Jensen Huang no longer runs Nvidia. On 12 November 2026 he resigned as CEO and as a director, four days after admitting in a letter to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife. CFO Colette Kress is leading the company on an interim basis. We have been Jensen Huang fans for years, and we still are. But being a fan does not mean looking away. An affair does not make anyone a bad CEO, an espionage suspicion is not evidence, and still, no one is indispensable. Not even him.
This piece covers what happened in three weeks, why the affair itself is not the real problem, why selling to China is not betrayal, and what Huang’s successor has to keep and do differently to outperform him.
What happened in three weeks
On 29 October The New York Times reported that US intelligence agencies had for more than a year been tracking a close relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang, a Chinese former executive at Megaspeed who is not related to him. Megaspeed is a Singapore data centre company that, according to TechCrunch’s timeline, bought 4.8 billion dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips in two years, and that the US and Singapore are investigating over possible export-control evasion. US officials believe Alice Huang is a source for China’s Ministry of State Security. Beijing denies this, and no public evidence has emerged so far.
On Sunday 8 November Huang admitted in a letter to employees that he had been unfaithful. “There is no excuse for what I did”, he wrote. The same day the board opened an independent investigation, stating it had no reason to believe national security or company secrets had been compromised. On 11 November The New York Times reported, citing five anonymous current and former employees, a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reported directly to Huang. None of the people involved confirmed it. A day later came the resignation, disclosed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Harvey Jones, a director since 1993, became the board’s first-ever chair.
The market reacted sharply. On 2 October Nvidia was worth about 5.7 trillion dollars. On 12 November it closed at roughly 4 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance. Part of that slide started before the scandal, but the gap is close to a third of the company’s value.
Does an affair make someone a bad CEO?
No. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and led it for 33 years. In 2006 he bet on CUDA, software that turned a graphics card into a computing engine for scientists, years before anyone asked for it. When deep learning broke through in 2012, it ran on his chips. He steered the company through a near-bankruptcy in the 1990s and the crypto hangover of 2022, and turned a gaming company into the first business in the world worth more than 5 trillion dollars. That is vision, endurance and execution, and none of the three disappears because of what happens in a hotel room.
His people see it the same way. In a poll by Blind, the anonymous workplace platform, 88% of Nvidia employees said Huang should remain CEO. Barely 1% said the board should remove him. Few leaders of a company with tens of thousands of staff can claim that.
What happens within a marriage is first of all a matter between two people. Jensen and Lori Huang have been married for forty years. We do not know what they have discussed or what arrangements they have, and the outside world does not need to know. Huang himself called his behaviour inexcusable towards his family. That judgement belongs to them.
The Kimberly Powell relationship, if confirmed, does not fit the classic story of abuse of power either. Powell is not an intern but a vice president with a long career at Nvidia, and nothing in the reporting points to coercion. She is not presented as a victim anywhere. Still, companies have rules about relationships with a direct report. Those rules are not only about victims. They are about conflicts of interest, about promotions and budgets, and about colleagues who wonder whether things are fair. If the story is true, that makes it a governance problem, not a moral scandal.
The real problem was never morality. It was risk: a CEO in the middle of a federal investigation, due to testify before Congress before Thanksgiving, with a new story liable to surface any day. A board has to protect the company, not the person. That is harsh, but it is the job.
Is everyone from China a spy?
That is the reflex we saw on LinkedIn and X in recent weeks, and it is wrong. The suspicion against Alice Huang is serious. US agencies see her as an intelligence source, the Justice Department has taken over the Megaspeed case, and that investigation has to run its course. But what is public today comes from anonymous sources. Nationality is not evidence.
Jun Jiang wrote a sharp piece on chinaconnect.be titled Did Jensen finally “Buy Chinese”?. He points out that Western commentators call Alice Huang a honey trap while the Chinese internet jokes about a “domestic product”, and that both sides reduce a woman to a tool. Whether she worked for an intelligence service is for evidence to decide, not her passport or her gender. He also raises the question that concerns us most: if an American entrepreneur with Chinese roots and ordinary business ties to China becomes a suspect by default, can America still attract the best talent in the world?
Jensen Huang was born in Taiwan in 1963 and moved to the US as a child. He is one of the great success stories of American innovation. Anyone who now looks at him mainly through the lens of his origins is drawing the wrong lesson from this case.
Selling to China is not betrayal, it is his job
Huang has argued publicly for years that Nvidia should be allowed to sell to China. In May 2025 he called US export controls a failure, saying they had not stopped Chinese AI development and had pushed customers towards Huawei. According to Huang, Nvidia’s share of the Chinese market fell from 95% to 50% over that period, and he put the Chinese AI market at 50 billion dollars a year. In fiscal 2025 China still brought in 17.1 billion dollars, 13% of total revenue.
