WIREDUnited States
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Some Nvidia employees are calling for Jensen Huang’s return even after his multiple reported extramarital affairs and abrupt resignation , according to internal correspondence reviewed by WIRED.
An internal “suggestion box” post submitted before Huang’s resignation by a longtime engineer at Nvidia urged the company’s board to take employee sentiment into consideration prior to taking any action. The submission has attracted more than 1,600 comments since then, with several asking board members to find a way to bring back Huang.
“If you believe in the mission, bring back THE boss,” wrote one anonymous commenter.
“We are all humans and can make mistakes. Jensen did so many good things and he needs a second chance,” wrote another.
One employee went as far as sending a companywide email demanding transparency into Huang’s exit. “I stand by Jensen,” the staffer wrote. “Not because I believe any person is infallible, but because I refuse to believe that standing for fairness must mean standing at a distance from someone whose leadership has meant so much to us.”
The employee couldn’t be reached for comment, while the engineer behind the suggestion box post declined to comment.
Nvidia and its new board chair, investor Harvey Jones, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Huang, a 63-year-old who had led Nvidia since its founding in 1993, wrote in an email to employees on Sunday that he had been “unfaithful to [his] wife” and that there was “no excuse.” The acknowledgement followed reports of an affair with a suspected Chinese intelligence asset . The board announced Huang’s resignation on Thursday morning, following reports of an alleged second affair with a direct report. (This employee has not commented on the matter.) Since then, Reuters reported on an alleged affair with yet another Nvidia employee. Huang hasn’t commented about these reports since his Sunday email.
Nvidia’s board is largely made up of early Nvidia investors and Huang’s longtime confidants. It named Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress interim CEO and appointed former Synopsys CEO Harvey Jones as chair of the board. The crisis has cost the company $1 trillion in market value since the allegations surfaced, prompted investigations from US lawmakers and the FBI, and raised the prospect of new export controls on chips.
It’s been business as usual inside the company throughout this week, but Huang’s resignation left many employees stunned . In the hours after, about two dozen employees posted on LinkedIn in support of Huang, with one describing their faith in his leadership as unwavering. Over the same period, WIRED couldn’t identify any posts from Nvidia employees in support of his resignation.
One employee who has been at Nvidia for a couple of years and wasn’t authorized to speak publicly says they perceive the desire for Huang’s reinstatement as widespread. They worry the company will eventually suffer without its founder at the helm and say that the board must bring him back. “Nvidia is Nvidia because of Jensen,” the employee tells WIRED.
Many employees had expected a board investigation to conclude before any big changes would occur. For instance, the suggestion-box post called on the board to share its findings with employees and formally solicit their sentiment “about Jensen’s continuing as our CEO.”
Instead, Huang left just as the inquiry had begun. Staffers are seeking to better understand why. “If America fails the man who helped build its future,” the employee in the companywide email stated, “then this world does not deserve Jensen Huang.”
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Nvidia cofounder Jensen Huang officially resigned after admitting to an affair with an alleged Chinese intelligence asset. He also faces reports of at least two more alleged affairs with Nvidia employees. In this bonus episode, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down how Nvidia’s board turned on its founder, what interim CEO Colette Kress means for the company, and how this moment could be a golden opportunity for Nvidia’s competitors.
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett , Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer , and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger . Write to us at [email protected] .
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Brian Barrett : Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley . I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Zoë Schiffer : I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.
Leah Feiger : And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Brian Barrett : We're bringing you an extra episode this week because Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang , has officially resigned. His resignation caps a swift, stunning fall for the man who spent more than three decades building a company into the engine of the AI boom . We're going to talk about how a board known for deferring to its celebrity CEO finally changed its tune and who's going to be running Nvidia, at least for now. Let's get started. Just for the room, we released a podcast this morning before this happened and then it happened. So now we're talking again.
Leah Feiger : I mean, who doesn't want multiple offerings from the Uncanny Valley crew, Brian?
