Jensen Huang’s downfall has investors betting on his cousin’s chipmaker instead

Jensen Huang’s downfall has investors betting on his cousin’s chipmaker instead SAN FRANCISCO — Advanced Micro Devices, the primary competitor to Nvidia when it comes to designing chips for the artificial intelligence industry, has seen its shares rise more than 30 percent in recent days as investors bet that it would benefit from the struggles of now-ousted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The two companies are linked by more than business: AMD CEO Lisa Su is a first cousin of Jensen Huang. Both were born in Taiwan before each of them separately moved to the United States as children and later became chip engineers. AMD and Nvidia emerged in the 1990s as the two dominant makers of graphics processing units, or GPUs, specialized chips for computer games. Huang worked at AMD for a time before co-founding Nvidia in 1993. Su joined AMD in 2012 and become CEO in 2014, after previously working at IBM and other companies. Nvidia was quicker to realize the potential for GPUs to power AI models by tapping into the AI boom and becoming the world’s first $4 trillion company. Huang resigned Thursday morning, four days after admitting to being unfaithful to his wife amid reports that he had a relationship with a customer whom the U.S. government suspected of being a Chinese spy. A spokesperson for Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment.