Jensen Huang, CEO of the chipmaking juggernaut Nvidia, is stepping down.
The decision comes days after the company took the extraordinary step of launching an investigation following news reports alleging that Huang had had an extramarital affair with one of the company's clients, who U.S. intelligence officials concluded had been recruited by China's top spy agency, according to the New York Times. NPR has not independently confirmed those reports.
In an email to Nvidia staff on Sunday, Huang admitted to cheating on his wife, and said he would cooperate with the investigation.
The company's share price dropped sharply on Wednesday, after the New York Times reported that Huang had had a second affair, this one with an Nvidia executive who reported to him.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to an NPR request for comment.
Huang was widely seen as one of the most important business leaders in the United States. Nvidia dominates the market for the chips used to train and run artificial intelligence. Huang also had President Trump's ear on AI policy, with Trump even calling Huang's phone in September while Huang was onstage during a conference.
The scandal that brought down Huang snowballed quickly over the past two weeks. The New York Times reported in late October that Huang had a close relationship with a Chinese woman at a Singapore-based company that was buying Nvidia chips. Citing unidentified sources, it said U.S. intelligence officials believed she had been recruited by the Chinese government to spy on him and possibly try to influence policy. NPR has not independently confirmed this reporting.
A drip-drip of scoops followed — from the Times and other outlets — suggesting that the relationship was romantic, that senior Trump administration officials knew about the allegations some time ago, and that Huang had had a second affair.
China's foreign ministry has said the allegations of spying are baseless and part of a smear campaign against China.
Huang's departure launches Nvidia into uncharted territory.
"There's no obvious replacement," said Stephen Witt, author of a book about Nvidia called The Thinking Machine. "It's not even clear Nvidia can be the same kind of company without Jensen. I have a hard time imagining what Nvidia looks like without Jensen."
Huang was one of the longest-serving CEOs in U.S. corporate history, stepping into the role after launching the company with partners over bottomless cups of coffee at a Denny's restaurant in San Jose, Calif., 33 years ago. Nvidia got its start making specialized chips to create 3D graphics for computers that would come to be known as graphics processing units, or GPUs.
He was the face of Nvidia and an unlikely celebrity, giving countless keynote speeches and interviews in his trademark leather jacket, or posing for selfies with adoring fans.
Huang was also the company's driving force. Under his leadership, Nvidia made a big and early bet on artificial intelligence, investing heavily to transform its niche graphics chips into general-purpose processing units that were ideal for the volume of computations required to create AI.
That bet would pay off in spades as GPUs became the go-to chip for AI creators. When AI burst into the public consciousness in late 2022 with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT — a chatbot trained and run on Nvidia chips — the firm was worth about $400 billion. Today, it's valued at more than $4 trillion, among the most valuable in the world, and it dominates the market for GPUs.
But analysts say despite Huang's visionary management of the business, he had a blind spot for succession and hadn't articulated a clear plan, at least publicly.
In a Bloomberg interview from mid-October, Huang was vague about succession plans. "I'm really hoping that the next CEO of the company is already at the company, but 20 years from now, I hope I stay healthy and I hope I continue to earn my keep."
Huang's adult children, Spencer and Madison Huang, both work at Nvidia. Asked about talk that Madison might be in line to succeed him, he paused, and told Bloomberg: "if that's their aspiration, Spencer or Madison's, they have to go earn it. And it's really, really hard work. It takes a lot of sacrifice."
Daniel Newman, CEO of the Futurum Group, a tech research firm, said the company will inevitably be different without Huang, and its future success is unclear.
"They've always had Jensen as this sort of visionary at the front," he said. "I don't think that's replaceable."
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