黄仁勋花了数十年时间，培养起与全球政客建立关系的独特能力，将英伟达打造成为世界上最有价值的公司之一，并成为人工智能热潮的引擎。
Jensen Huang spent decades honing a singular ability to cultivate relationships with politicians around the globe, growing Nvidia into one of the world’s most valuable companies and the engine of the artificial-intelligence boom.
他让英伟达成为技术军备竞赛的关键一环，与从新兴云计算公司到领先人工智能供应商的主要科技企业达成交易，提供尖端芯片和资金支持。该公司甚至出售过印有黄仁勋卡通形象的毛衣。粉丝们在黄仁勋前往台湾和世界各地时追捧他。
He made Nvidia a linchpin of the technological arms race, forging deals to provide cutting-edge chips and financial backstops to major tech players, from emerging cloud companies to leading AI providers. The company even sold a sweater with a cartoon of Huang on the front. Adoring fans mob Huang when he travels to Taiwan and around the world.
如今，他作为公司关键人物的地位已成为英伟达的一大风险。在董事会就有关他成为中国间谍活动目标的报道展开调查后，周一早盘交易中，英伟达股价一度下跌8%。
Now, his stature as the company’s key man has become a major risk for Nvidia. Shares slid as much as 8% in Monday morning trade following the launch of a board investigation into reports that he was the target of a Chinese espionage campaign.
这位联合创始人兼首席执行官表示，他不相信继任计划，同时也表示希望培养下一代领导人，从而可能有多位潜在继任者。63岁的黄仁勋直接管理约60名下属，以扁平结构运营公司，并表示领导人应不断传递他们拥有的知识和信息。
The co-founder and CEO has said he doesn’t believe in succession planning, and has also said he hopes to cultivate the next generation of leaders so there could be many potential successors. With roughly 60 direct reports, Huang, 63, runs the company with a flat structure, saying leaders should continuously pass on knowledge and information as they have it.
“如果他们真的几乎没有继任计划，那确实是个问题，”斯坦福大学公司治理与会计学教授大卫·拉克说，他预计董事会将咨询外部顾问和律师，如果还没有计划的话，就制定一个。拉克说：“在拥有明星首席执行官或实际上掌控公司的首席执行官的公司里，做更传统的事情可能很困难。”拉克研究过首席执行官与下属或外部承包商关系的案例，也研究过史蒂夫·乔布斯、马克·扎克伯格和埃隆·马斯克等意志坚强的科技创始人。他说，当前英伟达的困境之所以突出，是因为涉及国家安全影响，并且需要政府介入。
“If it’s true they really don’t have much of a succession plan, then that’s a problem,” said David Larcker, a professor of corporate governance and accounting at Stanford University, adding that he expects the board to consult outside advisers and lawyers to make a plan if one wasn’t already in place. “It can be difficult to do what’s more traditional in companies where you literally have the rock-star CEO or the CEO who literally has control of the company.”Larcker has studied instances of CEOs having relationships with subordinates or outside contractors, and he has also looked at strong-willed tech founders like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. He said the current Nvidia predicament stands out because of the national-security implications and need for the government to be involved.
“这种情况非常罕见，你无法随便打个电话给谁，对方就会说：‘这是个非常清晰的应对方案，’”他说。
“This is so unusual it’s not like you can call somebody up and they say, ‘Here’s a game plan for this that’s very tidy,’” he said.
英伟达最新的代理声明警告称，公司“高度依赖我们长期管理团队的服务”，而未能确保有效的继任规划可能会“阻碍我们的战略规划、执行和长期成功。”董事会尚未公开表明如果黄仁勋无法继续领导公司，由谁来接任。黄仁勋于1993年联合创立了该公司，通过在图形处理单元上押下重注——这种芯片能够处理海量数据——将其打造成为人工智能热潮的驱动力量。他持有公司3.6%的股份，是最大个人股东。
Nvidia’s latest proxy statement warns that it is “highly dependent on the services of our longstanding executive team” and that the failure to ensure effective succession planning could “hinder our strategic planning, execution, and long-term success.”The board hasn’t publicly indicated who would succeed Huang if he were no longer able to lead. Huang co-founded the company in 1993, building it into a driving force of the AI boom by betting big on graphics-processing units that can process massive amounts of data. He owns 3.6% of the company, making him the largest individual shareholder.
