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News of Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged asset of China’s Ministry of State Security was first met with a muted response in Silicon Valley —including inside Nvidia itself. Huang’s resignation , after news of two other alleged romantic relationships with Nvidia staffers, has left both the company and the broader AI industry stunned .
As revelations about Huang’s initial affair came out earlier this week, rank-and-file Nvidia employees at first pursued business as usual, according to two current and three former employees at the chipmaker, speaking anonymously to protect relationships at the company. They trusted the board to investigate and act accordingly, but few workers thought Huang would actually leave.
Nvidia’s roughly 60,000 employees are loyal to the point that its global turnover rate is reportedly among the lowest in tech. Workers say they have heard it called having “green in your blood” or being “green-pilled” or on “team green,” referring to the company’s signature color. Huang was the company’s soul and the founder who stuck with it through challenges for 33 years. Employees appreciated that he kept layoffs rare and red tape sparing.
“In just three days we went from superhero cape to ‘Oops, I forgot my pants,’ and nobody’s quite sure how to swallow that,” one employee said. One former employee insisted in Huang’s defense that something “more sinister” must have been in play, and that affairs alone shouldn’t have led to his departure.
Huang’s peers in Silicon Valley echoed that sentiment, remaining vocal in their support of the embattled CEO even after his ouster. “One mistake does not erase a lifetime of leadership and contribution in building NVDA,” venture capitalist Antonio Gracias wrote on X earlier this week, using the company’s ticker symbol.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Huang has also had an extramarital affair with a vice president at Nvidia, and Reuters revealed on Thursday a second “intimate relationship” with an employee. Before those alleged affairs became public, multiple industry executives told WIRED that Huang is “irreplaceable” and that his biggest mistake, aside from his relationship with Alice Huang, was admitting the affair in writing to the whole company.
That appears to still be the prevailing sentiment. “A founder who has spent 30 years building such a unique company so capably has earned the presumption that he should keep leading it,” venture capitalist Sarah Guo wrote on X after Huang resigned, and a few hours before the Reuters report.
Authorities and Nvidia’s board have yet to formally accuse Huang of wrongdoing in his interactions with the businesswoman and suspected intelligence asset Alice Huang, and China has denied that she’s a spy. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the FBI “is looking into it.” Nvidia’s board has stated that it doesn’t believe Huang compromised any secrets, but it has hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton to investigate.
Add to all that, some corners of Nvidia had already been whispering about the relationship with Alice Huang; one venture capitalist who declined to be named recalled a recent dinner where an Nvidia executive claimed there had been rumors about Jensen’s romantic relationship with a young Asian woman.
On Monday, the venture capitalist had estimated a “less than 10 percent” chance Huang would lose his job at the top of the world’s most valuable company. “The wind’s going to blow over on this,” they said. “People are going to hate him for three months, and forget this ever happened.”
The big anxiety in Silicon Valley remains the possibility that instability at Nvidia will burst an AI bubble, but analysts aren’t so sure.
The chief executive of one AI company, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to affect business relationships, says Nvidia’s recent bankrolling of AI startups and even buying companies such as model-hosting provider Hugging Face has helped prop up the need for chips. A “new professional CEO won’t do any of that,” meaning “systemic risk for the AI trade and AI bubble increases substantially,” the entrepreneur says.
Between bubble talk and Huang rumors, Nvidia shares in recent days have sunk to their lowest point in more than a year. Nvidia reports its latest quarterly earnings next week.
Inside Nvidia, meetings, projects, and the company’s aggressive culture are rapidly pressing ahead with what’s left of Huang’s vision.
Additional reporting by Will Knight and Zoë Schiffer.
This is an edition of the Model Behavior newsletter . Read previous newsletters here.
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No executive has pulled the strings in the artificial intelligence era quite like Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang . He parlayed the boom into incredible wealth, became a close confidant of President Donald Trump, and emerged as a prominent voice in US–China relations. That now all stands in the balance.
Over the past few days, Huang’s status as an AI titan has come under scrutiny amid an admission that he had an affair with Alice Huang , an executive at a Singapore-based company whom US intelligence services concluded was a Chinese intelligence asset.
Nvidia’s board of directors said the company would launch an investigation into the incident. Huang, the company said, “fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.” Huang earned $36 million last year and owned about 3.5 percent of Nvidia as of March, according to a corporate filing—which also noted that Huang is an at-will employee who can be let go anytime without severance.
How exactly the investigation shakes out, and what it means for Huang’s future at the company, remains to be seen. But the incident at least puts his position at risk, and raises questions about how the industry will respond.
“He’s the person who decides who gets the chips and who doesn't,” says David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who tracks the chip industry.
Nvidia, which Huang cofounded in 1993, controls 90 percent of the market for chips used in training frontier AI models. With those chips in short supply, Huang has the power to determine which areas of AI get a boost next. Nvidia has also bankrolled much of the AI buildout, investing billions in the very companies buying its chips, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. When Elon Musk wants to build a new data center, Yoffie says, he can put in a call to Huang.
Internally, Huang closely manages even small details at Nvidia, responds to emails from any one of its roughly 60,000 staffers, and raises his voice to get points across, according to current and former employees. He’s a regular on cable TV and at tech conferences, where he’s been trying to deflate concerns about an AI market bubble and boost the positioning of his company .
But Nvidia has no other executive anywhere close to Huang’s prominence, and no apparent potential successor. “We have no idea who would replace him,” Yoffie says. “You put someone new into that position, if you're a customer, who knows what that's going to mean.”
Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation, says Huang has played such an important role—and become so close to the president—that he has become load-bearing for the entire US AI industry.
“On the one hand, Huang is irreplaceable. He built Nvidia into the juggernaut it is today, and he was the visionary behind the GPU, which has sustained the intelligence revolution,” Fedasiuk says. But he says that the company, which is indispensable to the AI industry, has to come first.
“He has to be replaceable as the CEO of the world's largest company, at $4 trillion in capex.”
Nvidia shares fell more than 4 percent on Monday, even as broader stock market indices rose.
The board’s investigation will most likely focus on whether Huang violated any company policies, Yoffie says. But the FBI could also investigate whether laws were broken, and Congress may decide to look into whether Huang’s affair influenced the US government’s policy on selling chips to China.
Nvidia didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The scandal also raises serious questions about whether China may have gained sensitive information about US AI companies and the government’s strategy on China, Fedasiuk says.
Huang’s affair appears especially damning given how outspoken he has been in recent years against calls for more aggressive technology export controls on China. His credibility on the topic could be permanently in doubt.
Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration imposed export controls designed to limit China’s access to Nvidia’s chips, as well as to technology required to mint advanced semiconductors. In his second term, however, Trump loosened these controls, giving China access to older generations of Nvidia chips; it was better to make China reliant on US technology, the argument went.
Sam Bresnick , a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, says the Huang scandal is likely to accelerate efforts to crack down on chip exports.
“There was going to be more of an impetus to control what chips are getting sent to China anyway,” he says. “I expect there to be more scrutiny on what's going on, what's getting sent to China. I think there's also going to be more scrutiny from the Commerce Department.”
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