Nvidia's Board Reportedly Preparing to Replace Jensen Huang: After the Affair With a Woman the US Considers a Chinese Spy, a Second One Surfaced - and There Is No Successor

For 33 years Jensen Huang has run Nvidia, the company whose chips power the artificial intelligence boom. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, the board is preparing to replace him. The board, according to the same sources, was due to sit down and decide his future as early as Wednesday, and Nvidia, according to Bloomberg, has already hired an outside firm to search for candidates for a new CEO.

It all started on Sunday, when the 63-year-old Huang admitted in a letter to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife, to whom he has been married for 40 years. "There is no excuse for what I did," he wrote. But the marriage is the least of the problems. US intelligence believes the woman he was involved with, Alice Huang, an executive at the Singapore company Megaspeed, is a spy for China's Ministry of State Security. The two are not related; they just share a surname.

This is where the story stops being tabloid material. Megaspeed allegedly bought 4.8 billion dollars (around 4.3 billion euros) worth of Nvidia chips over the past two years, and the US and Singapore had already investigated it on suspicion of illegally diverting them to China. The investigation is now being run by the US Justice Department. The Shanghai firm Shanghai Century Litong, founded by Alice Huang and her family, became a preferred Nvidia partner with priority access to chips and, according to The Information, brokered purchases of Nvidia chips worth 7.5 billion dollars, including banned ones.

On Wednesday came the second blow. The New York Times, citing five people who worked at Nvidia, reported that Huang had also had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company's vice president for healthcare, who reports directly to him. Neither Nvidia, nor Huang, nor Powell confirmed it. The shares fell about 8 percent in after-hours trading that same evening, and lost around 11 percent over five days.

The most awkward part is what the board doesn't have. Huang, by his own admission, delegates very little and has around 60 direct reports. There is no clear successor, and no succession plan either. In the Balkans we know this scene well: when everything is built around one man, nobody asks what comes after him - until it's too late.

Politics is pushing in from both sides. Trump said on Sunday that Huang is "a good man, but you never know what's going on" and that he should stay in charge. Three Republicans who chair House committees want Huang to appear at a closed-door hearing, and the chairman of the China committee, John Moolenaar, gave him until the end of Wednesday, saying that if he doesn't agree, he will most likely be subpoenaed. Huang has already cancelled two public appearances.

There is also a detail the board will struggle to get around. Nvidia's general counsel, according to Bloomberg, asked the US Commerce Department last year whether the administration had played a role in Alice Huang's detention. Replacing the CEO would close the personal story. The question of how much was known inside Nvidia - and since when - stays open.