Nvidia without Jensen Huang. What lies ahead for Asian chipmakers?
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., drinks a beer with Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Group, Koo Kwang-mo, chairman of LG Group, and Lee Hae-jin, founder of Naver Corp., at a restaurant in the Hongdae district of Seoul, South Korea, on Friday, June 5, 2026. Nvidia has certified the three biggest memory chipmakers to supply their most advanced high-bandwidth products for the US company’s AI accelerators, Huang confirmed for the first time. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Nvidia’s leadership shake-up is unlikely to cause immediate disruption for major Asian semiconductor suppliers, such as Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., but Jensen Huang’s departure has raised questions about the company’s longer-term product strategy and supply chain relationships.
The bigger issue for investors and suppliers is whether Nvidia can maintain the pace of innovation and close ties with key partners that Huang helped drive as the company built its dominance in artificial intelligence chips.
In a Friday research note, Nam Dae-jong and Kim Yeon-mi, analysts at South Korean brokerage Daol Investment & Securities, said Huang’s departure was unlikely to affect the semiconductor industry’s near-term outlook.
However, they flagged uncertainty over Nvidia’s medium- to long-term product roadmap, including how its new leadership would coordinate with partners across the AI ecosystem.
Asian chipmakers
For chipmakers in Asia, one key question is whether Nvidia’s relationships with its manufacturing partners could change under new leadership.
Nam and Kim expect Nvidia’s foundry relationship with TSMC to remain unchanged, given the companies’ established partnership.
They also expect Nvidia’s relationship with Samsung’s foundry business to continue, citing growing cooperation between the companies, including manufacturing involving Samsung’s 4-nanometer process and work on next-generation high-bandwidth memory technology.
The analysts said custom AI chips, or application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, are emerging as alternatives to Nvidia’s graphic processing units and could accelerate diversification in the AI chip market.
However, they cautioned against interpreting growing competition as a sign of weakening demand for memory semiconductors, particularly high-bandwidth memory, or HBM.
Still, uncertainty remains over Nvidia’s longer-term product roadmap, given Huang’s central role in shaping the company’s business strategy and allocating resources.
SK Hynix, another key supplier to Nvidia, reversed earlier gains to close 3.03% lower on Friday.
In a research note earlier in the day, Shinhan Securities said investors had initially looked past concerns over Nvidia’s leadership change and focused instead on the broader outlook for the AI industry.
South Korea’s Kospi also reversed earlier gains Friday. In a research note, iM Securities said the impact of Nvidia’s leadership change on the broader semiconductor sector appeared limited, pointing to gains in AMD and Broadcom shares in the previous U.S. session and continued investment demand for AI companies.
ASUS on Nvidia’s future
ASUS Co-CEO S.Y. Hsu told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” that Nvidia’s leadership change was unlikely to alter its competitive advantages in the near term, though the company would monitor any impact on product quality, service costs and deliveries.
“I think Nvidia’s product and the total AI ecosystem, the advantage will not change overnight,” Hsu said.
ASUS, which works with Nvidia across graphics cards and AI servers, has yet to interact with interim CEO Colette Kress, Hsu said, adding that the company was seeking a meeting to better understand any potential strategic changes.
Over the longer term, Hsu said Huang had played a key role in helping Nvidia and its partners accelerate innovation, and that he would be watching to see whether the company could maintain that pace without him.
