这是一则传遍全球的辞职消息。英伟达联合创始人、执掌公司33年的首席执行官黄仁勋在重重压力下正式卸任。一位Neocloud创始人首次听到这个消息时对TechCrunch说：“就像炸弹爆炸了一样。”
It was the resignation heard across the world. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s embattled CEO who co-founded and led the company for 33 years, had officially stepped down. “It’s like a bomb went off,” one neocloud founder told TechCrunch when he first heard the news.
过去几年，英伟达一直是活跃的投资者，每年向初创企业投入数百亿美元。据PitchBook数据，仅今年就参与了105轮融资，且往往作为最大投资方。Relational Capital创始人玛丽亚·戴维森表示：“如果这个方向发生变化，对许多年轻公司将是巨大打击。”
Over the last several years, Nvidia has been a prolific investor, pouring tens of billions into startups annually, and participating in 105 rounds this year alone often as the largest investor, according to PitchBook. “If that direction changes, it’ll be a big blow to so many young companies,” said Maria Davidson, founder of Relational Capital.
投资者表示，黄仁勋的离开让初创企业生态系统失去了一位最大的支持者，短期内资本也将大幅减少，这可能对交易撮合、估值、融资乃至竞争产生巨大影响。
Huang’s absence leaves the startup ecosystem without one of its biggest champions and with far less capital for now, investors say, which could have a massive impact on dealmaking, valuations, funding, and even competition.
Dawn Capital的沙米拉·班基亚对TechCrunch说：“从应用层到Neocloud，几乎每一家AI原生初创公司都靠英伟达支撑。”
“Nvidia is carrying almost every AI-native startup from application to neocloud,” Dawn Capital’s Shamilla Bankiya told TechCrunch.
Seligman Ventures管理合伙人乌梅什·帕德瓦尔表示，投资初创企业的大多数重大决定往往出自黄仁勋本人。帕德瓦尔自担任Mellanox Technologies董事会成员时起就认识黄仁勋，英伟达于2020年以约70亿美元收购了这家网络芯片制造商。尽管有人希望黄仁勋最终的继任者能延续他的投资狂潮，但投资者并不看好这在短期内实现。
Most of the significant decisions to invest in startups often came from Jensen himself, according to Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures. Padval has known Huang since serving on the board of Mellanox Technologies, a networking chipmaker Nvidia acquired for approximately $7 billion in 2020. While there is hope that Huang’s eventual successor will resume his dealmaking spree, investors aren’t hopeful that it will happen in the short term.
英伟达临时首席执行官科莱特·克雷斯预计将推行一些变革，尤其是在英伟达对处于数十亿美元数据中心建设核心的AI初创企业的投资方面。黄仁勋在这一领域的大举交易一直令华尔街担忧。
Nvidia’s interim CEO, Colette Kress is expected to institute some changes, especially when it comes to Nvidia’s investments into AI startups at the crux of the billion-dollar data centre build-out. Huang’s rampant dealmaking in this sphere has been a source of concern for Wall Street.
“她保守得多，”一名投资者这样评价克雷斯，“我不认为她会投入同样多的资金来维持早期创业生态的运转。”英伟达最大的押注是支持新型云服务商、推理服务提供商和开放权重模型，而这些对规模较小的公司来说建设成本高昂。“尽管存在这些困难，生态系统之所以能够形成，詹森的举措是重要原因，”硬件公司Ghost的联合创始人扎因·贾维德说。
“She’s much more conservative,” one investor said of Kress. “I don’t think she’s going to commit the same amount of money to keep the early-stage ecosystem going.”Nvidia’s biggest bets were backing neoclouds, inference providers, and open weight models, which are expensive for smaller companies to build. “Jensen’s initiatives are a big reason an ecosystem has emerged despite that,” Zain Javid, co-founder of the hardware company Ghost, said.
例如，英伟达在CoreWeave仍为私营公司时就投资了它，并参与了Crusoe的两轮融资，包括其14亿美元的E轮融资。今年，它以130亿美元收购了Hugging Face（预计2027年完成交割），并持有Mistral AI、Lambda和Black Forest Labs的投资。在这些交易中，英伟达往往是最主要的投资者。据《华尔街日报》报道，去年，在开源初创公司Reflection AI开始获得可观收入之前，英伟达就向其20亿美元的B轮融资开出了8亿美元的支票。
For instance, Nvidia backed CoreWeave back when it was still private, and participated in two of Crusoe’ rounds, including its $1.4 billion Series E. It bought Hugging Face this year for $13 billion (expected to close in 2027) and holds investments in Mistral AI, Lambda, and Black Forest Labs. Nvidia was often the largest investor in the deals. Last year, it wrote an $800 million check into a $2 billion Series B round for Reflection AI, before the open-source startup began to earn meaningful revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“詹森相信开源，坦率地说，也相信欧洲，”班基亚谈到黄仁勋为何在世界各地对AI投入如此之多时说。这种支持在美国以外的其他地区（如欧洲）的终止，“将造成巨大的资金缺口，说实话，也是生态系统的缺口，没有人能够填补。”同样属实的是，英伟达在生态系统中占据如此主导的地位，以至于有时感觉像是一家垄断企业。通过如此慷慨的支票支持这么多公司，英伟达实际上将这些初创公司锁定在使用其芯片上，这有助于巩固其主导市场地位。
“Jensen believed in open source and frankly speaking, Europe,” Bankiya said of how Huang invested so much in AI across the world. The cease of that support in other regions outside of America, like Europe “would be a massive funding and honestly ecosystem gap that no one can fill.”It’s also true that Nvidia was such a dominant player in the ecosystem that at times, it felt like a monopoly. By backing so many companies with such generous checks, Nvidia effectively locked those startups into using its chips which helped reinforce its dominant market position.
