Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns over spy and extramarital affair scandal
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns amid spy, affair scandals
The Nvidia board announced that Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO, president and director, effective immediately, after he was revealed to have had two extramarital affairs, one of the parties to which is accused of being a Chinese intelligence officer. CFO Colette Kress becomes interim CEO, former Synopsys CEO Harvey C. Jones becomes the company's first chairman in its history, and the board will search for a permanent CEO. According to The New York Times, the party involved is Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore cloud service provider and major Nvidia customer Megaspeed, who is accused of passing information to China's Ministry of State Security, focusing on intelligence about advanced US AI chips and attempting to influence technology provided to China; Jensen Huang has acknowledged in an employee memo that he was unfaithful to his wife and apologized. The other extramarital affair was with Kimberly Powell, vice president of the healthcare business who reports directly to Jensen Huang. Jensen Huang has led this major supplier of AI chips since 1993, and there is external questioning over whether the scandal affected his push to sell advanced chips to China, or even affected Trump's decisions on AI export controls.
Nvidia is a major supplier of AI chips, and Jensen Huang's resignation over the spy and extramarital affair scandal adds uncertainty to computing power supply and chip policy toward China.