Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns amid spy, affair scandals

Nvidia’s board has ousted Jensen Huang, its longtime co-founder, president, and CEO, after reports of two extramarital affairs — one with an alleged Chinese spy and one with an Nvidia executive who reported to Huang. A press release published Thursday morning announced Huang’s resignation, effective immediately, as current CFO Colette Kress has been appointed interim CEO.

Huang has been at the helm of what’s now known as the most powerful company in AI since its founding in 1993. In the years since, it’s become the main purveyor of the chips fueling AI advancement and deployment in the US, and it has enjoyed near-unbridled power and influence — demand for Nvidia’s chips constantly outpaces supply, and AI CEOs are constantly putting in requests to buy more, sometimes to no avail. Nvidia’s investment portfolio — worth about $99 billion and spanning AI companies from frontier labs to neoclouds — has also granted it a lot of sway in the AI space. And in recent years, Huang himself has enjoyed a close relationship with President Donald Trump.

Over the past week, that influence has been a double-edged sword for Huang, after news broke that he had been involved in a romantic relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud provider and big customer of Nvidia itself. The Megaspeed executive was also allegedly a surveillance operative passing information along to China’s Ministry of State Security. She was focused on gaining information about advanced AI chips in the US and trying to influence the technology being made available to China, The New York Times reported. Huang admitted he had been “unfaithful” to his wife and apologized to his family and shareholders in a memo to Nvidia employees over the weekend.

As The Verge wrote earlier this week, “questions are swirling around how the affair may have influenced Huang’s reported push to sell advanced chips to China — and potentially even influenced President Trump’s own decisions surrounding AI export controls.”

As of Monday, analysts, venture capitalists and even Trump had expected Huang would come out the other side of the scandal with his chief executive status intact. Silicon Valley insiders, including Elon Musk, had backed him despite the news. But on Wednesday, news broke that Huang had had a second extramarital affair — this time with an executive reporting directly to him. The New York Times, citing five people who worked at Nvidia, identified the relationship as being with Nvidia’s VP of healthcare, Kimberly Powell. Soon after the news broke, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Nvidia’s board was meeting as soon as Wednesday evening in order to decide Huang’s future at the company and potentially oust him from his role.

This story is developing. Check back for updates.

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• Hayden Field