A CEO who wants to sell to as many customers as possible, within the law, is doing what shareholders pay him for. Every European exporter does the same. According to Reuters, cited by Jun Jiang, some 600,000 H200 chips are sitting in Hong Kong waiting for Chinese import approval. Washington cleared sales to ten Chinese companies in May 2026.
The line is not the opinion, it is the law. If chips reached forbidden destinations through intermediaries, that is a control failure and it has to come out. That is what the Megaspeed investigation is about. Nvidia says it investigated and refuted those allegations itself last year. A business position is not the same as loyalty, and the two should not be confused.
A 33-year track record in one chart
In fiscal 2000, its first year as a listed company, Nvidia booked 374 million dollars in revenue. In fiscal 2026, which ended in late January 2026, the figure was 215.9 billion. Most of that growth came in the last three years, but the foundations were laid twenty years earlier.
- 1993. Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem found Nvidia after a meeting in a Denny’s in San Jose.
- 1999. IPO and the GeForce 256, which Nvidia marketed as the first GPU.
- 2006. CUDA makes the GPU programmable for general computing.
- 2012. AlexNet, the model that launched deep learning, is trained on two GeForce cards.
- 2016. Huang personally delivers the first DGX-1 supercomputer to OpenAI.
- 2023 to 2025. After ChatGPT, almost every major AI model runs on Nvidia. Market value hits 1 trillion in 2023 and 5 trillion in October 2025.
That growth costs money, and not only at Nvidia. Read how Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh follows the money behind the AI buildout.
No one is indispensable, not even Jensen
Here is the uncomfortable part. The biggest weakness of Huang’s Nvidia was Huang himself. He had more than sixty direct reports, had the final say on every major decision, and according to former employees saw the board mainly as a legal requirement. The board only got a chair on 12 November. There was no obvious successor.
Companies do survive their founders, when they are built for it. Apple did after Steve Jobs, Microsoft after Bill Gates. Nvidia has to do it without preparation. Kress, CFO since 2013, knows the numbers and the customers but is not an engineer. Ian Buck, the man behind CUDA, was the favourite on prediction markets. Outside names include AMD’s Lisa Su and Arm’s Rene Haas, who spent seven years at Nvidia. Whoever it is will inherit a company whose culture was built around one person.
What the successor must keep
- The pace. A new chip generation every year, and customers who plan around it. That rhythm is a weapon against every competitor.
- Platform over product. Nvidia’s lead lies in CUDA, the software, the libraries and millions of developers, not only in silicon.
- Bets nobody asks for. CUDA took almost ten years to pay off. Huang had the nerve. Robotics and physical AI are today’s bets, as tools like NVIDIA MotionBricks show.
- A flat, open organisation. Sharing information with the group rather than in one-on-ones, so everyone works from the same context.
- Selling to everyone the law allows. Including China, even when it is politically uncomfortable.
- The bond with employees. A company where 88% of staff back the boss has something money cannot buy.
What the successor must do differently to outperform him
- Build a team that can run without you. Not sixty reports through one person, but a visible leadership team with its own authority and a real succession bench.
- A board that pushes back. The new chair is a start. A board that asks questions also protects the CEO.
- Compliance as a core capability. A customer buying 4.8 billion dollars’ worth in two years deserves a thorough check of who sits behind the intermediaries. That protects sales to China rather than slowing them down.
- Geopolitics as an institution, not a friendship. Jun Jiang notes that Huang relied on his personal ties with the White House, and that those stop being a shield once both US parties see chips as national security. A successor builds relationships at company level.
- Clear rules on relationships and family. Two of Huang’s children hold management roles. That can work fine, but only with transparent rules that apply to everyone.
- More legs to stand on. Europe and sovereign AI are a growing market that depends less on relations between Washington and Beijing. For European buyers, a less personality-driven Nvidia is also a more predictable supplier.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Jensen Huang resign from Nvidia?
On 8 November 2026 he admitted to being unfaithful to his wife, while US agencies were examining his ties to Alice Huang of Megaspeed. After a second report about a relationship with a direct report, he resigned on 12 November.
Who runs Nvidia now?
Colette Kress, CFO since 2013, is interim CEO and remains CFO. The board is searching internally and externally for a permanent successor. Harvey Jones is the board’s first chair.
Is Alice Huang a Chinese spy?
That is an allegation by US officials, reported by The New York Times based on anonymous sources. China denies it. There is no public evidence, and the US Justice Department investigation is ongoing.
What happens in the coming weeks?
Nvidia reports quarterly results on 17 November, followed by a first all-hands meeting with Kress on 18 November. Huang is expected to testify before Congress before Thanksgiving.
The jacket is on the hanger
Jensen Huang built the most valuable chip company in the world. The one thing he did not build is an Nvidia that does not need Jensen. Whoever manages that will outperform him. We remain fans of the man in the leather jacket, and we are curious who will dare to put it on.
