Allegations involving personal conduct, corporate governance and possible national security concerns have placed Jensen Huang under unprecedented scrutiny. NVIDIA now faces a defining test: can an institution built around one extraordinary individual survive without him?
By the time I started writing, a series of major decisions concerning a landmark company was already underway, decisions that could change the direction of the technology industry. Jensen Huang, the founding chief executive of NVIDIA, the man who helped turn graphics processors into the indispensable machinery of the artificial intelligence revolution, could be approaching the end of his 33-year reign. The unfolding boardroom drama is entirely different from the confrontation Sam Altman faced at OpenAI in 2023.
Jensen Huang was being received in Asia. The phenomenon had acquired its own name, Jensanity, a combination of his first name and the word insanity. Stephen Witt's The Thinking Machine describes a leader whose authority inside NVIDIA had acquired an almost religious character. Witt describes the use of “struggle sessions”, alternating “sweet talk and abuse”, as methods through which Huang could bend the organisation to his will.
Witt's portrait is not an uncomplicated celebration of a technological genius. He describes a man who can be charming, funny, unpredictable and contradictory, whose conversations move rapidly between ideas and whose opinions sometimes appear to change as he speaks. When a particular concept captures Huang's imagination, however, it becomes a recurring phrase within NVIDIA, repeated until it enters the company's vocabulary. Witt notes how expressions such as “zero-billion-dollar market” and “speed of light” became almost institutional doctrines. Even Huang's appearance was carefully associated with his identity. The black leather jacket, Witt suggests, helped him occupy the vacant ceremonial position of the “Visionary Tech Executive with a Signature Outfit” after Steve Jobs's death. This transformation from engineer and entrepreneur into a recognisable cultural figure was commercially useful, but it also made NVIDIA unusually dependent on the mythology of one individual. The present crisis exposes the inherent danger of that arrangement. When a corporation builds so much of its identity around one man, his personal failures can become an institutional crisis.
Huang's rise was hardly inevitable. NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, after discussions that famously began at a Denny's restaurant in San Jose. Huang made the decision to abandon much of the existing strategy and concentrate the company's remaining resources on the RIVA 128. A decade later, he made another decision that initially attracted scepticism, introducing CUDA in 2006 and committing NVIDIA to general-purpose GPU computing. The arrival of AlexNet in 2012, trained using NVIDIA GPUs, demonstrated the significance of this direction. He anticipated that computing itself was changing.
“I was unfaithful to my wife,” he wrote to employees, adding, “There is no excuse for what I did.” He accepted responsibility for the damage caused to his family and acknowledged that he had fallen short of his obligations to colleagues, directors, partners and shareholders.
He did not admit to espionage, the transfer of confidential information or knowingly facilitating illegal technology shipments. Nor does the admission of infidelity establish that the woman at the centre of the separate allegations was a Chinese intelligence operative. Nevertheless, the combination of the reported relationship with a Singapore-based executive accused of links to Chinese intelligence and a second reported relationship with an NVIDIA executive who allegedly reported to Huang has transformed what might otherwise have remained a private scandal into a major governance crisis.
In November 2023, OpenAI's board abruptly removed Altman, citing concerns that he had not been consistently candid in his communications with directors. Huang faces a different test. His predicament involves allegations concerning personal conduct, a subordinate relationship and possible foreign-intelligence exposure. He cannot assume that the same employee mobilisation or investor pressure that rescued Altman will protect him. NVIDIA's institutional structure, its shareholders and its board are not OpenAI's, and the allegations must be assessed on their own evidence. A founder may command immense influence, yet the board retains the authority and responsibility to govern the institution.
Huang's political relationships make the crisis still more consequential. He has cultivated a close relationship with Donald Trump and has repeatedly argued that Washington's restrictions on advanced chip exports to China are strategically misguided. In his recent Bloomberg interview, filmed before the latest allegations became public, Huang described China as “not our enemy” and called US chip policy a “mistake”. Huang has argued that engagement is preferable to technological isolation and that dialogue is essential to AI safety. He has also framed national AI development as a question of sovereignty, arguing that countries should retain control over their data, culture and institutional knowledge. Taiwan's origins as a technology giant may have shaped his outlook, and he may have been faithful to his own convictions, without any malicious intentions.
The question of who might eventually succeed Huang remains unresolved. Huang has never publicly established a clear successor, and reports have identified Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress and senior technical executive Ian Buck as possible internal candidates. Kress could provide financial continuity during an interim transition, while Buck's long association with CUDA and NVIDIA's computing architecture makes him an interesting longer-term possibility. Arm chief executive René Haas, a former NVIDIA executive, has also been mentioned. These are possibilities discussed by analysts and the media, not confirmed appointments. Huang's children, who work at NVIDIA, have also attracted speculation, although the prospect of family succession would invite questions about merit and corporate governance. Huang himself has previously insisted that his children should earn any position rather than inherit it.
There is something tragic in the contrast between the man who once worried that NVIDIA might be driven out of business and the billionaire now confronting the possibility that the company might have to move beyond him. That ambition may now be tested by the most difficult question a founder can face: whether the institution he created can survive without his personal command.
Jensanity was built on the belief that Huang could see the future before others did. The danger is that admiration for his past achievements may now become an obstacle to judging his present conduct. If Huang remains, he will have to demonstrate that the company can protect its governance and security standards while retaining its technological momentum. If he leaves, NVIDIA will have to prove that its success was built on more than the authority of one man. Either outcome will expose a larger weakness in the mythology of Silicon Valley, where founders are often celebrated as visionaries until the moment their judgement becomes a liability. The fall from grace, if it comes, will not erase Jensen Huang's contribution to computing. But it may finally end the idea that the man who helped build the machinery of the future stands beyond the ordinary rules of the present.
Even Huang's appearance was carefully associated with his identity. The black leather jacket, Witt suggests, helped him occupy the vacant ceremonial position of the “Visionary Tech Executive with a Signature Outfit” after Steve Jobs's death. This transformation from engineer and entrepreneur into a recognisable cultural figure was commercially useful, but it also made NVIDIA unusually dependent on the mythology of one individual
The writer is a columnist based in Colombo, Sri Lanka; Views presented are personal.