Comment: The Nvidia boss's biggest mistake is not the affair

The board investigates Jensen Huang's affair, but sticks with him. But what if the investigation reveals something that makes it no longer wearable?

“He’s Nvidia,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon says of Jensen Huang. That's exactly the problem. The engineer has made the Californian chip designer the most valuable company in the world. However, the boss and co-founder of Nvidia did not ensure that things would continue to run without him.

On Sunday, Huang admitted to having an affair with a Chinese manager at Singapore data center operator Megaspeed International. There is a suspicion that the 63-year-old became a target of the Chinese foreign secret service. The board of directors of Nvidia has therefore initiated an investigation against Huang - but at the same time asserted that it had trust in him.

But what happens if the guards find Huang guilty? What if politicians in Washington push to replace the married father?

The affair reveals how vulnerable the world's most important company for the boom in artificial intelligence (AI) is. Because Huang has failed to develop someone who could replace him. There is no publicly known succession plan. Everything at Nvidia is tailored to the charismatic leader.