Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang quits after affair with alleged Chinese spy - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation
NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang has stepped down from his role as the company's CEO. (Reuters: Evan Vucci)
Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia's chief executive, president and board member effective immediately.
It comes after Mr Huang admitted having an affair with a Chinese business associate.
The company's Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive until a replacement is found.
Jensen Huang, the co-founder of global artificial intelligence giant Nvidia, has resigned as chief executive effective immediately.
The news comes days after the California-based company launched an independent investigation following Mr Huang's acknowledgement that he had an affair with a Chinese business associate.
According to The New York Times, US intelligence determined that the woman — former Megaspeed managing director Alice Huang — was gathering information for China.
Beijing has denied the spying allegations and Nvidia has said it had "no reason to believe" that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised.
Nvidia's board of directors held an emergency meeting that reportedly continued into the early hours of Thursday morning, local time.
Following the meeting, the company released a statement saying Mr Huang had resigned as president, chief executive officer and as a member of the board.
Colette Kress will serve as Interim Chief Executive Officer for NVIDIA. (Nvidia via Reuters)
The company's Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress, who has worked for Nvidia since 2013, will serve as Interim Chief Executive Officer until a permanent replacement is found.
“Nvidia’s strength has always come from its people, and together with our leadership team, I am committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years,” Ms Kress said in a statement.
The company thanked Mr Huang for his "immeasurable contributions" to not only Nvidia but the wider industry.
Nvidia's new board chair Harvey Jones said he expected "the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption".
US President Donald Trump weighed in saying Mr Huang had "done a fantastic job" and should be replaced by "a legend".
"There is only one man to take his place - TIM COOK of Apple," he wrote on Truth Social.
Jensen Huang has become the focus of an independent investigation into an affair he had with a suspected Chinese spy.
The company and Mr Huang are also facing a proposed class action accusing them of defrauding shareholders by concealing Mr Huang's ties with Ms Huang — a Chinese citizen and former executive at the Singapore-based data centre company.
US President Donald Trump earlier this week confirmed the FBI was looking into the affair, and described Mr Huang as a "very honourable man".
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast said he expected Mr Huang to testify to Congress sometime within the next week.
Nvidia has become the top supplier of AI chips at the centre of the global AI boom and US-China technology rivalry.
US House Speaker Mike Johnson said he was "in favour" of limiting exports of semiconductor chips to China.
"And I think there's a developing consensus in Congress that is an important position to take. Especially in the light of recent developments, it makes sense," he said.
Mr Huang's departure could leave a leadership vacuum at the roughly $US4 trillion ($5.8 trillion) chipmaker he co-founded and built over more than three decades.
Mr Huang, 63, has no obvious successor and owns about 3.6 per cent of Nvidia's stock.
Shares of Nvidia, one of the largest companies in the world, plunged 13 per cent in early Wall Street trading following the announcement, which dragged the broader stock market lower.
Asian shares also fell on Thursday as investors kept a nervous eye on what action Nvidia's board would take.
Nvidia stock has shed at least 24 per cent of its value over the past month, wiping around $US1.4 trillion ($2 trillion) off its market capitalisation.
Nvidia has been a vital player in the artificial intelligence boom.
While some analysts believe Mr Huang's departure will not affect AI projects already in the works, others think it will.
Adam Sarhan, of 50 Park Investments, said Mr Huang's resignation comes amid a period of weakness in AI stocks due in part to worries about overbuilding capacity and exacerbated by US elections that showed public anger towards data centres.
Analyst Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives called it "a dark day for Nvidia and the US tech industry" but said the company's board needed to "rip off the band-aid and take Nvidia into its next chapter without him".
Michael Feldman, portfolio manager at ClearBridge Investments, said Nvidia now risked losing its "technology roadmap".
"That roadmap is largely visible for the next several years. The risk is execution. Jensen has been the chief conductor of an extraordinarily complex system," he said.
"In a world with real bottlenecks, that coordination is a competitive advantage in itself."
An image shared by software company Net Thunder on LinkedIn in 2024, which it says shows Megaspeed's Alice Huang sitting alongside Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang at an event in Taiwan. (Supplied: NetThunder/LinkedIn)
Alice Huang was banned from re-entering Singapore after she left the country in February, Singapore's home affairs ministry has confirmed.
The ministry said Ms Huang was investigated for possible offences including buying servers that were exported via Singapore to Malaysia without entering the Singapore market.
But the ministry said there was insufficient evidence to find Ms Huang had committed any offences and she was issued a warning.
In its first statement since the scandal broke, Singapore-headquartered Megaspeed International said on Thursday that it took its obligation to comply with US export control laws "extremely seriously" and was "committed to working constructively and transparently" with the US government.