Brian Barrett : It's true. Constant updates. We're going to do an hourly podcast from now on, just iterative, getting real in the weeds. No. How surprised is everybody that this happened? And I guess first, if you want some setup about what happened, you can listen to our previous episode, but I guess I'll first say really quickly, Jensen Huang admitted to an affair with an alleged Chinese intelligence asset who was selling a lot of chips to—and then a report came out that he had another affair allegedly with someone who reported directly to him at Nvidia, and that feels like the final straw. So we're caught up. Are we surprised still?
Zoë Schiffer : I mean, the first thing to say is the company does have rules on the books saying that you're not supposed to have a relationship with a direct report. And so when we talked and it was the Chinese spy, although that is the obviously more scandalous thing that has happened, it also really felt to me like Jensen was going to weather that storm. But then when the second affair came out, that felt like it gave the board a really good excuse if they needed one to say, "OK, we have to stop." And I think it's fair to say here that while there is no current reporting on additional affairs, I think the concern is if two have already come out, what if more continued to become public and they need to stop the bleeding?
Leah Feiger : But he still fought pretty hard to retain his role, right?
Zoë Schiffer : I don't think the board wanted him to resign. I don't think Jensen wanted to resign. I think that their backs were completely against the wall on this one. The company has already been through an incredibly embarrassing scandal that will drag out for the next many months as Jensen is dragged before the Senate and has to answer to people who have serious concerns about his advocacy for China and where the Nvidia chips have been going and all of that. Now there's a second affair again with a direct report, and I think that the situation became very, very quickly untenable for everyone involved.
Leah Feiger : Absolutely. And now Nvidia has a new CEO in the name of CFO Colette Kress . Tell me about her.
Brian Barrett : Interim. So yeah, she'll be there for the time being, but she's been at Nvidia for a long time. She's been there since 2013, which means that she's worked closely with Jensen since before the company was the darling of the AI world back when it was a graphics processor for gaming laptops company. She was at Cisco and Microsoft before that. She's a real industry veteran. I think my understanding is she's really a classic CFO. I don't know if she's a long-term visionary leader of this company, but she knows Nvidia inside and out. And I think if you're looking for stability and you're looking for someone who's not going to create new drama and who's not going to have a scandal, that seems like she really fits that bill.
Zoë Schiffer : Yeah, I think what they need right now is stability, like you said. They need someone to take the reins. They don't want anything else dramatic to happen to the company. And of course they're going to immediately kick off a search for a new visionary leader, which as we said in the last episode, there's not an obvious successor here. They've got to find someone who has incredible technical prowess, who has a real vision for where the AI industry is going and who will be able to learn Nvidia's business. I think it's doubtful that person ... Well, actually, I really should have learned from this experience that I shouldn't have hot takes. I was going to say, I don't think the person's going to come from—
Zoë Schiffer : ... Nvidia internally, but what do we know at this point? It could be anything. So yeah, Colette will take the reins for the moment, and the company needs to weather this storm and come out the other side.
Brian Barrett : And I think she does, as you might have guessed she's going to be operating the business the way Jensen had, at least in terms of advocating for closer collaboration with China and the business lines that Nvidia has been going down, leaning more into CPUs recently, open source. I don't think you're going to expect anything other than business as usual. And when you have her in there, as we talked before, China is so important to Nvidia's future. Jensen Huang had lost all credibility on that point. So having someone in there who can make the case that, hey, we should have a better relationship with China, we should be able to sell more to China, who is not compromised in the way that Jensen has been, that's an upside. I mean, it's a lot of downside for Nvidia that Jensen's gone, but at least they can come into these conversations without that baggage. I think that's the main point here.
Leah Feiger : And perhaps even right the ship even slightly. I mean, with news of Jensen's departure, Nvidia's stock plunged, absolutely plunged, but one of Kress' big roles as CFO was communicating with Wall Street. So I'm assuming that there's a world where this could be slightly reassuring to investors, perhaps.
