Nvidia has significantly bolstered its leadership team over the past year as it expands beyond chipmaking into software, cybersecurity, and strategic enterprise engagement. Amid growing scrutiny and unprecedented success, the company has made key hires across marketing, research, cybersecurity, and systems engineering—while also seeing some notable departures. Among the most prominent additions is Alison Wagonfeld, who joined in January as Nvidia’s first-ever chief marketing officer. A veteran of Google Cloud, where she led marketing for nearly a decade, Wagonfeld now reports to CEO Jensen Huang and will play a central role in shaping Nvidia’s public messaging and brand presence during its next growth phase. In June, Nvidia brought on Jiantao Jiao, a professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of AI startup Nexusflow, as a director of research. His focus will be on post-training AI, evaluation systems, AI agents, and infrastructure, with an emphasis on bridging academic innovation with industry application. Mark Weatherford, former deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, joined as head of cybersecurity policy and strategic engagement. His appointment signals Nvidia’s growing efforts to engage with government agencies and strengthen trust in its AI and computing platforms. In September, Nvidia acquired Enfabrica, an AI startup focused on GPU clustering for large-scale AI workloads, in a $900 million deal. Founder and CEO Rochan Sankar joined Nvidia as part of the acquisition, along with key engineers and researchers from the company. Krysta Svore, who spent nearly two decades at Microsoft leading quantum computing research, became Nvidia’s vice president of applied research in November. She will lead efforts across the quantum computing stack, aiming to integrate quantum capabilities with existing AI and HPC platforms. Danny Auble, founder of SchedMD, joined as senior director of system software after Nvidia acquired his company. SchedMD’s open-source workload manager Slurm will remain open-source, with Nvidia committing to continued investment and development. In December, Nvidia acquired the technology and talent from Groq, a high-performance AI inference chip company. Founders Jonathan Ross (CEO) and Sunny Madra (COO) joined Nvidia, bringing deep expertise in inference acceleration. The deal, valued at $20 billion, reflects Nvidia’s strategic pivot toward inference as AI models move from training to deployment. Nvidia also strengthened its HR leadership with the hiring of Kristin Major as senior vice president of human resources. She brings over 13 years of experience from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where she held leadership roles in HR and legal. Despite these gains, some key leaders left in 2025. Dieter Fox, senior director of robotics research, departed in June to join Ai2, a nonprofit AI research institute, where he will focus on foundation models for robotics. Minwoo Park, who led autonomous vehicle research at Nvidia, left to become head of the advanced vehicle platform division and CEO of Hyundai’s self-driving unit, 42dot. Nvidia also lost two board members: Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman in space and a former board member, stepped down in July for personal reasons, and Rob Burgess, a seasoned tech executive, passed away in December. These moves highlight Nvidia’s transformation into a broader AI infrastructure leader, investing heavily in talent, strategy, and public trust as it navigates increased regulatory and market scrutiny.