Nvidia loses two senior executives as they join investment firm Era with a $250 million fund

Nvidia Loses Two Top Managers: They Join Investment Firm Era with a $250M Fund

On March 12, 2026, it became known that Nvidia has lost two notable managers: Jeffrey Levin and Max Cohen are joining the New York-based investment firm Era, which is betting on AI. For the market, this is not a routine personnel move, but a signal that the battle over artificial intelligence is increasingly shifting from the models themselves to capital, clouds, and infrastructure.

Who Left Nvidia

Levin was responsible for global AI initiatives at Nvidia, and Cohen led the company's cloud business in North America. Both worked at the intersection of computing demand, corporate implementations, and partnerships—meaning they saw the AI boom not just from the chip side, but from the client side, which builds services and data centers on these chips. At Era, their roles are already outlined quite specifically: Levin will help launch a new AI startup with the firm's support, and Cohen will look for deals among new cloud providers.

By new cloud providers, this means companies that rent computational infrastructure for training and running models without being classical hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. It is precisely in this market layer where many new bets are now emerging: demand for GPU is huge, the entry ticket to infrastructure is growing, and access to the right clients and contracts is becoming no less valuable than the technology itself.

What Era Is Building

Era is a young New York-based firm, only four years old. It is led by 30-year-old investor Jasper Lau, and among its backers, Taiwanese businessman Andre Koo Sr. is mentioned, among others. The company operates not just as a venture investor: it also provides financial services to its clients and portfolio companies. Already, Era has stakes in notable AI and defense-tech assets, which shows the firm's ambitions to go beyond a typical family office.

• Raising a $250M fund
• Has already received $140M in commitments, and the round is called oversubscribed
• Its portfolio includes Anduril Industries
• Among bets — Mira Muratty's Thinking Machines Lab
• Focus — AI startups and related infrastructure

For Era itself, this is a convenient moment for scaling: the AI market remains overheated, but money is increasingly looking not for abstract "next OpenAI," but for teams and projects that have access to computing, energy, and corporate customers. Against this backdrop, the arrival of people from Nvidia looks logical. They bring not only impressive resumes, but also practical understanding of how demand for GPU, cloud capacity, and applied AI services is structured today.

Why Infrastructure Matters

The most interesting detail in the Era story is the origin of the capital. The firm is raising money not from traditional institutional LPs like pension funds, but from extremely wealthy families, some of whom are connected to companies building global data center infrastructure. According to the company, these investors control businesses with approximately 70 gigawatts of energy capacity and about 70 million acres of land.

For AI, this is already not just impressive numbers: without electricity, real estate, and permits, it is impossible to quickly deploy new campuses for model training and inference. At the same time, Era plans to continue working closely with Nvidia. Earlier, the chipmaker helped the firm determine priority AI markets and investment strategies for the new fund.

If this model persists, Era gets a rare combination of assets: money from families with real infrastructure resources, a flow of deals from the AI ecosystem, and managers who understand exactly where the next demand is being formed. Essentially, this is about an attempt to combine venture, strategic consulting, and infrastructure capital in one loop.

What This Means

The move of two managers from Nvidia to Era shows how quickly the AI market is turning into a game not just of technologies, but of control over supplies, clouds, land, and energy. Winners will not necessarily be those with the best model layer, but those who know how to bring together chips, financing, and infrastructure. For investors, this is yet another sign that the next stage of the AI boom will be much more capital-intensive.