Brian Barrett : I think so. The thing about the market, I guess, is that everything's always baked in. The market has already accounted for so much. So it did take a big plunge. I think as we're recording this, it had been stabilizing a little bit. I shouldn't say that, because by the time this is out, it's going to go wildly in one direction or another.
Leah Feiger : It means it's a time for another emergency pod. We're just going to keep this going all day.
Brian Barrett : We're going to have to do another emergency pod. Exactly. All day. Get ready, folks.
Zoë Schiffer : We have been talking a lot though about how interconnected, not just the AI industry is, but the entire US economy, how tied up it is with just a few companies. And Nvidia really is, it's kind of Nvidia and Anthropic that so much of this is riding on. And so I think we have yet to see what the ramifications of this will be if Nvidia is able, like we said, to weather
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Goldstein: 0.0CAMEO 01
Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO of tech giant Nvidia, the company's board says, with chief financial officer Colette Kress appointed interim boss.
The company's shares have recovered some ground after plummeting more than 13% when US markets opened shortly after news of Huang's resignation.
The BBC's North America correspondent Samira Hussain explains what's next for the company.
Read more about the rise and fall of Jensen Huang here .
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Goldstein: 0.0CAMEO 01
Arm's boss Rene Haas (L), Nvidia's Colette Kress (C) and Chris Malachowsky (R) have been named as possible successors
Nvidia is now facing a scenario few would have considered until very recently - a future without Jensen Huang.
The chief executive and co-founder of the AI chip-making giant is at the centre of a major scandal over reports of extramarital affairs, one of which was with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy.
On Thursday, Nvidia's board announced he had resigned effective immediately.
He will be replaced, for now, by Nvidia's chief financial officer Colette Kress.
The tech giant is facing one of its biggest challenges, finding the right person to permanently lead the business that Huang helped create more than three decades ago and turned into one of the world's most valuable companies.
We take a look at which candidates have emerged as potential successors.
Colette Kress is chief financial officer at Nvidia
Nvidia's finance chief, Colette Kress, is taking on the chief executive role for an interim period while the company searches for a permanent replacement.
An industry veteran for more than 30 years, Kress previously held high positions at tech firms like Cisco and Microsoft.
Kress, who also serves as Nvidia's executive vice president, has seen the firm's transformation from making chips for video games in the early 1990s to becoming an AI semiconductor powerhouse.
She "fronts every earnings call" alongside Huang and is a "familiar and trusted voice for the market at a time when it badly needs one," said Josh Gilbert, an analyst at investment firm eToro.
But doing the job permanently could be a different story, said Gilbert, as the firm, known for its edge in technology, could want an engineer in the chair.
Chris Malachowsky is one of Nvidia's three co-founders
Another option is Chris Malachowsky, who founded Nvidia alongside Huang and Curtis Priem, and is the only executive that shares the same level of seniority.
Malachowsky has played a key part in developing the company's computing technology.
Ian Buck, who oversees Nvidia's high-performance computing business, has also emerged as a potential candidate if the company is keen to put an engineer in the top job.
Buck was among the early pioneers who helped popularise the use of graphic processors beyond gaming applications.
"He could protect Nvidia's technological edge, but his ability to manage the wider commercial relationships and geopolitical challenges would face scrutiny," said Charu Chanana, investment strategist at investment bank Saxo.
Today, Nvidia's leading processors are widely regarded as the gold standard for AI development.
Huang's children also work at Nvidia in executive positions but are relatively young and inexperienced.
Nvidia is likely to favour an internal appointment initially but could look externally for a more permanent replacement, said Jun Bei Liu, founder and lead portfolio manager at Ten Cap.
Several names of tech entrepreneurs outside of Nvidia have been floated by experts.
Liu said Apple's former chief executive, Tim Cook, could be a possible choice as someone familiar with managing global supply chains, though she questioned whether he would be willing to leave the iPhone maker, where he is the chair.
Apple's Tim Cook (R) with Jensen Huang (L) and his wife Lori Huang at the White House
Liu and Chanana also suggested Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm Holdings, the UK chipmaking giant.
Nvidia's processors are made with the help of chipmakers around the world, including Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung.
