Elon Musk has said NVIDIA is likely to lose some of its most important supply chain deals now that Jensen Huang is gone, arguing that many of them were built on personal trust rather than paperwork.
In a post on X, Musk credited Huang with driving NVIDIA’s supply chain “brilliantly”, but said many of those arrangements were “a handshake with Jensen, not a written contract”. Without Huang, he wrote, “at least some of those critical deals will be lost.”
Responding To Dylan Patel’s Claim
Musk’s post was a quote tweet of a clip from SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel. In it, Patel says Huang personally went to executives at tiny suppliers, including companies that make only a few hundred million dollars in revenue but own an important subcomponent, and convinced them to let NVIDIA buy up their supply and build it out.
“Jensen had complete foresight and understood the demand required,” Patel says in the clip. He adds that with Huang gone, those same suppliers are now looking around the market and finding that Google is “begging for more capacity from the whole supply chain.”
Patel also questions whether NVIDIA can hold on to its technology advantages without Huang, given that it is only about a year ahead of its biggest competitors. “It’s not like the gap is massive,” he says.
The remarks echo what Patel said on the TBPN podcast earlier this week, when he argued that Google and AMD could eat into NVIDIA’s market share with Huang gone. He described Huang as the only semiconductor executive going out and personally convincing supply chain companies to invest at a scale they never have before, and to hand him allocations.
Why The Supply Chain Is The Whole Game
Chips, memory, advanced packaging and, increasingly, land and power are all scarce, and NVIDIA’s lead has rested on locking up capacity early. Huang has made the case for this himself. On a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, he argued that suppliers are willing to invest upstream because NVIDIA’s downstream demand is so large. He has also said NVIDIA applies the same discipline to the physical layer, having declared that land, power and shell is the next critical resource for AI factories.
That is exactly what Musk and Patel say is at risk. If allocations were secured through relationships Huang built over decades, rather than through long-term contracts that bind both sides, a new leadership team may have to renegotiate some of them.
Google Is The Obvious Beneficiary
Google is the rival best placed to take advantage. SemiAnalysis has found that TPUv7 Ironwood delivers up to 50% better performance per dollar than NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra, and more recently that TPUv7 beat NVIDIA’s flagship GB300 NVL72 on an agentic inference benchmark on performance per dollar across most of the curve.
Patel’s argument is that what has held Google back is not engineering but commercial muscle. In his telling, Google lacks the DNA for wheeling and dealing with suppliers and customers, and if it suddenly secures double the allocation while NVIDIA loses its chief dealmaker, the balance could shift quickly.
Some Caveats
Musk’s claim is an assertion, not a reported fact. Neither he nor Patel has named a specific deal that is at risk, and NVIDIA has not said that any supplier agreement has changed.
NVIDIA still controls roughly 92% of the GPU market by most estimates, and its board has said it expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption under interim CEO Colette Kress.
It is also worth noting that Musk’s companies, including xAI, are among the largest buyers of NVIDIA’s GPUs, and that Huang once called Musk’s team’s feat of standing up a datacenter in 19 days “superhuman”. Days before Huang’s exit, Musk had backed him as “irreplaceable” for American AI leadership, so his latest comment fits a consistent view that Huang’s role was hard to replace.
What Happens Next
Huang resigned as president, CEO and board member on November 12. The board is searching for a permanent successor and has said it will consider both internal and external candidates. In the meantime, Kress, who has been CFO since 2013, is running the company alongside her existing role.
The first real test comes on Tuesday, November 17, when NVIDIA reports its third-quarter fiscal 2027 results. Investors will be listening for any sign, from Kress or from suppliers and customers, on whether the commitments Huang secured are holding.