Jensen Huang Resigns as Nvidia CEO Amid Spy-Linked Affair Scandal

Jensen Huang resigned as CEO of Nvidia on Thursday, ending his 33-year run at the company he co-founded, after reports of multiple affairs — including one with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy. CFO Colette Kress has taken the helm as Nvidia's interim CEO, stepping into leadership of the chipmaker that has become the backbone of the AI boom at the very moment its export-control compliance record is under scrutiny.

The resignation marks one of the biggest crises in Nvidia's 33-year history, and the circumstances extend well beyond the personal conduct of its founder. The stakes are commercial and geopolitical at once, because the affair at the center of the scandal connects directly to a sprawling effort to accumulate AI chips across Southeast Asia.

Why the affair matters beyond infidelity

Huang's relationship with Alice Huang, the woman reported to have ties to Chinese intelligence, carries implications that run far deeper than infidelity, according to the reporting that precipitated his resignation. Her connections to Nvidia customer Megaspeed placed her in the middle of a regional push to accumulate AI chips across Southeast Asia.

Megaspeed is now under investigation for possibly diverting restricted Nvidia chips into the hands of Chinese companies. That detail transforms a personal scandal into a policy story. The U.S. government has imposed a series of strict export controls restricting chip sales to China, and Nvidia's hardware sits at the center of that regime. Any evidence that restricted Nvidia chips moved to Chinese buyers through Southeast Asian channels would put the company's name at the center of a U.S. export enforcement question it does not control.

The relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang dates back to 2023, according to The New York Times. That year was what Huang himself described as a "turbulent" period for the company.

What was happening at Nvidia in 2023?

The timing matters. In 2023, Nvidia was in the midst of redesigning some of its chips to comply with the first in a series of strict export controls imposed by the U.S. government restricting sales to China. The company had to re-engineer products mid-cycle to keep selling into a market the U.S. was progressively walling off.

Huang publicly projected confidence at the time. In February 2023, speaking from Nvidia's headquarters in an interview with CNBC — part of a documentary about how Huang created Nvidia and built it into the backbone of the AI boom — he addressed the new restrictions directly.

"The regulation is going to be just fine. We're going to be able to work through it," Huang told CNBC.

That quote now reads differently. The export-control regime that Huang said Nvidia would "work through" has since expanded into the series of restrictions that investigators now suspect Megaspeed of circumventing on the demand side — by allegedly diverting restricted chips to Chinese companies through Southeast Asia.

The same day as the headquarters interview, CNBC also interviewed Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare. Powell is another executive with whom Jensen Huang reportedly had an affair, according to the reports that led to his resignation. The 2023 documentary footage, originally intended to celebrate Huang's rise, now doubles as a record of two relationships that would later end his tenure.

What did Huang say about his own mistakes?

Huang was unusually candid about his fallibility in that 2023 interview. His statements then now carry the weight of retrospect.

"Every company makes mistakes and I make a lot of them," Huang said in the 2023 interview. "And some of them put the company in peril."

The line lands harder now. Nvidia has faced existential peril before. The company nearly went bankrupt in the early years after it was founded in 1993 — a brush with collapse that Huang survived and that became part of the founder mythology the CNBC documentary chronicled. That history of near-death and recovery framed Huang's public identity as a leader who steered the company through its worst moments. His exit now presents a different kind of peril: not market-driven, but self-inflicted.

How big was Nvidia's rise under Huang?

The scale of the fall is measurable against the scale of the ascent. In the early months of the AI boom — after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 — Nvidia was on the precipice of historic growth. The company's GPUs became the essential compute substrate for training and running large AI models, turning Nvidia into the backbone supplier of the entire generative AI industry.

Huang, at that moment of maximum leverage, had no intention of leaving. He told CNBC he would like to keep running the company for "three or four decades," as long as "I feel that I'm making a real contribution to the company."

Less than four years later, Jensen Huang is out. The ambition of a decades-long tenure ended at roughly the one-decade mark of that stated timeline, cut short not by boardroom performance disputes or market shifts but by personal conduct that intersected with a national-security investigation.

Who is running Nvidia now?

Colette Kress, Nvidia's CFO, has taken over as interim CEO. Kress now inherits three simultaneous fronts:

• A leadership transition at a company whose identity was inseparable from its founder for 33 years
• An ongoing federal export-control environment that restricts Nvidia's China sales
• The reputational fallout of the Megaspeed investigation, in which a Nvidia customer stands accused of diverting restricted chips to Chinese companies

The company entered this chapter with its market position as the AI boom's hardware supplier intact, but with the founder who built that position gone. Nvidia's near-bankruptcy in its early years, its reinvention through the AI era, and now Huang's abrupt exit form the arc of what CNBC has packaged as "The rise, reinvention and uncertain future of Nvidia without Jensen Huang."

For an industry that has treated Nvidia silicon as the default infrastructure of artificial intelligence, the open question is whether Kress's interim leadership can hold customer and regulator confidence while the Megaspeed probe — and whatever it reveals about how restricted chips moved through Southeast Asia — plays out.