Haas is familiar with leading a publicly-listed company and would bring semiconductor experience, though Nvidia's business model is considerably different from Arm's, said Chanana.
"The challenge is finding someone who can combine Jensen's technical understanding, strategic vision and relationships across the global technology industry," Liu said.
Ten Cap's Liu had believed it was just a matter of time before Huang would step down as Nvidia's chief executive.
"The issue is no longer simply about personal conduct," she said. "It is about corporate governance, national security concerns and maintaining confidence in the leadership of one of the world's most strategically important companies."
Several major investment firms have downgraded their forecasts for the chip giant - a rare shift given investors' longstanding optimism about the company.
Stacy Rasgon, senior analyst in US semiconductors at Bernstein Research, wrote in a note to investors that "our gut tells us we probably haven't fully probed the depths of what might be found here".
Rasgon halved Bernstein's share price target for Nvidia and said: "We've had enough and prefer to watch from the sidelines."
Ray Wang, chief executive of Constellation Research, said the crisis isn't so much an issue for the wider AI industry but rather one for Nvidia itself which has to consider if the person it appoints as its chief executive has the same appeal as Huang.
"That's really what the issue is, because a lot of these partnerships and investments have been made because of the trust with with Jensen," he said.
What we know as pressure builds on embattled Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Zoe Kleinman: Nvidia CEO's affair will cause ripples across US and beyond
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Goldstein: 3.0CAMEO 02
A new report by the New York Times details an alleged relationship that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had with a female company executive who reported to him. This comes as calls for him to step aside grow amid concerns over another relationship Huang had with a woman that U.S. intelligence officials identified as a Chinese spy.
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There’s a specific mantra drilled into government workers, military officers, and intelligence personnel during counterintelligence briefings: “If she’s a 10 and you’re a 5, she’s a spy!” Or, as the US Army’s Counterintelligence Command posted on Valentine’s Day: “It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out ‘10 + 5 = honeytrap.’” The very beautiful woman who is suddenly interested in your very ordinary existence probably has ulterior motives , is the message.
Jensen Huang surely doesn’t live a typical life—he’s a centibillionaire, the swashbuckling CEO of Nvidia, one of the hottest and most geopolitically consequential companies of the 21st century. Surely he’s aware of the possibility that he’d cross paths with intelligence assets. In fact, it’s hard to think of many companies in the world that would be a higher priority target for foreign intelligence agencies.
All of that makes the stock-shaking news this week all the more surprising. How did Huang get embroiled in a spy scandal that mixes infidelity, international espionage, the Trump administration, and the economic behemoth of the multitrillion-dollar AI industry?
The story kicked off just before Halloween, with a six-byline story in The New York Times reporting that Huang was the target of a Chinese spy plot. Starting somewhere between 2024 and 2025, Huang allegedly had an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), a one-time executive at a Singapore-based cloud provider known as Megaspeed. US intelligence agencies warned top US officials that they believed she was a Chinese intelligence asset. So far, Nvidia’s board, which has launched its own investigation, says it has “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised,” but that’s far from the only concern.
As one would expect, China has denied any nefarious plot centered on Jensen Huang. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson on Monday said , “The narrative about so-called Chinese spies is entirely based on groundless speculation—it’s nothing more than slander and smearing.”
But according to reporting by The New York Times and the Financial Times , US intelligence officials also claim that Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, was reporting to China’s Ministry of State Security intelligence agency. On Monday, Megaspeed said on LinkedIn that US authorities found “no evidence of any violations concerning the illicit transfer of chips or any illegal activities." (There’s no indication so far that Alice Huang, a one-time Chinese state journalist, is an employee or “officer” of Chinese intelligence; she’s believed to be an “asset,” an outsider who aids an intelligence agency, sometimes for pay, sometimes not.)
