At least Jensen Huang, the founder of the chip-making giant Nvidia, will have more time to devote to his tangled love life. After news emerged of his second affair, this time with a senior company employee, to add to the alleged Chinese “honeytrap” agent, the board clearly felt it had no choice but to replace him. Instead of waiting to be pushed, Huang did the honorable thing and resigned. There was probably no other way out of the mess. Even so, no one should kid themselves that this has fixed anything – because it will be impossible to find another CEO as talented as the one Nvidia has just lost.
It is starting to be quite hard to understand how Huang found the time to turn Nvidia into the world’s largest company
It is starting to be quite hard to understand how Huang found the time to turn Nvidia into the world’s largest company. The affair with Alice Huang – no relation – was bad enough. An alleged Chinese agent, she posed a clear national security risk, and it was reckless, to put it mildly, to be involved with her. If that was not bad enough, it was then reported that he was involved with a senior, married Nvidia executive, Kimberly Powell. There may well be more revelations to emerge in the weeks ahead. One affair might have been brushed aside as a romantic mistake, but two makes Huang look like an accident waiting to happen. The board clearly felt it had no choice but to remove him. Too much damage was being done.
It is surely one of the biggest corporate sackings of all time. Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple in 1985, but it was a far smaller company in those days, and he returned a decade later. Sam Altman was briefly kicked out of OpenAI, but came back five days later. But losing Huang from Nvidia is more like losing Henry Ford from Ford, or Bill Boeing from Boeing. The scale of his achievement can hardly be underestimated. He was the founder of the company more than three decades ago, and remained central to Nvidia’s success. He was its strategist, technical director, and public face all rolled into one. It will be impossible to replace him, and certainly not with the faceless number cruncher, Colette Kress, chosen as interim CEO.
For now, the company has a lock on high-end chips. It is the only real supplier of the hardware that powers the artificial intelligence boom, and its key customers can’t go anywhere else. And yet, it is hard to see how long that can last without Huang steering the business. Chip technology moves at lightning speed, and plenty of competitors, both Chinese and American, are trying to take market share away from it. Google is experimenting with making its own chips, as is Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, and Microsoft. All the tech giants have the deep pockets and expertise to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, and it took someone with Huang’s brilliance to stay ahead of them all, while also keeping them on board as customers. Nvidia’s shares fell by 5 percent as the news of Huang’s resignation broke, and they are now down by 14 percent over the last week. But they may well have a lot further to fall. President Trump has already called for former Apple CEO Tim Cook to take over, and that might not be a bad choice. And yet, in reality, Huang is irreplaceable – and that will soon become painfully clear.
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