Jensen Huang may be ousted as the CEO of Nvidia after the tech giant lost more than $۶۰۰bn in market value this week, following reports that he had extramarital affairs with two women, including a businesswoman accused of spying for China.
Nvidia’s board of directors met late on Wednesday to decide whether to remove Huang, who cofounded the $۴.۲ trillion company, which supplies most of the chips used for advanced artificial intelligence (AI).
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Huang, ۶۳, admitted on Sunday in a memo to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife, following the reports of a relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed whom United States officials suspect of working for Chinese intelligence, a claim China has denied.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Huang had another extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reports to him. The newspaper cited five people who worked at the company.
Nvidia’s shares fell more than ۸ percent in after-hours trading on Wednesday after The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to oust Huang.
Here’s what you need to know:
Can Nvidia’s board remove Huang?
Yes.
Under Nvidia’s bylaws, Huang can be removed “with or without cause” by a majority vote of directors.
The board has ۱۱ members, and all but Huang are considered independent.
Huang owns about ۳.۶ percent of the company, according to LSEG data, and has no majority voting control. That sets Nvidia apart from other tech giants.
Huang does not have majority voting control, unlike executives at other companies in the sector, such as Meta and SpaceX.
Nvidia also has no board chair, which Steve Okun, a Singapore-based geopolitical analyst, called “pretty astounding”.
“But what this certainly shows is the utter lack of appropriate governance at Nvidia,” Okun told Al Jazeera. “This should never have been allowed to happen.”
What is Nvidia doing?
On Sunday, the board launched an independent investigation into whether Huang had been “the target of a foreign intelligence effort”, while saying it had “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team”.
Bloomberg reported that the board had been working with an outside firm to identify possible replacements.
Huang has never named a successor, but the Reuters news agency reported that analysts see two likely internal candidates: Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress and engineer Ian Buck.
Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at the technology research group Omdia, described Buck as “a highly regarded industry veteran”, but said: “This remains a speculation until the final decision”.
What would his departure mean for Nvidia?
Huang cofounded Nvidia in ۱۹۹۳ and has led it ever since, turning a maker of graphics chips for video games into the world’s leading supplier of processors that power AI.
Nvidia controls an estimated ۸۰ to ۹۰ percent of the market for the chips used to run advanced AI, and is the world’s second-most valuable company after Apple.
“Jensen is no doubt the de facto leader of Nvidia,” Su told Al Jazeera, pointing to his “willingness to make early bets, identify major technological shifts, and steer the company in the right direction”.
Su said the impact on short-term continuity would be minimal, but a new leader could change the company’s long-term direction, “as a different CEO may have a different view of the future”.
Investors are bracing for that outcome.
“The market is starting to price Nvidia without its founder as the likely outcome, not a tail risk,” Armina Rosenberg, cofounder of Minotaur Capital, which holds Nvidia shares, told Reuters.
For Okun, the question is whether Huang is bigger than Nvidia, or whether the company has become so unique in what it makes that it no longer needs him.
“That’s the question everybody’s going to try and figure out from a business perspective,” he said.
What trouble is Huang facing?
The alleged spy link “spices up the story quite a bit”, Okun said, adding that even without it, Nvidia faced “an extraordinarily damaging question”: Why Megaspeed received so many of its chips, and where they went.
Megaspeed bought about $۴.۸bn worth of equipment from Nvidia, according to The New York Times.
US authorities have been investigating the company since ۲۰۲۴ over suspicions that it helped China obtain advanced Nvidia chips in breach of export controls, an allegation Megaspeed denies.
But Carsten Holz, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told Al Jazeera that the likelihood that Huang “could pass on significant technical information to another person, whether a spy or not, would seem extremely low”.
On Monday, US President Donald Trump said the FBI was looking into the matter, adding that Huang had told him he had “absolutely no idea” the woman was an alleged spy.
Three Republican House committee chairs have asked Huang to attend a closed-door briefing on November ۱۸. He faces a possible subpoena if he does not respond, Reuters reported.
Okun said Huang “certainly has to take a leave of absence”.
It is also unclear whether Huang will join Trump at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in the Chinese city of Shenzhen on November ۱۸-۱۹.
He travelled with Trump to Beijing in May, but his participation is now in doubt, the South China Morning Post reported. During the May trip, an agreement was signed to allow Nvidia to sell its H۲۰۰ AI chips to several approved Chinese companies.
Asked on Sunday whether Huang would take part in the summit, Trump said: “I don’t know, but I’d certainly take him.”
Huang had lobbied Trump to lift some of the restrictions on chip exports to China imposed by President Joe Biden. Beijing is one of the biggest buyers of Nvidia chips in the world.
