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For 33 years, Nvidia and Jensen Huang were almost the same thing. Huang co-founded the company in 1993 and turned a graphics-card maker for gamers into the company that controls an estimated 90 percent of the market for advanced AI chips. His leather jacket became a symbol of the AI boom. On Thursday, November 12, he resigned as chief executive and left the board.
What happened
The sequence was quick. On Sunday, November 8, Huang publicly admitted to being unfaithful to his wife, Lori, and apologised to his family and employees. The board said it still had confidence in him but opened an independent investigation into reports that he had been targeted by Chinese intelligence. The first relationship reported involved Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, who is alleged to have worked for Chinese intelligence. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported a second relationship, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reported directly to him. Reuters reported the board was meeting to consider removing him. On Thursday he was gone.
Chief financial officer Colette Kress, who has been at Nvidia since 2013 and oversaw its growth from about US$4 billion in annual revenue to more than US$215 billion, is now interim CEO. Harvey Jones, a director since 1993, is the company’s first independent board chair. Nvidia shares fell more than 14 percent at one point on Thursday before partly recovering. President Donald Trump defended Huang and suggested former Apple chief Tim Cook as his successor.
The board says it has no reason to believe national security was compromised, and there is no established evidence that Huang knowingly helped Beijing.
My view: this is a governance story, not a gossip story
It is easy to treat this as a scandal about a famous man’s private life. That misses the point, for three reasons.
First, conflicts of interest. A chief executive in a relationship with a direct report is a clear governance failure at almost any listed company, whatever the personal circumstances. Boards have codes of conduct for exactly this reason.
Second, national security. Huang spent years lobbying Washington to let Nvidia sell advanced chips to China. In December 2025 the Trump administration approved exports of the H200, about six times more powerful than the restricted H20, subject to a 25 percent tariff and other conditions. Chinese buyers have reportedly placed orders for more than two million H200 units. When the person arguing for that policy is reported to have had a relationship with someone alleged to be a Chinese intelligence asset, lawmakers are right to ask questions, even if no wrongdoing is found.
Third, concentration risk. This is the lesson for markets outside the United States. Nvidia is not just a chip company. It invests in the cloud providers, start-ups and data centres that buy its chips, and it is reportedly preparing to invest about US$10 billion in Anthropic. Huang was the public face of much of the AI investment boom. When one person’s reputation can move trillions of dollars of value in a day, that is a structural weakness.
Why Southeast Asia should pay attention
Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are competing to host AI data centres, many of them built on Nvidia hardware and on assumptions about continued US–China chip trade. Any tightening of export rules after this scandal, for example new restrictions on transshipment through Singapore, where Megaspeed is based, would affect the region directly. Governments in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur should prepare for that.
Nvidia will survive. It has a strong bench of executives and, for now, few real competitors. But the age of the irreplaceable tech founder may be ending.
Sources: Al Jazeera; NVIDIA press release; NPR; The Washington Post.
