[Jia Yangqing Leaves NVIDIA After Just One Year, DGX Lepton Performance Falls Short of Expectations] According to monitoring by Beating, Jia Yangqing, the founder of AI startup LeptonAI (later serving as NVIDIA's Vice President of System Software), has left NVIDIA just one year after the company acquired LeptonAI for several hundred million dollars. SemiAnalysis reports that the primary reason for the split was NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's dissatisfaction with the operational performance of the DGX Cloud Lepton project, as well as disagreements between the two parties regarding product execution and open-source commitments. NVIDIA acquired LeptonAI in April 2025 and rebranded the platform as DGX Cloud Lepton in June of the same year, positioning it as a unified AI compute marketplace. Initially, NVIDIA had promised to open-source LeptonAI's core software platform by 2026, but this commitment has yet to be fulfilled. External speculation suggests that Jensen Huang changed his mind post-acquisition and refused to approve the open-source plan. Additionally, the equity vesting agreement spanning several years failed to retain Jia Yangqing. Beyond internal cultural and strategic differences, the rise of AI programming tools such as Cursor and Claude Code is reshaping the middleware market. These tools lower the engineering barriers for developers building applications, thereby diluting the engineering value of infrastructure platforms like LeptonAI. It has been confirmed that Jia Yangqing has been invited to serve as an advisor for GPU cloud service provider Hyperbolic, offering technical support for multi-chip systems and compute efficiency. [Original Link]