The Week Jensen Huang Fell: How a Spy Scandal Toppled Nvidia’s CEO

In the span of a few days, the most powerful executive in artificial intelligence went from untouchable to unemployed.

Jensen Huang, who built Nvidia from a graphics-card maker into the roughly $4 trillion engine of the AI boom, resigned Thursday after 33 years, felled not by a bad earnings report but by a scandal with the texture of a spy thriller.

Here’s how a defining week for AI, and by extension crypto, unfolded.

The crisis began with reports that Huang had grown close to Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, one of Nvidia’s largest Southeast Asian customers, whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly suspected of gathering information for Beijing.

For a company at the center of the U.S.-China chip fight and a looming debate over tighter export controls, the national-security overtones were impossible to ignore. Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation into whether Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence operation, though it said it had no reason to believe company secrets or national security were compromised.

On Nov. 8, Huang apologized for being “unfaithful” to his wife, acknowledging the relationship.

Jensen Huang’s exit

What might have been a single lapse quickly snowballed. The New York Times reported a second affair, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, who reported to Huang.

By Thursday, Huang was out as president, CEO and board member. Chief financial officer Colette Kress was named interim CEO, and longtime director Harvey Jones took over as board chair. The abruptness stunned an industry accustomed to treating Huang as synonymous with Nvidia itself.

Then, a day after his resignation, Reuters reported a third relationship, an “intimate” one with a second unnamed Nvidia employee, citing two people familiar with the matter. Reuters did not identify her, and Nvidia declined to comment. Huang has acknowledged only the Alice Huang affair, deflecting when the Times asked about Powell.

Affair trade

Nvidia’s stock cratered more than 14% at the open on Thursday before clawing back to close down about 4.6%. Wall Street quickly sorted winners from losers: rivals like AMD and Broadcom fared better, while companies tightly tied to Nvidia’s business took the brunt.

The reaction underscored how much of the AI trade, and the crypto market that increasingly moves with it, rests on a single company.

The scandal then rippled outward. Singapore barred Alice Huang from returning to the country, Alibaba shares slid on reports it was a Megaspeed customer, and congressional committees had already sought a closed-door briefing from Huang over his Megaspeed ties.

The loudest names in tech, AI and crypto called the ouster a blunder, with one founder branding it “a massive mistake.” Inside Nvidia, an internal suggestion-box post drew more than 1,600 comments, many pleading for Huang’s return. “If you believe in the mission, bring back THE boss,” one wrote.

The board has moved on regardless. According to the Financial Times, it approached Arm CEO Rene Haas, a former Nvidia executive who led Arm through its 2023 IPO, as a potential successor, though Nvidia called speculation about any candidate “premature.” Analysts have also floated Nvidia’s Ian Buck and AMD’s Lisa Su.

Why it matters for crypto

Nvidia’s chips power the AI data centers whose explosive buildout has become intertwined with crypto, from AI-agent commerce to the mining firms pivoting to host AI workloads.

Leadership turmoil at the company that supplies the picks and shovels ripples outward, and it lands amid a broader reckoning over AI’s role in everything from cyberattacks to data-center politics.

Nvidia reports earnings Nov. 17, with Kress at the helm and the permanent CEO search still underway, a nervous moment for a market already rattled by a sharp week-ending selloff.

For now, the company that defined the AI era is leaderless at the top, its founder’s legacy clouded by scandal, and the question hanging over Silicon Valley is whether anyone can fill the role Huang made uniquely his own.