Yangqing Jia, the AI researcher who created the Caffe deep learning framework and later co-founded LeptonAI, has departed NVIDIA roughly 14 months after the chipmaker acquired his startup for hundreds of millions of dollars. The exit was first reported by semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis on June 29, 2026, and confirmed the same day when GPU cloud provider Hyperbolic announced Jia had joined as a technical advisor. Jia created Caffe in 2013 during his PhD at UC Berkeley — the first deep learning framework to achieve industrial-scale adoption — and later contributed to ONNX and helped ship PyTorch 1.0 at Facebook. When NVIDIA paid hundreds of millions to acquire his 20-person startup in April 2025, it was paying for developer credibility, which is now advising a competitor. NVIDIA's acquisition in April 2025 was followed by the launch of the product as NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton at Computex in May 2025, with Jensen Huang describing it as "ridesharing for AI." NVIDIA had also completed a separate and larger software bet: in December 2024, the company finished its acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli startup that makes GPU orchestration software for AI workloads, at a price reported at $700 million.