Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns amid spy affair scandal

The resignation caps a five-day saga that reportedly was years in the making, moving from Huang's admission of an affair with a suspected Chinese spy to reports of a second affair and then his exit. SemiAnalysis's read is that the board moved under pressure from the U.S. intelligence community, which is unhappy that Nvidia chips have apparently been smuggled to China. That national-security angle sits alongside a personal scandal that would otherwise have been contained.

The timing lands in a crowded week for AI news. Anthropic went on the road to pitch its initial public offering, hoping to raise more than $64 billion, and CoreWeave and Cerebras both posted positive surprises. Nebius, meanwhile, fell almost 17% despite close to sevenfold revenue growth in the last quarter, a drop the piece ties partly to Nvidia, an investor in the company.

Huang's role extended well beyond Nvidia itself, as a supplier of chips and software and a backer of AI leaders and cloud providers. Whether that backing network holds together without him is the open question, though Nvidia is expected to be less centralized whoever takes the top job.