Jensen Huang's Fall Exposes How Deeply Nvidia Depended on Its Founder

On Thursday, Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive of Nvidia, the company he cofounded 33 years ago and had led for its entire existence. Colette Kress, the chief financial officer, is now interim CEO. Harvey Jones, newly installed as board chair, said the search for a permanent successor is underway and will consider both internal and external candidates.

The resignation came at the end of a week that began on Nov. 8, when Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife of 40 years. On the same occasion, the company's board said it was investigating whether he had been the target of a foreign-intelligence effort. Huang and his wife, Lori, met as lab partners at Oregon State University. They have two children, Madison and Spencer, both of whom work at Nvidia. Lori Huang has been influential behind the scenes, serving as president of the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation and responsible for her husband's wardrobe of black leather jackets.

Reports have since filled in some of the picture. One relationship was reportedly with Alice Huang, whom US intelligence officials suspected of spying for China. That raised pointed questions given the years Huang spent lobbying Washington to loosen restrictions on chip sales to China. Another reportedly involved Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, who was one of his direct reports. Reuters, citing anonymous sources, has reported a further affair with another employee who has not been named.

The man at the center of this once waited tables as a teenager at a Denny's in San Jose, the same restaurant where he later cofounded Nvidia. A Taiwanese immigrant, he had also scrubbed toilets at a Kentucky reform school. His career-long bet was that computing would shift from CPUs, which handle tasks one at a time, to GPUs, which handle thousands at once. Gamers were early customers, but the chips' ability to render millions of pixels simultaneously suited them to scientific simulation, image processing, and eventually AI training.

More than 20 years ago Nvidia began developing CUDA, software that lets developers use a GPU for work beyond graphics. Huang insisted every chip be compatible with it. Chips can be copied, but CUDA and its related tools kept customers tied to Nvidia, a deep moat. When researchers found GPUs could train large language models like ChatGPT, Nvidia became what the article calls the arms dealer of the AI race. Its market value rose from $360 billion in late 2022 to $5 trillion last month. Since the affair revelations it has lost roughly $500 billion.

Huang was also the company's showman. He was its only CEO, and Nvidia's conferences were held in arenas with him as the headliner. The fervor was dubbed "Jensanity": he autographed a woman's top at a 2024 tech conference, and Nvidia sold merchandise with a cartoon of his face. Internally, he kept a flat structure with dozens of direct reports and weighed in on decisions at nearly every level. At an all-hands meeting last year he told employees, "the mission's the boss," and said he still woke up "scared to death" each morning. He also became a diplomat, telling staff he would rather be working with them, but that as the largest company in the world, Nvidia could not leave such work to others. Larry Ellison of Oracle recalled a 2024 dinner at Nobu in Palo Alto as himself and Elon Musk "begging Jensen for GPUs."

Analysts see a company unusually dependent on one person. Brad Gastwirth of Circular Technology said Huang's mix of technical expertise, strategic vision, and industry relationships is nearly impossible to replicate. Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives, a longtime bull, wrote Thursday that the era of the leather jacket and the rock star is over. Shares fell 4.3% that day. Still, the article argues Nvidia is almost too big to fail, and like Apple after Steve Jobs, it must carry on.

The pressures are real. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, among Nvidia's biggest customers, are developing competing AI hardware, and labs like Anthropic increasingly use multiple chip suppliers. Tougher data center regulation after the midterms and financing strain on neoclouds, which face construction delays and power shortages, threaten the buildout. For the US, a stumble could give China an edge. Investors, customers, and policymakers will now watch whether Nvidia's ecosystem can outlast the executive who built it.