Jensen Huang future at Nvidia in doubt as board meets

Jensen Huang's future as chief executive of Nvidia is in serious doubt after reports that the chipmaker's board met on Wednesday to decide whether to remove him, following claims of two extramarital affairs. At the time of writing, Nvidia had not announced a decision, according to the BBC and other outlets reported.

The Wall Street Journal first reported that the board was preparing to oust the co-founder, who has led the company for 33 years. Nvidia shares fell about 8% in after-hours trading in New York on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported.

Why Jensen Huang is under pressure

The crisis began with a New York Times report that the CEO had a close relationship with Alice Huang, a businesswoman US intelligence officials believed was working for Beijing. She is not related to him and was a senior executive at Singapore-based data centre firm Megaspeed in 2023. China has called the spying claims "entirely groundless".

Over the weekend the Nvidia boss admitted in a memo to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologised to his family. The board launched an independent investigation and hired law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. We covered the earlier stage of the story in our report on the Nvidia spy memo and Megaspeed.

Then on Wednesday the New York Times reported a second alleged affair, this time with an executive who reports directly to him. The Verge, citing the Times, named her as Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care. Neither has publicly confirmed the report.

How the board could act

According to Reuters, Nvidia has 11 directors, all independent except Huang, and the CEO can be removed with or without cause by a majority vote. Options reported by analysts include:

• Removing him as chief executive
• Placing him on leave while the investigation continues
• Appointing an interim CEO while he stays on in another role

Who could replace him

Nvidia has no obvious successor. The CEO has said he has around 60 direct reports and has long run the company with little delegation. Bloomberg reported that the board is working with an outside firm to identify candidates.

Names raised by analysts include chief financial officer Colette Kress as a possible interim leader, co-founder Chris Malachowsky, and Ian Buck, who runs the data centre business. A Minotaur Capital co-founder told Reuters that Kress would be the natural interim choice.

What is at stake for markets

Nvidia designs the chips that power much of the global AI boom, so any change at the top matters far beyond Silicon Valley. Reuters said the company has lost about $600 billion in market value this week if the after-hours losses hold.

The turmoil comes days before Nvidia reports quarterly results on November 17. The company has also been caught up in US limits on chip sales to China, as covered in our story on Nvidia H200 chips and China.

Investors across Asia are watching closely. Nvidia is a key customer for chip and server makers in Taiwan, South Korea and Southeast Asia, and data centre investment has become a growing part of Thailand's digital plans, as our report on Thai data centres explains.

A founder at the centre of AI

Born in Taiwan in 1963, Huang moved to the United States as a child and studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and Stanford. He worked at AMD before co-founding Nvidia in 1993. Bloomberg estimates his fortune at around $155 billion.

Phuket Times will update this story when Nvidia's board announces its decision.

Image: Jensen Huang delivers the Nvidia keynote at CES 2025. Photo by Joseph Zadeh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.