Jia Yangqing Reportedly Leaves Nvidia, One Year After Lepton AI Acquisition

According to SemiAnalysis on June 29, 2025, Jia Yangqing, founder and CEO of Lepton AI, has left Nvidia, just one year and two months after Nvidia acquired Lepton AI for approximately $700 million. Jia joined Nvidia in April 2025 as Vice President, leading the DGX Lepton product. The report suggests his departure may be linked to poor performance of DGX Lepton and Nvidia's failure to fulfill its open-source promises.

Acquisition Background and Product Transformation

• In April 2025, Nvidia completed the acquisition of Lepton AI, with Jia Yangqing and co-founder Bai Junjie joining Nvidia.
• One month after the acquisition, the Lepton AI platform ceased operations, banned new user registrations, and its official Twitter account was deactivated.
• Originally planned to integrate Lepton AI into DGX Cloud, but DGX Cloud itself faced challenges: pricing starting at $36,999 per month, hit by a 45% price cut from AWS, later pivoted to an internal R&D tool, and stopped disclosing cloud spending commitments separately from Q2 fiscal 2026.
• Lepton AI's positioning was downgraded from a full cloud platform to a GPU workload scheduler, rebranded as DGX Cloud Lepton, connecting over 25 cloud partners, but the product fell short of expectations.

Unfulfilled Open-Source Promise

• Nvidia had promised to open-source Lepton's core software platform by 2026, but as of end of June 2026, this had not been fulfilled.
• SemiAnalysis believes Nvidia's business model relies on hardware sales, and open-sourcing Lepton could allow competitors to manage non-Nvidia GPUs, conflicting with commercial interests.
• Jia Yangqing's career is known for open source (Caffe, TensorFlow, PyTorch 1.0, ONNX), and the shelving of open-source plans may be the direct cause of his departure.

Jia Yangqing's Background and Next Move

• Jia Yangqing: Bachelor's and Master's from Tsinghua University, PhD from UC Berkeley; developed Caffe during PhD, contributed to GoogLeNet/Inception; worked at Google Brain, Facebook (led PyTorch 1.0 and ONNX), and Alibaba (VP of Technology).
• In 2023, he left Alibaba to found Lepton AI, focusing on a Python-native GPU cloud platform, including the Photon abstraction layer, Tuna inference engine, gpud monitoring tool, and open-source search engine search_with_lepton.
• Public information shows that on June 9, 2025, Jia joined decentralized GPU computing market company Hyperbolic Labs as an advisor.

Industry Impact

• The incident highlights cultural and business model conflicts when large hardware companies acquire open-source software teams.
• Meanwhile, AI agent programming (e.g., AMD engineers using Claude Code Agent to rewrite Slurm alternative Spur) is lowering the development cost of software infrastructure, potentially reshaping the industry landscape.