On Sunday, Nvidia told reporters, “Jensen is committed to continuing to lead Nvidia as CEO without interruption.” By Thursday, he was gone. Nvidia's board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation as president, chief executive and director on Wednesday, effective immediately, and announced it the next morning. Chief financial officer Colette Kress took over as interim CEO.
Now the man who wrote the book on Huang is asking what he missed.
In a New York Times Opinion essay titled “The Fall of the A.I. King,” Stephen Witt revisits the years he spent with Huang for his 2025 biography, The Thinking Machine.
The title referred to the chips that powered artificial intelligence and to the restless mind of the man who built Nvidia. After this week, Witt jokes, he might need a sequel. He already has a title: “The What-Were-You-Thinking?! Machine.”
The $1,000 Tip at Denny's
At breakfast one day, Huang left their waitress $1,000 in hundred-dollar bills. He made so little of it that Witt had to track her down to find out what he'd done.
When Witt first met Huang in 2023, he writes in the Times, the Nvidia chief was quick to credit his employees for the company's success. Huang liked small restaurants, tipped lavishly and often mentioned that he had once washed dishes. Over time, Witt came to see the humility as a performance aimed at the one person who most wanted to believe it: Huang himself.
“In truth, Mr. Huang was quite arrogant. He had little tolerance for disagreement and almost no capacity for open discourse. When you contradicted him, even over the most trivial matter, it was like lighting a fuse.”
If you held your ground, Witt writes, Huang could scream at you for an hour or more. Executives seemed genuinely afraid of him. Listening to their stories, Witt thought of the abusive music instructor in Whiplash. He remembers people laughing too eagerly when Huang was in the room, then muttering once he left.
What People Inside Nvidia Told Witt
Witt says he began hearing rumours about Huang's infidelity earlier this year and couldn't confirm them. In the Times essay, he describes a culture of omertà inside Nvidia. A former employee later told him that Huang's alleged affair with Kimberly Powell, the company's vice-president of health care and one of his direct reports, was common knowledge.
In separate reporting on November 11, The New York Times said Huang and Powell had an extramarital relationship, citing people who spoke anonymously. When the newspaper reached Huang by phone and asked about Powell, he replied, “I don't think you should be talking to me directly.” Then he hung up.
Both of Huang's children, Madison and Spencer, hold executive roles at Nvidia. Witt asked the former employee why Huang would take that risk at the company where his children worked. The former employee's theory, as Witt recounts it, was that the risk itself gave Huang a thrill. Witt writes that he wouldn't be surprised if more women came forward.
Alice Huang and the $7 Billion Chip Trail
The allegations involving Alice Huang took the story outside Nvidia and into a fight over which American chips China could get its hands on.
Alice Huang, who is unrelated to Jensen Huang, was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company with data centres in Southeast Asia. The Information reported that more than $7 billion in Nvidia chip sales to Chinese customers flowed through the network it examined. Its reporting described two routes: customers renting computing power from servers in Southeast Asia and equipment being shipped into China. Megaspeed denied illegally diverting chips to China.
The New York Times reported that US authorities had concluded Alice Huang was a Chinese intelligence asset. China denied the allegation, which Reuters said it could not independently verify. Jensen Huang acknowledged in a message to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife and denied that his conduct had national security implications. Nvidia's board opened an independent investigation and said it had no reason at the time to believe national security or company secrets had been compromised.
Witt goes further in his essay. Given the intelligence reportedly gathered about the relationship, he argues, it is hard to believe Jensen Huang didn't understand what was going on. Witt also sees a political fight behind Huang's downfall. He writes that Huang gained Donald Trump's trust through flattery, then alienated China hawks by persuading the president to ease restrictions on chip sales. Witt says Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the memo that exposed Huang. That account of Rubio's role remains independently unverified.
The Lab Partner Who Waited Six Months
Huang was 17 when he met Lori in an electrical engineering class. They were lab partners, Witt writes, and Huang was so shy it took him six months to ask her out. She was his first girlfriend. They married in their early 20s, and she left the workforce to raise their children while he pursued his plan to start a company.
When Witt was reporting his biography, he asked some of the couple's oldest friends about their marriage. These were people who knew them before the money and the fame. He sounded them out about infidelity, friction or any private arrangement. What he heard back was that theirs was the kind of marriage other people wanted.
Witt says Huang's affection for his family seemed genuine. He travelled with them, encouraged both children to join Nvidia and, only weeks earlier, walked Madison down the aisle at her wedding in Hawaii. She married Nico Caprez, another Nvidia executive. Those details sit alongside Witt's blunt judgment of what Huang did to Lori.
In the Times, Witt also considers what a divorce could mean for the couple's fortune. He writes that hundreds of millions of Nvidia shares they jointly own are held in family trusts, and that Lori could become one of the richest women in America if they split. He doubts they signed a prenuptial agreement when they married in the mid-1980s, when neither had much. Their private arrangements are unknown. The divorce scenario is Witt's speculation.
The Company That Has to Replace Him
Witt recalls hearing Huang make an impassioned case for gender parity on Nvidia's campus in 2023. This was a company that, in its early years, had few women on staff and used a scantily clad computer-generated pixie named Dawn as a mascot. Men still accounted for about 80% of employees, Witt writes. After the reporting about Powell, he found himself reconsidering that speech, too.
Nvidia now has to find a permanent successor. The board says it will consider candidates inside and outside the company. Kress will keep her finance job while serving as interim CEO, and she faces investors on November 17 at Nvidia's first earnings call since Huang stepped down. Reuters reported that she was one of the few executives willing to push back when Huang wanted to make some of his biggest bets.
Witt doubts a finance executive is the long-term answer. In his telling, the job calls for someone who can understand the engineering, close a deal with a powerful customer and get on the phone to Taiwan when the chips are late. He compares Nvidia without Huang to the Chicago Bulls without Michael Jordan.
Essential Business Intelligence, Sharp Market Insights, Practical Personal Finance Advice, Daily Fuel, Gold and Silver Prices and Latest Stories — On NDTV Profit.