Nvidia CEO Wears Fuchsia Leather Jacket At Insight Sales Event

While Insight had gifted the flashy leather jacket to the AI chip leader, the fact that Jensen Huang wore it and made time to speak at the company’s event virtually is a ‘huge testament to the strength’ of Insight’s partnership with Nvidia, an Insight executive tells CRN.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took a break from wearing his iconic black leather jacket on Tuesday to sport one infused with fuchsia at a sales event for the solution provider powerhouse that claims the color as its signature hue: Insight Enterprises.

The AI chip leader wore the fuchsia leather jacket, adorned by white racing stripes on each sleeve, while speaking to Insight CEO Joyce Mullen about the companies’ partnership on generative AI solutions at Amplify, its annual technical and sales conference that’s taking place in North Scottsdale, Ariz., Insight executive Megan Amdahl told CRN.

While Insight had gifted the flashy leather jacket to Huang, the fact that he wore it and made time to speak at the company’s event virtually is a “huge testament to the strength” of Insight’s partnership with Nvidia, said Amdahl, senior vice president of client experience and North America COO at Insight, which is No. 16 on CRN’s 2023 Solution Provider 500 list.

Nvidia has risen to become one of the world’s largest companies by market capitalization—briefly overtaking Amazon and Alphabet last week—and that’s been largely due to its dominance of the fast-growing AI computing space.

Amdahl said Nvidia’s partnership with Insight is “really intentional” and lauded the chip designer’s “incredible” effort for working with the channel to deliver AI solutions.

“They really see all the partners as part of their ecosystem,” she said.

Nvidia gave Insight the first-ever Retail Partner of the Year award for last year’s Nvidia Partner Network awards, and Amdahl said the solution provider is now working with the AI chip behemoth to expand into other industries, including health care.

In addition to providing the chips, systems, software and services for AI infrastructure, Nvidia has also helped Insight with another critical area: determining which AI independent software vendors (ISVs) to work with from a field of many options, according to Amdahl.

“They help advise us all the time,” she said.

Huang was one of several top tech executives to speak at Insight’s Amplify event this week. Later on Tuesday, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger walked on stage to speak to Mullen about the company’s efforts around sustainability, industrial policy and AI, according to Amdahl.

Amdahl said both Huang and Gelsinger talked about the need to help businesses understand use cases for generative AI, an area in which Intel seeks to challenge Nvidia on multiple fronts, including the nascent but fast-growing segment of AI PCs.

As use cases are established with businesses, Insight is finding that they “often need significant upgrades to their infrastructure,” which includes PCs with new AI capabilities made possible by the inclusion of a neural processing unit alongside the CPU and GPU, according to Amdahl.

She said the conversations about AI PCs are happening around the same time that businesses are looking to refresh their fleets of PCs, in part because of the 2025 end-of-life for Windows 10 but also because it’s been roughly three years since the pandemic-driven PC refresh.

“It's a moment in time that we haven't really seen so many things happening at once,” she said. “The momentum and the chip demand is just going to be absolutely extraordinary.”

Amdahl said Amplify’s topics have been “massively focused on generative AI” and how Insight can differentiate from other solution providers in the space.

“We think our biggest opportunity is generative AI at the edge, because it pulls capabilities that our competitors really don't have in terms of, we can do our global multi-site deployment to get those generative AI devices out at the edge while being able to service it in a managed state,” she said.

Photos by Megan Amdahl.