Nvidia After Jensen Huang: Do Google, Amazon or AMD Gain?

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's CEO on Thursday. Three days ago we wrote that he'd probably keep the job, and we were wrong. The question now is whether Google, Amazon or AMD take Nvidia's business. We don't think much of it moves in 2027, because next year's chips were ordered and designed long before this week. Where we think Nvidia pays first is on price, in the talks for the build after that, and the buyers best placed to push are the ones that already make their own chips.

Quick glossary for the table. Google's TPU and Amazon's Trainium are AI chips those companies design for their own data centers and now also rent or sell to others. CUDA is Nvidia's software layer, which most AI code is written for and which makes switching away from Nvidia slow. Neoclouds are GPU-rental clouds like CoreWeave. Deals here are sized in gigawatts of data-center power, because that's how buyers plan capacity.

Chips that ship next year are already designed, booked into TSMC's factories and planned into buyers' data centers. Minotaur Capital's Armina Rosenberg made the same point this week, per BigGo Finance: customers' 2027 plans don't depend on who the CEO is. Nvidia's new chair, Harvey Jones, said in Thursday's release that he expects customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption.

The smaller buyers at the bottom of the table mostly stay too. Their code is written for CUDA, and while Amazon now offers tools to run the same code on Trainium and Google sells TPUs outside its own cloud, moving a working system is still a project. As we argued in October, the custom chips win with buyers big enough to write their own software, and those are the same few names at the top of this table.

Nvidia kept about 75 cents of every dollar of sales as gross profit in each of the last three reported quarters. That's the number a buyer with its own chip negotiates against. AMD made 56% in the quarter to September and says its AI chips sit below that, which we covered in AMD's Q3 piece.

Here's the mechanism as we read it. Google or Amazon doesn't have to move a single workload to use this week. It only has to bring a credible TPU or Trainium quote to the talks for its next build, and those talks now happen with an interim CEO who's also still the CFO, while the board runs a search. Huang set Nvidia's terms with these customers for years. A new team that wants to keep its biggest accounts has an easy lever in price, and we'd expect it to use some of it before it risks losing a buyer to its own chip.

Google is in the best spot. It runs its own TPUs, sells them to nearly 100 customers, and Anthropic has signed for gigawatts of them, so it has both the cheaper chip and a growing outside business. Broadcom, which builds the TPU, gains with it. Amazon comes next. It says its custom chips, Graviton and Trainium, saved customers more than $2 billion in the quarter to September, and it plans to sell Trainium outside AWS late in 2027, around when the next round of contracts gets written.

Monday's AMD jump came partly from Google choosing AMD server processors for its newest TPU systems, per NewsBytes. That's a win inside Google's chip, not instead of Nvidia's. Some commentators, like Luke Lango on Investing.com, argue the scandal speeds a shift to AMD and the custom chips. AMD is the only GPU a neocloud or government can switch to without its own chip team, so we'd expect it to pick up some nervous buyers. But it wins them by pricing under Nvidia, and if Nvidia trims price to keep the big accounts, the gap AMD sells into gets smaller.

There are two good objections, and they point in opposite directions. The first is that Nvidia sells everything it can make. Moore says the half of the business outside the big clouds is probably growing faster, and the big clouds have been waving TPU and Trainium quotes at Nvidia for three years while its margin stayed around 75%. A sold-out seller doesn't have to give on price, and a new CEO may simply hold the line. If that's right, the margin holds and we're wrong.

The second is that we're underrating what Huang did. He set the yearly cadence of new chips that keeps AMD and the custom-chip makers a generation behind, and he pushed partners to build capacity ahead of demand. An executive at one of Nvidia's Taiwan partners was quoted by BigGo saying they'd keep supporting Nvidia but "a new CEO may not be as aggressive as Jensen Huang." Bernstein downgraded Nvidia to the equivalent of a hold this week, and Dan Ives at Yorkville Ives put a lower price target on a Nvidia without Huang, per Yahoo Finance. If the chip after Rubin, Nvidia's next system, slips by even a few months, Google and Amazon get time to move real work onto their own chips, and then it's share, not just price.

November 17 is Nvidia's earnings for the quarter to October: the margin against the 74% guide, the guide for the quarter to January, and anything Kress says about pricing. After that it's the permanent CEO pick, Broadcom's December report on its AI revenue, and Amazon's plans for selling Trainium outside AWS.