The Fall of Jensen Huang: What It Means for Nvidia, the AI Race, and the Tech World

For 33 years, saying Nvidia meant saying Jensen Huang. He co-founded it in 1993, at age 30, and never stopped running it since. This Thursday, the board announced his resignation, which he had accepted on Wednesday, putting an end to one of the fastest falls remembered in Silicon Valley. From the moment it came to light, the sequence took less than a week. On Sunday, Huang acknowledged in a memo to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife, Lori, and the board opened an independent investigation. The woman in question is Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed who, according to US officials, would have been recruited by Chinese security services to gather information on Huang. China rejects the accusation, and Attorney General Todd Blanche said this Thursday that the Department of Justice has not determined that she is a spy. On Wednesday, The New York Times added another precedent: according to five people who worked at the company, Huang also had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare and his subordinate. Neither Huang nor Powell has confirmed it. Nvidia's statement thanks its founder for his "immeasurable contributions." It contains no statement from Huang. Hours after the announcement, Reuters reported, citing two sources, that Huang also had an intimate relationship with a second employee, whom it did not identify. Nvidia made no comments. A company tailor-made for its founder The fall of Jensen Huang: what it means for Nvidia, the AI race, and the tech world Technology / La Tercera The first thing the industry asks is how Nvidia works without Huang. The question makes sense. The executive had around 60 direct reports, said traditional org charts made no sense to him, and ran the company through project-based meetings, where everyone from recent graduates to senior executives sat together. In January, Bloomberg was already warning that Nvidia had no clear successor to its star CEO (famous, among other things, for his leather jackets). Kress, at Nvidia since 2013, is the most recognizable face of the executive team after Huang. She appears alongside him at every earnings presentation. But, as Axios points out, analysts do not necessarily see her as the natural heir to a founder who had become the visionary of the AI era, because her entire career has been in finance. At the same time, the board named Harvey C. Jones, former CEO of Synopsys, as the first chairman of the board in the company's history. There is also a corporate governance fact. Huang is Nvidia's largest individual shareholder, with nearly 3.6%, but he did not hold special voting shares, as Mark Zuckerberg does at Meta. That difference helps explain how quickly the board acted. The other risk is talent flight. Nvidia is full of executives loyal to Huang, many of them millionaires thanks to a company that in 2022 was worth less than $300 billion and this year came close to $6 trillion. The Asian network that depended on one man But there is more. During decades of trips to Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and China, Huang built a network of suppliers that depended on his personal relationships with executives who are major figures in their own countries. According to The New York Times, it is unclear who could fill that role with the same authority. The exception is TSMC. Its manufacturing capacity is so contested that, according to supply chain sources cited by the Taiwanese newspaper Commercial Times, if Nvidia reduces its orders, that space could be taken by AMD and custom chip designers, such as Broadcom and MediaTek. A window for Google, AMD, and Amazon The fall of Jensen Huang: what it means for Nvidia, the AI race, and the tech world Technology / La Tercera The competition is already watching. Google and Amazon have been investing in their own AI chips for years, as a cheaper alternative to Nvidia's products, and several analysts believe that prolonged instability at the company opens up space for them. Both are, at the same time, major Nvidia customers. Google has its own chips, the TPUs, and Anthropic committed last year to using up to one million of them. The market took notice this Thursday: Alphabet rose nearly 3% while Nvidia fell. For analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, of TF International Securities, the TPUs are probably the biggest beneficiaries, because uncertainty at Nvidia could lead customers and suppliers to rely more on alternatives. Wedbush, on the other hand, doubts Google will ever become a primary supplier, because its chip business competes with many of its own customers. AMD appears as the other candidate. Wedbush considers it the clearest beneficiary of a possible prolonged disruption at Nvidia, thanks to its Instinct platform, and its Helios system already operates at Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle. But Daniel Newman, of Futurum Group, warns that AMD cannot scale up its production overnight, even if customers want to switch. Nvidia still holds a big advantage: it still sells far more AI chips than any of its competitors. And Kuo estimates the succession would not affect its product development before 2028. The first test will come on November 17, when it reports earnings with Kress at the helm. On the stock market, the blow was less severe than it seemed at the start of the session. This Thursday, Nvidia's stock fell nearly 14% at the opening, but cut its losses during the day and closed down 4.3%, at $166.19. Its market capitalization hovered around $4 trillion for most of the session and ended just above that figure, far from the record in early October, when it approached $6 trillion. In contrast, AMD rose 5.9% and Broadcom 5.5%. Something similar had happened on Monday, the first session after the board's investigation was announced: Nvidia closed down 4.3%, while AMD rose 13% and Broadcom 9%. The shakeup was also felt in companies that depend on Nvidia. Nvidia's stock weighs about 7% of the S&P 500, and the so-called "neoclouds," cloud computing firms that depend on its chips, also fell this Thursday. CoreWeave, backed by Nvidia, lost nearly 12% at one point and closed down 6.9%; IREN fell 8%, and Nebius, 17%, though in its case a weaker-than-expected annual forecast, published the same day, also weighed. For them, which built their business on the availability of Nvidia GPUs, the question is whether an Nvidia without Huang will maintain the same pace of deliveries and the same agreements. According to Goldman Sachs, the five largest US cloud providers could spend about $1.2 trillion on AI infrastructure in 2027, and the country's AI investment would rise from 1.8% of GDP in 2026 to 2.5% in 2027. A good part of that money will go to data centers full of Nvidia chips, or indirectly financed by the company. China, the most delicate front The fall of Jensen Huang: what it means for Nvidia, the AI race, and the tech world Technology / La Tercera It seems the most lasting effect will be in Washington. Huang was one of the industry's most influential voices in favor of selling chips to China. He was key to Trump authorizing the export of the H200 in December 2025, an older but still very powerful model. According to the New York Times, two of the roughly two dozen Chinese companies that the Department of Commerce approved to buy or handle that chip have empty offices at their registered addresses, and the owners of one of them are linked to Wise Road, a Chinese fund included on the US trade blacklist. At the center of the case is Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center firm where Alice Huang was an executive, which bought Nvidia chips and is under investigation by Singapore police. The US Department of Commerce also investigated it for possible chip diversion, but, according to the NYT, that investigation was halted last year. In November 2025, weeks after the NYT reported the Commerce Department's investigation into Megaspeed, Nvidia began reporting its revenue by customer headquarters rather than billing location, a change that redistributed the figures by region, especially those of Singapore. That change was made with Kress as CFO. Another name like him The fall of Jensen Huang: what it means for Nvidia, the AI race, and the tech world Until the last day, several investors maintained that the United States could not win the AI race without Jensen Huang. Trump defended him during the week. This Thursday, on Truth Social, he praised his "fantastic work" and proposed Tim Cook, currently executive chairman of Apple, as a replacement. Before the resignation, Elon Musk had replied "it would be an honor" to an X user who asked him to hire Huang, without saying for what position. Huang had already spoken about the subject. At the beginning of the year, on Jodi Shelton's podcast, he said there would never be another CEO like him, because the company had raised him. And in an interview with Emily Chang of Bloomberg, recorded in October and released this week, he said he hoped his successor was already at the company. In practice, Nvidia's board took less than a week to demonstrate that Huang, too, could be removed. The idea that there will never be another like him remains to be seen.