Nvidia Hires Former Intel Exec To Lead North America, Latin America Sales
Charles Wuischpard is joining Nvidia as it experiences astronomical growth due to high demand for its GPUs, which has been driven by a surge of interest in generative AI applications.
Wuischpard announced his new role at Nvidia as vice president of North America and Latin America sales last month on LinkedIn.
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He was most recently CEO and a board member of Ayar Labs, one of CRN’s hottest semiconductor startups of 2023. The startup, which counts Nvidia as an investor, is seeking to enable a new era of high-performance chips with silicon photonics technology that uses light to move data faster through chips than what’s possible with electricity.
“While I remain extremely optimistic about the future of Ayar Labs, I couldn't be more excited about this rare opportunity at Nvidia,” Wuischpard wrote in a LinkedIn post. “The company is playing a profound role at the intersection of AI, cloud, graphics, robotics, and automotive, with all the necessary pieces to truly transform the world as we know it.”
Wuischpard is joining Nvidia as the company experiences astronomical growth due to high demand for its GPUs, which has been driven by a surge of interest in generative AI applications. For its third quarter, Nvidia reported that revenue had tripled from a year ago, and it expects to finish its 2024 fiscal year strong with even higher sales in the final three months.
While Nvidia has dominated the AI computing space through an ever-expanding set of tightly integrated chips, systems, software and services, the company is facing a field of competitors who are eager to whittle away at its influence.
Nvidia’s competition includes pure-play rivals like AMD, Intel and several startups as well as cloud service providers designing their own AI chips, such as Amazon Web Services.
Even OpenAI, the ChatGPT-maker that has been a major Nvidia customer, has reportedly been interested in making its own AI chips.
Prior to leading Ayar Labs, Wuischpard was an executive for more than four years at Intel, where he served as general manager of the Scalable Datacenter Solutions Group, which was sold to MiTAC, the Taiwan-based parent company of server vendor Tyan.
Previously, he was president and CEO of Fremont, Calif.-based high-performance computing systems integrator Penguin Computing for seven years.