China, though, has elevated economic espionage to a core pillar of its economic and military development, stealing the designs for everything from US fighter jets to solar panels and commercial paint recipes . “Honeypots” or “honey traps”—positioning an alluring operative to seduce or develop a relationship with a key target—are one of intelligence’s most infamous and well-established strategies. French officials have warned specifically about Chinese honeypots since at least 2011, when intelligence reports cited a pharmaceutical researcher who was seduced and then blackmailed by a Chinese spy operation.
Over the past quarter of a century, as Silicon Valley emerged as a center of political and economic power, it has become a key focus of Chinese intelligence. In one plot, a Chinese national named Fang Fang spent years trying to cozy up to Bay Area politicians , including then US Representative Eric Swalwell. (While intelligence officials at the time reportedly believed Fang to be an operative, law enforcement officials never brought any charges against her). When traveling to China, US business executives have become accustomed to leaving their regular phones and computers at home and using burner devices to prevent the installation of spyware or malware (as I did, when I traveled to China for WIRED in 2019 to report on Huawei ). In 2012, when Leon Panetta was making his first trip to China as defense secretary, he and his team were advised to bathe and shower in the dark in the event his hotel room was bugged. Last year, the threat of honeypots prompted the US government to explicitly ban personnel working in China and Hong Kong from engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens. More recently, US officials joined with allies to warn about China’s increasingly sophisticated “ LinkedIn espionage ”: using the business-focused social networking site to recruit and build relationships with unwitting executives.
Alice Huang’s Megaspeed, for its part, is a major Pacific region player in cloud services focused on the advanced computer chips that are the heart of Nvidia’s business. The Biden administration had sharply limited the export of cutting-edge chips globally to slow China’s development of AI, but Jensen Huang has successfully lobbied the Trump administration to loosen those restrictions.
Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Donald Trump denied having prior knowledge of Alice Huang’s potential espionage. “I didn’t hear about it then, but a lot of people have heard about it, and Jensen totally denies that,” Trump said . “I asked him that question: ‘Did you have any idea that she was a spy?’ He said, ‘I had no idea that she was a spy.’” On Tuesday, the Times reported that Marco Rubio had briefed Trump in May, right before Jensen Huang joined the president on Air Force One for a trip to China.
The veracity of Trump's claims will surely be investigated, especially in the context of the famous Watergate maxim: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Nvidia’s CEO has been publicly linked to the Megaspeed executive since at least 2024 and Alice’s husband, Kang Weigh, has reportedly known Jensen since the 2010s. WIRED’s Lauren Goode reported on Monday that Jensen Huang, starting in 2025, hired Risa Heller’s crisis communications firm, which is well-versed in handling public sex scandals. This spring, secretary of state Marco Rubio evidently helped craft a classified memo inside the administration warning officials about Jensen Huang’s potentially compromising relationship.
Jensen Huang—who has developed an important reputation as AI’s number one cheerleader at the frontier of AI labs—is now stuck in an awkward situation. Is he an idiot, unaware that his paramour might have been a foreign intelligence asset? Merely reckless with his own reputation, fiduciary responsibility to Nvidia, and the technological security of the United States? Or a witting accomplice to undermining US national security?
Regardless of the truth, Nvidia loses. Shareholders have ridden a roller-coaster that has seen Nvidia’s stock rise by about 600 percent over the past five years, becoming the world’s second-most valuable company. In the past month, the stock has plummeted by a quarter. The disaster for Nvidia is just beginning, it seems, as lawsuits loom, including by its own shareholders.
Similarly, the Trump administration is likely to face real questions from the newly Democratic congress: When were the president and other top officials briefed about this intelligence threat? What communication, if any, did they make to Nvidia and to whom? Should more have been done by US intelligence to block Alice Huang from having access to Nvidia and its CEO?
The fact that Megaspeed is a major customer of Nvidia makes everything more complicated. Indeed, reports have circulated for at least a year that the US was concerned that Megaspeed was diverting chips to Chinese intelligence agencies, an allegation that could have massive consequences for the global AI race. Bloomberg this week reported that Megaspeed's subsidiaries have purchased billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips and that an audit requested by the US government last year found that Megaspeed couldn’t initially account for some
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