The Rise and Fall of Jensen Huang
· The Atlantic
Updated at 9:05 a.m. ET on November 12, 2026
Visit syntagm.co.za for more information.
Most of the major executives in the AI boom have weathered vicious attacks and major controversies in recent years, but one has stood out as bulletproof: Jensen Huang, the CEO of the global microprocessor giant Nvidia. That changed yesterday when, following revelations that Huang had at least two extramarital affairs, reports emerged that the company’s board was meeting to decide whether to remove him. Then, this morning, Huang resigned.
Up until that moment, Nvidia, and by extension Huang, had felt like a stabilizing force in AI. Even if Anthropic and OpenAI faltered, Nvidia raked in profits: By some estimates, it has provided 90 percent of the advanced chips used in the AI industry. Elon Musk and Sam Altman may seem erratic or disingenuous, but Huang came off as steadfast and discerning. Dario Amodei’s messianism has led to tussles with the White House, but Huang and Donald Trump were chummy. Just last month, Nvidia’s valuation hit a sky-high $5.7 trillion—rivaled only by its own previous peak, from May. Huang was the AI boom’s king, and his kingdom was wealthy and, above all, secure.
[Read: Jensen Huang is too big to fail]
Then came news of Huang’s infidelity—including a liaison with an alleged Chinese spy—which ultimately led to Huang’s ouster. What happens next is uncertain: While Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, will serve as the interim CEO, Huang has run the company since 1993, when he co-founded the firm, and he has no clear successor. Nvidia’s stock tumbled on the news, and the future of the company is in question. Silicon Valley, and perhaps the global economy, may be in jeopardy as well.
It’s worth underscoring just how entrenched Nvidia is in the broader AI ecosystem. In addition to delivering the best chips in the business—there’s no ChatGPT or Claude without them—the company’s huge profits fuel an industry flywheel: The firm has guaranteed tens of billions of dollars to fledgling AI firms and data centers that, in turn, buy or rent Nvidia chips. These investments fuel the U.S. economy as a whole. One analysis found that just eight AI companies account for half of the gains in the S&P 500 since the launch of ChatGPT, in 2022. As much as a third of U.S. GDP growth this year is being driven by AI-related investments. None of that would have been possible without Nvidia.
Within Silicon Valley, Huang has been heralded as almost clairvoyant. In its first decade, Nvidia was dedicated solely to making microprocessors for gaming consoles—a still-nascent but growing sector. Then, in 2006, the company debuted a way to adapt its chips for machine learning. Instead of being celebrated, Huang was derided. Nvidia’s stock crashed within a couple of years, and muddled along as the AI industry began to take shape. Nvidia’s impressive rise reinvented Huang’s identity within Silicon Valley as an era-defining leader. His company seemed to run like a well-oiled machine. “You want to refine the character of your company,” Huang said at a Stanford summit in 2024, and “greatness comes from character.” His strongest character trait seemed to be his unshakable confidence: “You’re not talking to somebody who woke up a loser. That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me,” he rebutted earlier this year, when asked about the threat of Chinese chipmakers catching up to Nvidia. When Silicon Valley seemed to lose its wits over AI models running rampant this past summer, Huang appeared nonplussed and offered to “send engineers in” to fix the problem.
Lori Huang, his wife of 40-plus years, was also part of his narrative: “To build a company, you need somebody strong and you need somebody amazing like my wife,” Jensen said on a podcast earlier this year. “And she took care of everything.” She even helped introduce him to his trademark leather jacket. This was a man who purported to be so busy and single-mindedly focused on his company that he bragged about not knowing his phone number or home address.
Despite a packed schedule, it appears he had enough time to have at least two affairs. On Sunday, he admitted to being romantically involved with Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman who, until recently, headed up Megaspeed, a Singaporean data-center company. Megaspeed has bought billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips and is suspected of smuggling Nvidia technology to China, contravening U.S. export controls. She is also reportedly suspected by U.S. intelligence agents of being a spy. (China has denied this.) Up until Jensen Huang’s mea culpa, Nvidia had denied anything unethical or untoward in the CEO’s relationship with Alice Huang; a spokesperson insisted that “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected.”
Not unusual, indeed. The second affair, with Nvidia’s vice president of health care, was reported in The New York Times last night. Is the most powerful AI executive in the world hiding other secrets? Apparently Nvidia’s board of directors doesn’t want to risk finding out. (Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
In retrospect, all of the signs of slippery business practices and personal hubris were there. By the middle of 2025, Singapore-based customers—by then under considerable scrutiny as possible middlemen for China—accounted for one-fifth of Nvidia’s revenues. After news broke that the U.S. government had launched an investigation into Megaspeed for smuggling chips to China, Nvidia appeared to change to an accounting methodology that did not show any revenue from Singaporean customers. The Times has reported that Nvidia’s top lawyer tried to intervene in the investigation, which had started in 2024. (Nvidia told the Times that the company works with the government to stop smuggling.) All the while, Huang has been lobbying heavily to lift export controls to China. This spring, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly warned Donald Trump about Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy while the two were on an Air Force One flight en route to Beijing. Trump apparently did not take action on the matter. This week, the president said that he thinks Huang is “a very honorable guy, and I feel very confident that he’ll be in good shape.”
Following the recent allegations, the tech industry closed ranks around their king, arguing Huang had made a mistake but was too valuable to really hold to account. Musk and a cadre of venture capitalists (along with Trump) all said that, essentially, Huang was “too big to fail,” as my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote. Perhaps Nvidia is still too big to fail, but Huang isn’t. His departure proves that the laws of physics still apply, no matter how wealthy or powerful you may be: There are consequences to reckless behavior. You can claim greatness one day, and still wake up a loser the next.
In the end, Huang and the Nvidia board were still heeding the former CEO’s own advice, dispensed in a talk in 2003: “Corporate culture in our case is about intellectual honesty. Intellectual honesty to us means that we have the ability to be self-critical, that we have the ability to recognize we’ve made mistakes.”