行业分析师表示，即使英伟达能找到某人履行与黄仁勋相同的业务职能，他几十年来周游世界、与首席执行官和全球领导人建立业务和政策伙伴关系的经历也将难以复制。他经常与特朗普总统交谈，并前往欧洲和亚洲向高级官员推销人工智能的重要性以及芯片在全球自由流动的必要性。
Even if Nvidia could find someone to fulfill the same business functions as Huang’s, his decades traveling the world to forge business and policy partnerships with CEOs and global leaders would be difficult to emulate, industry analysts say. He frequently talks to President Trump and travels to Europe and Asia to pitch top officials on the importance of AI and the free flow of chips around the world.
“黄仁勋是不可替代的。他已成为人工智能地缘政治中的独特力量，”吉姆·塞克雷托说。他是一名公共事务顾问，曾在拜登政府时期担任商务部副幕僚长。“没有其他人同时拥有他的技术专长和与世界领导人的私人关系。”在最近一次旨在突显英伟达技术的欧洲之行中，他会见了法国总统马克龙和德国总理默茨，敦促这些国家不要出台繁重的监管规定，并要求它们迅速采用人工智能。
“Jensen Huang is irreplaceable. He’s become a singular force in the geopolitics of AI,” said Jim Secreto, a public-affairs consultant and former deputy chief of staff in the Commerce Department during the Biden administration. “No one else has his combination of technical expertise and personal relationships with world leaders.”During a recent trip through Europe highlighting Nvidia’s technology, he met with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, urging the countries not to enact burdensome regulations and asking them to move quickly to adopt AI.
上个月，特朗普授予黄仁勋和其他行业高管国家科学奖章，以表彰他们在该领域的成就。在9月份由白宫人工智能顾问戴维·萨克斯共同主持的“All-In”播客现场录制节目中，黄仁勋出席了节目。特朗普在节目中致电英伟达首席执行官黄仁勋，黄仁勋开启了免提电话，并赞扬总统没有对近期人工智能模型的网络攻击做出过度反应，没有实施过度严厉的限制。
Last month, Trump awarded Huang and other industry executives the National Medal of Science for their accomplishments in the sector. During a September live taping of the “All-In” podcast co-hosted by White House AI adviser David Sacks that featured Huang, Trump called the Nvidia CEO, who put the phone on speaker and praised the president for not overreacting to recent cyberattacks by AI models with overzealous restrictions.
特朗普第二任期伊始，黄仁勋与萨克斯建立了密切关系。萨克斯是一位风险投资家，他主张政府在人工智能发展方面应实行有限干预，这一观点与黄仁勋不谋而合。自那时起，英伟达首席执行官帮助推动特朗普批准直接向中国出口该公司生产的一款旧款芯片，实施了一项针对实施限制性人工智能规则的州的行政命令，并给予在美国大量投资的科技公司半导体关税豁免。
Early in Trump’s second term, Huang forged a close relationship with Sacks, a venture capitalist who shares a preference for limited government intervention in the development of AI. Since that time, the Nvidia CEO helped push Trump to approve exports of an older chip the company makes directly to China, implement an executive order targeting states that impose restrictive AI rules and give tech companies investing heavily in the U.S. exemptions from semiconductor tariffs.
科技研究和咨询公司Futurum Group首席执行官丹尼尔·纽曼表示：“在很多方面，黄仁勋就是英伟达的史蒂夫·乔布斯。这并不意味着他们未来找不到蒂姆·库克，但那将是一次大规模的权力交接，而公司并未为此做好准备。”他指的是苹果公司的前任领导人。
“In many ways Jensen is Nvidia’s Steve Jobs. That does not mean they cannot find a Tim Cook in the future, but it would be a massive changing of the guard, and the company has not been set up for that,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of tech research and advisory firm Futurum Group, referring to the former leaders of Apple.
