Jensen Huang spent 33 years building a company that would become indispensable to the AI revolution. Now, it will have to learn to exist without him.
The Taiwanese immigrant who once scrubbed toilets at a Kentucky reform school became one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives by turning gaming chips into the engine that fueled the AI boom. Along the way, he cultivated relationships with players across every level of the AI ecosystem as well as President Donald Trump, cementing his influence far beyond his company.
Revelations of extramarital affairs in the past week derailed his image as a family man who lived for nothing but his company. Huang’s resignation leaves Nvidia needing to prove that the company most synonymous with the AI boom can function without the founder who designed its strategy, evangelized its technology, and became its public face. Now, investors, customers, and policymakers will be watching whether Nvidia’s sprawling hardware-and-software ecosystem is resilient enough to outlast the executive who built it.
“I was raised by the company,” Huang said in a January interview with Jodi Shelton, the CEO and cofounder of the Global Semiconductor Alliance. “I have a feeling about this company that you can’t easily replace by hiring somebody who is just good at doing something.”
A Week of Tumult
After decades of navigating industry upheaval, Huang was brought down in a week of tumult for Nvidia. The CEO admitted on Nov. 8 to being “unfaithful” to his wife of 40 years while the company’s board said it was investigating whether he was targeted by a foreign-intelligence effort.
Huang resigned Thursday, with CFO Colette Kress stepping into the role of interim chief executive, while newly installed board chair Harvey Jones said that the search for the next CEO was underway, including internal and external candidates.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images
Jensen and Lori have been married for roughly 40 years. They met as lab partners at Oregon State University and share two children — Madison and Spencer — both of whom work at Nvidia.
She was influential behind the scenes, serving as president of the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation and responsible for Huang’s wardrobe of black leather jackets.
One of Huang’s romantic relationships was reportedly with Alice Huang, whom US intelligence officials suspected of spying for China. That raised explosive questions given the years Huang had spent lobbying Washington to loosen restrictions on chip sales to China.
Another relationship reportedly involved Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who was one of his direct reports. Reuters has since reported that Huang had another affair with an additional unnamed employee, citing anonymous sources.
The Key Man
Huang cofounded Nvidia out of the same Denny’s in San Jose where he’d waited tables as a teenager. He became renowned as a charismatic and strategic leader with relentless intensity.
Often called the godfather of AI, Huang held a strong stance toward the technology. The core of that vision was a decades-long bet that computing would move away from CPUs that perform tasks one at a time and toward GPUs that can perform thousands of tasks simultaneously.
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The gaming industry was an early user of Nvidia GPUs. Their ability to render millions of pixels at once made them well suited for other parallel tasks: scientific simulations, image processing, and training artificial intelligence.
Huang oversaw Nvidia’s push to harness the GPU’s ability and apply it to any field. More than 20 years ago, the company began developing its CUDA software, which allows the manipulation of the GPU’s processing power for non-graphics work, and Huang insisted on making every chip compatible with the platform.
While Nvidia’s chips could be copied, the tightly integrated CUDA software and its related tools kept customers tied to the company. It was a deep moat. It wasn’t long before researchers found that GPUs could be used to develop massive large language models like ChatGPT. Nvidia became the arms dealer in the ongoing race for greater computational power to fuel the AI revolution.
Huang was the face of it all. The only CEO to ever lead the company, he was both an engineer and a showman who seemed at home on stage in his signature black leather jacket. The company’s conferences were held in arenas with Huang as the headlining act.
The frenzy around him was known as “Jensanity.” He autographed a woman’s top across her chest during a 2024 tech conference, and Nvidia sold merch emblazoned with a cartoon version of his face.
He spoke at length about his vision for a new kind of computing, encouraging countries to build their own sovereign AI systems while discouraging regulatory restrictions that could dampen adoption of the technology.
Nvidia saw unprecedented growth. Its market value went from $360 billion at the outset of the AI boom in late 2022 to $5 trillion last month. Since the revelations of his affairs, it has lost roughly $500 billion in market value.
“What seemed impossible a week ago is now a reality,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Yorkville Ives who has been bullish on Nvidia for years, wrote on Thursday. “The old Jensen, the black leather jacket, the Godfather of AI, the rock star viewed as the face of the AI boom, is over and in the past.”
Center of Gravity
Huang’s prominent leadership of Nvidia since its birth established a singular corporate culture that revolved around him. By his own account, that corporate architecture was designed so the company could reinvent itself constantly without changing its structure. In an all-hands meeting last year, he told employees that “the mission’s the boss.”
As Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company, Huang still strategized as though it were on the verge of going out of business. “You wake up every single morning scared to death,” he said at the meeting. “It’s a good place to be.”
Huang was also known for weighing in on decisions at virtually every level of the company. He maintained a radically flat management structure with dozens of direct reports, and employees were known to work tirelessly. Many became “embarrassingly rich,” in Huang’s words at the same all-hands meeting, as the company’s stock price soared.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Beyond his technical prowess, Huang also emerged as a skilled diplomat. At a second all-hands meeting last year, he responded to an employee question about how much time he’d spent traveling to Washington and speaking to world leaders.
“I’d rather be here working with you guys,” he said, but Nvidia had become too central in the global AI race to sit on the sidelines. “We’re the largest company in the world, and if we don’t do it, and it’s important to us, who else is going to do it?”
Nvidia’s chips are the fuel to the data center explosion and the never-ending parade of new AI models being released. The company is now seen as central to national intelligence, and the US government has long expressed fear that its most powerful products could end up in the wrong hands.
Even tech icons have been humbled to the point of groveling. Oracle cofounder and chairman Larry Ellison had dinner with Elon Musk and Huang at Nobu in Palo Alto in 2024, he recalled on an earnings call in September of that year. “I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs,” he said.
Too Big To Fail
For all Huang’s efforts, he left behind a company unusually dependent on him. But it is also a company that is almost too big to fail. Its central role in the global AI ecosystem can’t be replaced. Like Apple after Steve Jobs, Nvidia must continue.
But that future has never been more uncertain.
“Jensen’s combination of technical expertise, strategic vision and industry relationships is nearly impossible to replicate,” said Brad Gastwirth, an analyst at Circular Technology.
SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The biggest question for investors is whether Nvidia can sustain its unparalleled growth. Shares fell 4.3% Thursday.
Nvidia’s biggest customers — including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft — are also developing competing AI hardware, while AI labs like Anthropic are increasingly pursuing strategies that involve multiple chip suppliers.
The massive buildout Huang envisions is also under siege — from tougher data center regulations following the midterm elections to financial pressures on neoclouds. These upstarts are facing construction delays and power shortages and are struggling to secure financing for their multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.
The stakes are also high for America. Nvidia’s chips power much of the world’s AI infrastructure, and Huang was a loud advocate for selling its technology abroad in order to maintain America’s lead. If Nvidia struggles to stay ahead after his departure, it could give China a leg up in the AI race.
Huang once said he tried to identify and counteract anything that could put Nvidia in harm’s way. In the end, it was his own conduct that put the company at risk.
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