“Companies like CoreWeave have essentially been able to do big, risky things and take swings and operate under the assumption that if all of this falls apart, NVIDIA will bankroll us because it's useful for NVIDIA for us to continue to exist. And NVIDIA has infinity money that it has been able to just propagate around the industry.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Pierce explains why Nvidia's financial role matters more to the AI industry right now than its chip design, and why that role went unquestioned while Jensen Huang was in charge.
Transcript
And all the people who are buying those chips are not going to be immediately, vastly less likely to because Jensen Wong is no longer the CEO.
…I'm the person who made those deals. The second you bring in an outsider to be like, let's look under the hood. Let's see if this tiny little toothpick propping up the American economy is any good at all. Then it's a real danger situation. So I think there was only one choice and it was a CFO.
Yeah. And I think what they're going to try to protect, obviously, is something like stability. But I think we talked to Liz on the show earlier this week about companies like Core Weave, which have essentially been able to do big, risky things and take swings and operate under the assumption that if all of this falls apart, NVIDIA will bankroll us because it's useful for NVIDIA for us to continue to exist. And NVIDIA has infinity money that it has been able to just propagate around the industry. And in large part, NVIDIA has done this without any scrutiny or questioning because of Jensen Wong, who has become the person of this industry. And so I think I'm very curious to see how much of the cult of Jensen Wong personality matters here. Like you said, he's the guy who goes on CNBC and says, like, computing is an asset, and people believe it, right? Like, that is not a thing everybody thought was immediately insane. And I think only somebody, to
CNBC's credit, they did have me on the next day to just hyperventilate about that sentence for like five years.
It's a bonkers thing to say, but he said it on television and a lot of people went, great idea, Jensen Wong. And there's not a lot of people who could have pulled that off. And I think that to me is the big open question here is like, is NVIDIA NVIDIA because of its chips and technological lead?…
I think MetaStack would go up.
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