黄仁勋还利用自己在其他行业首席执行官中的影响力来帮助制定政策。他与Meta Platforms的马克·扎克伯格一道，帮助牵头推动顶尖人工智能公司就训练新模型和保障其安全以防止网络攻击的最佳实践达成一致。
Huang has also used his clout with other industry CEOs to help shape policy. Alongside Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms, he helped lead a recent charge for top AI companies to agree to best practices for training new models and keeping them safe to prevent cyberattacks.
涉事公司之一是SpaceX，它是英伟达的头部客户。黄仁勋与SpaceX首席执行官埃隆·马斯克合作已超过十年。2016年，黄仁勋亲自向当时在OpenAI的马斯克交付了首台用于所谓深度学习的超级计算机，并在上面题词：“献给计算与人类的未来。”与其他AI公司一样，SpaceX依赖价值数十亿美元的英伟达芯片来运行其模型。这种依赖让许多CEO不敢得罪黄仁勋，也不敢背书他反对的政策。
One of the companies involved was SpaceX, a top Nvidia customer. Huang and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk have worked together for more than a decade. In 2016, Huang personally delivered the first supercomputer for so-called deep learning to Musk when he was at OpenAI, inscribing it with a note saying “to the future of computing and humanity.”Like other AI companies, SpaceX relies on billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips to run its models. That dependency has made many CEOs wary of crossing Huang or endorsing policies that he opposes.
今年早些时候，在一些政府官员因安全顾虑考虑禁止部分工具后，黄仁勋发起联署了一封全行业的公开信，支持开放权重模型——这类模型更便宜、更可定制。许多此类开放模型是在中国开发的，而英伟达是美国顶尖的开放权重模型开发商之一。那些限制最终未曾实施。
Earlier this year, Huang rallied support for an industrywide letter supporting open-weight models that are cheaper and more customizable after some administration officials considered banning some of the tools due to security concerns. Many of those open models are developed in China, and Nvidia is one of the top U.S. open-weight developers. The restrictions were never implemented.
黄仁勋与商业伙伴甚至一些竞争对手关系密切，其中包括英特尔首席执行官陈立武，他在黄仁勋今年早些时候从卡内基梅隆大学获得荣誉博士学位时，为其披上博士帽。在特朗普政府入股英特尔10%股份后，英伟达去年底向英特尔投资50亿美元，以扩大与该公司的合作伙伴关系。
Huang is close friends with business partners and even some rivals, including Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan, who placed a doctoral hood on Huang when he received an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University earlier this year. Nvidia invested $5 billion in Intel late last year to expand its partnership with the company after the Trump administration took a 10% stake in the company.
英伟达CEO定期前往台湾——他的出生地，也是公司大部分芯片由台积电代工的地方。黄仁勋的行程往往风风火火，崇拜者争相在与台积电创始人张忠谋等关键合作伙伴会面的间隙，要求合影和签名。
The Nvidia CEO regularly travels to Taiwan, where he was born and where most of the company’s chips are manufactured by TSMC. Huang’s trips are often whirlwinds, with admirers clamoring to take selfies and get autographs around meetings with key partners like TSMC founder Morris Chang.
“在一群极客中，黄仁勋展现了与世界超级精英建立人脉的独特天赋——这是一种罕见的技能，”美国创新基金会高级研究员瑞安·费达修克说。“正是这种无与伦比的政商界巨头人脉，使他最初成为中国情报机关极具吸引力的目标。”
Huang “has shown a unique knack for networking with the world’s ultra-elite—a rare skill in a sea of nerds,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation think tank. “It was this unparalleled access to politicos and other industry titans that made him such an attractive target for Chinese intelligence to begin with.”