The key facts

  • Jensen Huang has left the post of Nvidia CEO; Colette Kress has temporarily taken over the company
  • Nvidia employs about 6,000 people in Israel and is building a campus in the north of the country
  • Possible successors mentioned include Israelis Joni Srouji and Michael Kagan

Nvidia's leadership crisis and its significance for Israel

The resignation of Nvidia's longtime CEO Jensen Huang has caused concern in Israel, which Huang in 2023 called the company's 'second home.' Nvidia acquired the Israeli chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9 billion in 2019 and made the local division its largest research center outside the US; the company had also planned to build a campus in northern Israel. Beyond the roughly 6,000 local employees, the main question for Israel's tech community is whether Nvidia will maintain its commitment to the country under a new leader.

Who could lead the company

Colette Kress, formerly CFO, is temporarily serving as head. In a 2023 interview circulating on X, she said she usually started her day 'with meetings with Israel, and only then continued with California.' The list of possible successors, which remains preliminary, includes two Israelis — Joni Srouji from Apple and Michael Kagan from Nvidia, although they are not among the leading candidates. Kress's long-term prospects at the head of the company remain undetermined.

A window for competitors or a narrowing market

Nvidia holds a central position in the AI industry thanks to its GPUs, which are used for training and running large language models, and it accounted for a significant share of spending in the global AI industry. Israeli venture investors assess the consequences of Huang's departure differently. Yanai Oron, a partner at Vertex Ventures Israel, noted that slower decision-making at Nvidia could give competitors a chance, but if the uncertainty also slows AI spending, they risk getting 'a larger share of a smaller opportunity.' Selah Ventures founder Adi Levanon believes that Huang's departure will not destroy Nvidia's technology and ecosystem, but will give competitors more room; according to him, developers of specialized AI chips and inference software, into which venture capital is already flowing, now have a window to prove the better economics of their model, yet 'a change of leadership by itself will not bring them business.'