CEO resigns amid reports of affairs, including one with an alleged spy for China
By Amrith Ramkumar
The world's most consequential AI CEO is out.
Jensen Huang, the 63-year-old co-founder and longtime chief executive of Nvidia, resigned after having two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee. The company said Thursday that it was starting a search for his successor and that finance chief Colette Kress would serve as interim CEO.
The inglorious ending to Huang's run at the top of Nvidia caps a 33-year career at the company he founded at a Denny's with two friends and $40,000. With Huang at the helm as its first and only CEO, Nvidia started as a company making graphics chips for personal computing and gaming, then nurtured a software-developer ecosystem and designed high-performing AI graphics processing units processing voluminous computations. Along the way it became one of the world's most valuable companies.
Huang, who owns about 3.6% of the company, has become one of the richest people in the world as his company ascended.
Since 2007, his pay has totaled $2.4 billion, including salaries, bonuses and other compensation, according to Courtney Yu, the director of research for Equilar, a research firm that gathers data on executives and boards. That includes $773.5 million in vested stock and $1.6 billion in exercised options.
As Nvidia became the leading chip designer for top tech companies, Huang was lauded by other tech CEOs and frequently held court at massive Nvidia conferences around the world for developers using the company's products and software. He was slated to appear at one such event in Washington, D.C., in early December.
Through its dominant market position, Nvidia has emerged as a financial backstop for the growing AI industry. By providing funding and credit support to companies that use its products, it created a circular web of relationships that both reinforces success and, to some degree, shares risks. The goal was to seed the AI landscape with startups that built on Nvidia's technology and bought ever more of it as they grew.
Born in Taiwan, Huang's parents sent him to the U.S. when he was 10 and he waited tables at Denny's as a teen. He attended high school in the suburbs of Portland, Ore., and was a member of the computer club, according to a biography of Huang by author Stephen Witt.
He studied engineering at Oregon State University, where he met his wife, Lori, and became her study partner, according to Witt. Huang has credited her for sacrificing her career to raise their two children and for helping select his signature black leather jackets.
Early in his career, Huang worked at chip company Advanced Micro Devices -- which became a rival to Nvidia -- and chip maker LSI Logic Corp. before co-founding Nvidia in 1993.
Huang and his wife had two children, who now work at Nvidia, as does their son-in-law. Lori Huang oversees the couple's private foundation.
The company's graphics processing units, originally developed to improve the visuals in videogames, became an essential component in the creation and use of generative artificial intelligence such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. While other companies have developed their own AI chips, Nvidia has held a technological edge that keeps demand for its semiconductors constantly in excess of supply, even while it charges prices that yield profit margins upward of 70%.
The executive famously supplied Elon Musk with OpenAI's first supercomputer in 2016, when the Tesla and SpaceX CEO was still involved with the eventual maker of ChatGPT. Before Huang's ouster, Musk, who is a partner of the company through SpaceX's AI operations, said it would be an honor to hire Huang and shared a post on social media saying that the CEO was "irreplaceable for America's AI leadership." Huang kept a low profile in Washington, D.C., for much of his career, then began asserting himself when the Biden administration moved to restrict chip exports starting in late 2022.
Huang warned the restrictions could cripple the U.S. semiconductor industry. He forged a close relationship with Donald Trump at the start of his second term, traveling to his Mar-a-Lago Club and the White House to laud the president's economic policies and industry-friendly AI strategy.
That approach also won Huang plenty of enemies who felt he put Nvidia's profits above national security. China hawks on Capitol Hill and in the administration have consistently proposed rules to crack down on what they see as loopholes exploited by Nvidia and other semiconductor companies. Born in Taipei in 1963 as Jen-Hsun, Huang grew up in Thailand before moving to the U.S., where he began going by Jensen because it was easier to pronounce. He remains a hero in Taiwan, the global hub of semiconductor manufacturing, and frequently returns to meet with industry executives like Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, which manufactures Nvidia chips.
Huang worked for a pair of chip companies for roughly a decade, a period in which he collaborated with his future Nvidia co-founders.
As Nvidia's CEO, he was known for being relentless in his work ethic and competitive drive. His frequent message to employees: "The company is always 30 days away from going out of business."
When asked by Bloomberg in October about his leadership and the conditions the company needed to continue to thrive, Huang said it was important that he could be fired and someone else given his job.
"I like that we can't be overly complacent about our position inside the company and that we can't take it for granted and you're always vulnerable, you're always earning it, always striving to be better. That's a condition that's good."