Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang, who led the company for 33 years, has officially stepped down amid controversy. According to Sina Finance, Seligman Ventures managing partner Umesh Padval said Huang personally made most of Nvidia’s major startup investment decisions. Padval served on the board of Mellanox Technologies, the networking chipmaker Nvidia acquired for about $7 billion in 2020.

Investors hope Huang’s successor will eventually restart large-scale investing, but few expect that to happen in the short term. Nvidia interim CEO Colette Kress is expected to make some changes, particularly to investment in AI startups, which is central to the wave of data center construction worth billions of dollars. Huang’s aggressive investments in the area have long been a focus of concern on Wall Street.

One investor described Kress as “much more conservative” and said she was unlikely to commit comparable sums to sustain the early-stage startup ecosystem. Nvidia has a dominant position in that ecosystem, at times approaching a monopoly. Its large investments have effectively tied many startups to using Nvidia chips, further strengthening the company’s market advantage.

A more cautious Nvidia could give competitors and smaller companies more room. Google released two new chips this week. Some investors interviewed by the media hope large cloud providers and other chipmakers will invest to fill a potential funding gap after Huang’s departure.

Battery Ventures general partner Dharmesh Thakker said technology giants competing with Nvidia would vie for its investment leadership. He said success would depend on combining strong products, an ecosystem and developer community comparable to CUDA, and enough capital to support that ecosystem. CUDA is Nvidia’s software platform, which developers use to run AI models on its GPUs.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, AMD and others may invest in established startups to promote their chips and cloud services, Thakker said, but they may find it difficult to match Nvidia’s investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure startups that have yet to generate revenue.

One venture capitalist said that under Huang, infrastructure companies seeking $100 million to $500 million worth of GPU resources could often obtain half the funding from Nvidia and start with valuations of $1 billion or more. Nvidia’s participation also encouraged other investors to follow at those valuations. Investors now expect Nvidia to be more selective with new projects and reduce funding for companies it has already backed, putting downward pressure on valuations. Padwal said Nvidia’s presence on a company’s shareholder list reassured everyone. Without that endorsement, traditional venture capital firms may think carefully before investing or put some deals on hold.

Few investors believe a slowdown in Nvidia’s investments alone would stop the AI boom. Former Nvidia employees, including Amulya Vishwanath, who now runs a venture capital fund independently, said Huang’s departure was a major loss for Nvidia, but the startup ecosystem was bigger than any one person and its talent would continue to grow.