are betting that if major cloud providers allocate more of their budgets to in-house chip development, companies providing design services for these projects stand to gain additional business. In contrast, NVIDIA’s manufacturing partners, which also supply competitors, have been less affected by management turmoil, resulting in minimal movement in TSMC’s stock price.
Samsung’s opportunity lies in securing a larger share of supply. In March this year, Samsung partnered with AMD on next-generation AI memory and computing technologies, while SK Hynix remains NVIDIA’s primary supplier of high-bandwidth memory. Jung In Yun, CEO of Fibonacci Asset Management Global, believes that if Jensen Huang steps down and NVIDIA’s new management reevaluates its supplier relationships, Samsung could seize the opportunity to expand its collaboration with NVIDIA. On the day, Samsung’s stock outperformed SK Hynix by more than one percentage point. South Korean AI chip startups FuriosaAI and MangoBoost, backed by Samsung, are also attempting to gain market share with alternative technologies.
Whether Chinese chip companies can benefit depends largely on whether U.S. export policies tighten further. Cambricon rose as much as 13% intraday, while Hygon Information and SMIC both climbed over 5%. Bloomberg noted that if the supply of advanced AI chips to China is further restricted, demand for domestic alternatives could rise. However, unless Chinese companies overcome bottlenecks in advanced chip technology, they will still struggle to significantly erode NVIDIA’s market share.