NVIDIA's CEO Shake-Up Hands Alphabet a 3% Pop as Google TPUs Take Center Stage

Alphabet shares traded at $301.97 on Thursday, up 3%, the biggest gain among the cloud giants. NVIDIA sank 6%, and Broadcom rose 5% — the chipmaker works with Google on its Tensor Processing Units. Microsoft sat at $528.98, up 2%, while Amazon traded at $269.49, up 1%.

The trigger landed November 12, when NVIDIA announced Jensen Huang resigned as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately. CFO Colette Kress is running the company on an interim basis while keeping her finance job, and the board is reviewing internal and external candidates for a permanent CEO. Harvey Jones, the board's first-ever chair, said he expects operations, customer commitments and the product roadmap to continue without interruption.

Google Cloud's numbers give the TPU pitch its ammunition. Revenue climbed 103% year over year to $30.71 billion in Q3 2026, results reported October 28. CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time that the company is seeing strong demand for its TPU systems across a wide range of customers. For scale, Azure revenue grew 48% in Microsoft's quarter ended in September, and AWS rose 39% over the same stretch — both far behind Google's pace.

Each giant is hedging. Microsoft runs NVIDIA hardware alongside its own Maia chips in Azure, building what CEO Satya Nadella called a fungible fleet that shifts capacity to the highest-value work. Amazon keeps most of its Bedrock AI service on in-house Trainium silicon and is preparing to sell those chips outside AWS. On Amazon's latest earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said the number of companies with a significant cloud business and a chip strong enough to sell externally is effectively two — a count that fits Alphabet and Amazon, not Microsoft.

The bill for all this is steep. Alphabet's capital expenditures hit $51.36 billion in Q3, with free cash flow at negative $9.07 billion, and it is funding part of the build-out with debt and at-the-market share sales. NVIDIA reports Q3 FY2027 results on November 17, the next hard look at whether its customer relationships are holding through the transition.