Jia Yangqing leaves Nvidia after just one year; DGX Lepton’s operational performance falls short of expectations

According to 动察 Beating monitoring, only a year after NVIDIA acquired AI startup LeptonAI for hundreds of millions of dollars, LeptonAI's founder (who later served as NVIDIA's Vice President of System Software) Jia Yangqing has left NVIDIA. SemiAnalysis revealed that the main reason for the split was NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's dissatisfaction with the operational performance of the DGX Cloud Lepton project, and differences between both parties regarding product execution and open-source commitments.

NVIDIA acquired LeptonAI in April 2025 and relaunched the platform as DGX Cloud Lepton in June of the same year, positioning it as a unified AI computing power marketplace. NVIDIA initially promised to open-source LeptonAI's core software platform before 2026, but this promise has not yet been fulfilled. There is speculation that Jensen Huang changed his mind after the acquisition, refused to approve the open-source plan, and the multi-year equity vesting agreement failed to retain Jia Yangqing.

Apart from internal cultural and strategic differences, the rise of AI intelligent agent programming tools represented by Cursor and Claude Code is also reshaping the middleware market. These programming tools lower the engineering threshold for developers building applications, diluting the engineering value of foundational infrastructure platforms like LeptonAI. Jia Yangqing has now been confirmed to be invited as an advisor to GPU cloud service provider Hyperbolic, offering technical support for multi-chip systems and computing efficiency.