Potential beneficiaries of Nvidia management turmoil: AMD and Broadcom may be the biggest winners, Samsung may receive more HBM orders.

BlockBeats news, November 12 - Nvidia's board of directors is reportedly preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang and has engaged external agencies to identify potential successors. Following the news, Nvidia's US stock fell about 9% in after-hours trading, while AMD and Broadcom both rose more than 3%, and Google parent Alphabet gained 0.3%. Some investors are betting that if management turmoil affects Nvidia's relationships with customers, competitors will have opportunities to win more AI chip orders.

AMD has the best chance to directly capture AI GPU orders, while Broadcom and Alphabet may benefit from cloud providers expanding custom chip deployments. AMD is Nvidia's closest competitor in the AI GPU market, while Broadcom is expanding its business in custom AI chips and networking equipment. Alphabet announced this week that it is expanding its TPU product lineup with plans to launch two new configurations. Mandeep Singh, head of technology research at Bloomberg Intelligence, believes AMD, Google TPU, and Amazon all have opportunities to expand their share of the AI accelerator market. However, Anna Wu, founder of Floodlines Research, noted that TPUs cannot fully replace GPUs, and migrating existing AI workloads away from Nvidia's platform will require time and cost for customers.

Custom chip designers are also attracting capital attention. MediaTek, which partners with Google on custom chip development, rose as much as 3.3% intraday on Thursday, while Alchip Technologies and Global Unichip both gained more than 8%. Investors are betting that if major cloud providers allocate more budget to in-house chips, companies providing design services for these projects will also have opportunities to win more business. By comparison, Nvidia's manufacturing partners also supply competitors, so they are relatively less affected by the management turmoil, with TSMC's stock price showing little change.

Samsung's opportunity lies in capturing more supply share. Samsung reached a cooperation agreement with AMD in March this year on next-generation AI memory and computing technology, while SK Hynix remains Nvidia's primary supplier of high-bandwidth memory. Jung In Yun, Global CEO of Fibonacci Asset Management, believes that if Jensen Huang departs and Nvidia's new management re-examines supplier relationships, Samsung may seize the opportunity to expand cooperation with Nvidia. Samsung's stock outperformed SK Hynix by more than 1 percentage point that day. Korean AI chip startups FuriosaAI and Samsung-backed MangoBoost are also attempting to gain market share with alternative technologies.

Whether Chinese chip companies can benefit depends more on whether US export policies tighten further. Cambricon rose about 13% intraday, while Hygon Information and SMIC both gained more than 5%. Bloomberg noted that if supply of advanced AI chips to China is further restricted, demand for domestic alternatives may increase. However, unless Chinese companies break through bottlenecks in advanced chips, it will remain difficult for them to significantly erode Nvidia's market share.