Jensen Huang's Nvidia exit tied to riskier business than personal life, WSJ says

The Wall Street Journal report frames Huang's departure as a reaction to a credit program he built at Nvidia, one that offered AI cloud providers and data center developers billions in financial guarantees so they could afford Nvidia chips. In return, those partners were supposed to give Nvidia a cut of their revenue. The largest such arrangement was a $250 billion guarantee discussed with OpenAI for an Ohio data center, and Nvidia shares fell 5% once the deal became public. Colette Kress, then CFO and now interim CEO, cut Nvidia's commitment to OpenAI in half, and the scaled-back deal was signed in August.

According to the report, Kress had already questioned internally how the guarantees were valued and what they would return, and she tried to rein in Nico Caprez, Huang's son-in-law, who pushed the program and promised partners quick closings. In an August meeting, Huang reportedly called her "a deer in the headlights" and dismissed her as a mere "reporting CFO." The report also says Nvidia's stock valuation frustrated Huang: the company's average monthly stock multiple fell from 23 to 16 between May and October, and Nvidia responded with the largest share buyback in its history.

The report adds that major cloud providers were planning to adopt alternative chips and reduce their dependence on Nvidia, a threat Huang described as an "avalanche" given Nvidia's commitments to buy large volumes of wafers and memory. At the GTC conference in Berlin in October, Huang used a story about a soup vendor in Japan to pressure half a dozen cloud CEOs, telling them the vendor was "a better businessperson than all of you" because he kept prices high and his customer base broad rather than selling his whole inventory to one or two customers. Whether Huang left voluntarily or the board used the affairs as leverage has not been reported, and CNN says the spy allegations involving Alice Huang rest on shaky ground, with the intelligence gathered so far not proving she worked as a spy for Beijing.