Nvidia has just hired Google marketing executive Alison Wagonfeld as chief marketing officer.
Wagonfeld will be the company’s first CMO, consolidating duties that were previously scattered among a few people. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang will be her boss, according to a person familiar with the move.
Once she starts in February, everyone in Nvidia’s marketing and communications department will report to her, the person said. Wagonfeld confirmed the jump with a LinkedIn post.
She spent close to a decade at Google, where she ran marketing for the outfit’s cloud computing business. That background should come in handy now that Nvidia is trying to look like more than a chip supplier with a lucky break.
Nvidia has ballooned over the past three years by becoming a key provider of the chips that power advanced artificial intelligence tools and services. The boom really caught fire after OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022.
That sort of growth makes marketing less of a nice-to-have and more of a daily firefight. It has turned Huang into one of the loudest and most recognisable faces of the AI frenzy.
On Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang told the crowd, “The race is on for AI. Everyone is trying to get to the next frontier.”
Nvidia posted record sales of $57 billion in its most recent quarter, up 62 per cent from a year earlier and beating analysts’ consensus estimates, which is the sort of number that makes a shiny new CMO feel like a requirement rather than a luxury.
