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NP Nilay Patel Nilay Patel Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.

“Jensen's engineering skill is in finance. It's in funding neo-clouds and backstopping them and investing in the labs and using chips as collateral and going on CNBC with the heads of every major private equity company and saying compute is now an asset class. A sentence which is going to live on in infamy.”

The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“Jensen's engineering skill is in finance. It's in funding neo-clouds and backstopping them and investing in the labs and using chips as collateral and going on CNBC with the heads of every major private equity company and saying compute is now an asset class. A sentence which is going to live on in infamy.” — Nilay Patel, The Vergecast

Context

The hosts were discussing why Nvidia's CFO, rather than an engineer, was named acting CEO after Jensen Huang's resignation. Patel argues that what Huang actually did for Nvidia was financial: propping up the AI industry that buys its chips.

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Transcript

The Vergecast Around 09:11 into the episode
Nilay Patel

…that Colette Crest, the CFO, is now the acting CEO of NVIDIA. NVIDIA is a. Chip design company, and they have lots of engineers who work every day on the next generation of those chips. I don't think Jensen Wong is micromanaging that is for as much as his 60 direct reports, no one-on-ones. Jensen

David Pierce

Wong might have been micromanaging. There's a whole episode

Nilay Patel

of Dakota about that orchard that we're going to do one day. Jensen's engineering skill is in finance. It's in funding neo-clouds and backstopping them and investing in the labs and using chips as collateral and going on CNBC with the heads of every major private equity company and saying compute is now an asset class. A sentence which is going to live on in infamy.

David Pierce

I will say, I think it's possible Colette Crest has been doing most of that work anyway. It appears Jensen had a fair amount of company. Jensen had like a lot of spare time over the last couple of years, very clearly. But yeah, it's very clear that the, I think you're right, that the financial arm…

Nilay Patel

Yeah. I mean, look, the demand is for the chips as they exist today. Right. You know, if you think about just like tech cycles, everyone is always waiting for the next generation of tech. Bluetooth 5 will fix it is like a thing that you hear all the time. Like the next generation of this thing will…

David Pierce

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.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Vergecast

“I think the reason Jensen resigned instead of being fired is so they don't have to explain this reasoning. He just gets to say, I'm a distraction. See you later. No further questions.” — Nilay Patel, The Vergecast “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.” — David Pierce, The Vergecast