After the Fall

Don’t have “personal relationships” with people who work for you. That’s just one of the lessons Jensen Huang learned this week as scandal swallowed him whole and led him to resign yesterday as the chief executive of Nvidia, the chip supernova he co-founded 33 years ago. It’s bad enough to have an affair with a woman the U.S. authorities believe to be a spy for China. Your board will look into that. But if it looks as if you’re also torching company policy to get affectionate with subordinates? You’re done. (The Times cataloged other C.E.O.s who’ve been ousted for having relationships with people on their org charts.)

It was, The Times noted, “the stunning fall of one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. boom.” Nvidia controls something like 90 percent of the market for computer chips that power artificial intelligence. Huang’s departure puts that dominance at risk. Shares of Nvidia, the second-biggest publicly-traded company in the world, were down more than 4 percent at yesterday’s market close.

Nvidia, which Huang ran almost single-handedly, is an absolutely central player in the artificial intelligence boom. And it’s a linchpin in the contest between the U.S. and China for dominance in the sector. The company doesn’t just develop and sell those chips. It also acts as a kind of bank to finance the data centers that have become a real driver of U.S. economic growth.

Now Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, will serve as interim chief executive while the board looks for a permanent replacement. Here are some of the potential candidates. (President Trump, who urged Huang to fight for his job, had an idea about where to pass the torch: to Tim Cook, the former chief executive of Apple. “A Legend replaces a Legend!” he wrote on social media.)

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The aftermath

But remember the woman U.S. officials believe to be a Chinese spy? Her name is Alice Huang, and Washington is still very interested in her relationship with Jensen Huang — no relation — who has lobbied to loosen restrictions on the sale of A.I. chips to China. (This story explains how some Chinese spies use seduction to score intelligence and influence.)

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