XPeng’s head of automotive, Wu Xinzhou, just jumped to NVIDIA, and apparently everyone is quite happy about it.
Wu’s job hopping has had the blessing of his former boss. In a Weibo post announcing Wu’s departure, Xpeng’s founder and CEO He Xiaopeng expressed pride in his former employee for attaining a “top-level management role” at a “globally renowned company,” which turned out to be Nvidia.
On social media, He and Wu have each hinted at a tie-up between Xpeng and Nvidia in the area of semiconductors. In a photo posted by Wu the day before he started at Nvidia, he was flanked by Huang and He, suggesting a close partnership between the two companies.
“Tomorrow is my first day at Nvidia, and I appreciate Xiaopeng for personally escorting me here. According to Old Huang [Jensen Huang], I will still be working for Xiaopeng in the future, just without him having to pay my salary,” Wu wrote in the post.
Chinese companies like Baidu, XPeng, and Pony have operated AV engineering units in Silicon Valley for years. Mostly those offices employee Chinese-speaking, often China-born, engineers who live in the US.
Relatively few US companies have opened China offices, particularly in the AV space. In fact, concerns about IP protection have often led US AV firms in the opposite direction.
Opening a China-focused AV division could indicate a combination of bright signals for NVIDIA:
- They anticipate doing even more business in China, despite the deteriorating geopolitical relationships between the US and China.
- They think China is home to world-class talent that is easier to source than in the US.
- They think the cross-cultural and data protection issues that have bedeviled other US-China teams.
Hopefully bright days ahead!
David Silver 