如果该公司在初创企业投资方面确实变得更加保守，那可能会给竞争对手和规模较小的竞争者留下更多空间。（巧合的是，就在黄仁勋的英伟达风波之际，谷歌本周宣布了两款新芯片）。
If the company does grow more conservative with its startup investments, that could leave more room for rivals and smaller competitors. (Coincidentally, Google announced two new chips this week amid Huang’s Nvidia fallout).
TechCrunch采访的一些投资者希望，大型云公司和其他芯片制造商能够介入，为初创企业提供支持，填补黄仁勋可能留下的部分空白。
Some investors with whom TechCrunch spoke hope that large cloud companies and other chipmakers will step in to back startups and fill some of the void that will likely be left by Huang.
Battery Ventures 普通合伙人达尔梅什·塔克尔（Dharmesh Thakker）表示，例如，他预计科技巨头将竞相争夺英伟达的投资王座，“这取决于谁能提供最佳的产品、生态系统和社区组合，以与 CUDA 竞争，并拥有资助该生态系统的财力。”他说。CUDA 是英伟达的软件平台，可让开发者在其 GPU 上运行 AI 模型。
Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, for example, expects big tech rivals to vie for Nvidia’s investment crown, “depending upon who brings the best combination of a great product, an ecosystem and community to compete with CUDA, and the financial power to bankroll the ecosystem,” he said. CUDA is Nvidia’s software platform that enables developers to run AI models on its GPUs.
虽然谷歌、亚马逊、微软和 AMD 等公司可能会支持成熟的初创公司，以推动其芯片和云服务的采用，但塔克尔怀疑他们会像英伟达那样，向尚未产生收入的基础设施初创公司投入数亿美元。
While companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and AMD may back mature startups to drive adoption of their chips and clouds, Thakker doubts they will pour hundreds of millions into pre-revenue infrastructure startups the way Nvidia did.
一位风险投资人士表示，在黄仁勋领导下，需要 1 亿至 5 亿美元 GPU 的基础设施公司，往往会从英伟达那里筹集其中一半资金，估值达到 10 亿美元或更高，仅为了起步。芯片制造商的参与让其他投资者在以高估值支持这些公司时感到安心。
Under Huang, infrastructure companies that needed $100 million to $500 million in GPUs would often raise half of that amount at valuations of $1 billion or more from Nvidia just to get started, one VC said. The chipmaker’s participation gave other investors the comfort in backing these companies at the lofty valuations.
现在，英伟达预计将在支持新公司时更加挑剔，并向其现有投资组合中的公司写出更小规模的支票，这导致估值下降。
Now, Nvidia is expected to be more selective in the new companies it backs, while writing smaller-sized checks into its existing portfolio, contributing to a drop in valuations.
“当英伟达在股权表上时，每个人都感到安全，”帕德瓦尔（Padval）说。投资者表示，没有这种支持，传统风险投资公司在向这些初创公司投入资金前可能会三思而后行，甚至可能暂停某些交易。
“When Nvidia was on the cap table, everyone felt safe,” Padval said. Without that backing, investors say traditional VCs are likely to think twice before writing checks into these startups and may even pause certain dealmaking.
即便如此，很少有人认为英伟达的投资放缓本身就会阻止更广泛的 AI 热潮。
Even so, few believe that Nvidia’s investment slowdown will by itself halt the broader AI boom.
尽管所有人都同意黄仁勋对英伟达来说是巨大的损失，但他的一名前员工、如今自己经营风险投资基金的阿穆拉·维斯瓦纳特（Amulya Vishwanath）表示，“创始人和领导者必须承担责任”，并且生态系统比一个人更大。“那批人才将继续蓬勃发展，也必须继续蓬勃发展。”
Though everyone agrees that Huang is a massive loss for Nvidia, one of his ex-employees, Amulya Vishwanath, who now runs her own VC fund, said that “founders and leaders must be held accountable,” and that the ecosystem is bigger than one person. “That talent will, and must, continue to thrive.”