Jensen Huang scandal casts doubt on Nvidia’s AI dominance — how we got here

Nvidia is facing one the biggest crises in its 33 year history, with founder Jensen Huang resigning as CEO Thursday after multiple reported affairs, including one with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy. Now CFO Colette Kress has taken the helm as Nvidia's interim CEO.

The implications of Huang's affair with Alice Huang run far deeper than infidelity. That's because her ties to Nvidia customer Megaspeed put her in the middle of a sprawling effort to accumulate AI chips across Southeast Asia. And Megaspeed is under investigation for possibly diverting restricted Nvidia chips into the hands of Chinese companies.

The relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang dates back to 2023, according to The New York Times. That was a "turbulent" period for Nvidia, Jensen Huang told CNBC during an interview at the time. Nvidia was in the midst of redesigning some chips to comply with the first in a series of strict export controls imposed by the U.S. government that restricted sales to China.

"The regulation is going to be just fine. We're going to be able to work through it," Huang told CNBC from Nvidia's headquarters in February 2023. The interview was for a documentary about how Huang created Nvidia and built it into the backbone of the AI boom.

That same day, CNBC also interviewed Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, with whom Jensen Huang reportedly had an affair.

It's not the first time Nvidia has faced an uncertain future. The company nearly went bankrupt in the early years after it was founded in 1993.

"Every company makes mistakes and I make a lot of them," Huang said in the 2023 interview. "And some of them put the company in peril."

In the early months of the AI boom, after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Nvidia was on the precipice of historic growth. Jensen Huang told CNBC he'd like to keep running the company for "three or four decades," as long as "I feel that I'm making a real contribution to the company."

Less than four years later, Jensen Huang is out, and we're taking a look back at our interviews with the Nvidia co-founder and other company executives as the chipmaker enters this next critical chapter. Watch the video for the full story.