Jensen Resigns Over Second Affair
Nvidia CEO’s second affair scandal in a week prompted his resignation, and the board is now searching for a new leader for the company.
A lot can change in a week. Just days after admitting to an extramarital affair with a Chinese intelligence asset, Jensen Huang has resigned as Nvidia CEO after The New York Times exposed a second affair with a senior Nvidia staff member.
As late as Wednesday evening, it looked like Jensen was going to ride out the scandal over his affair with the executive revealed to be a Chinese spy. But the emergence of a second affair, this time with one of Huang’s direct reports within Nvidia, was another huge blow. It was the coincident timing of these two separate scandals that really made Huang’s position untenable; he might have survived either one had they presented separately (then-Intel CEO Brian Krzanich resigned in 2018 over a similar offense, but he didn’t have Jensen’s history with the company, nor his star power).
The personal and professional reputation of the industry’s most famous CEO is now indelibly stained.
Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 and has been the CEO since day 1. In those 33 years, Nvidia has become the biggest tech company in the world, today worth around $4 trillion, largely due to the AI revolution. Nvidia GPUs became the de facto standard for machine intelligence and have driven almost all significant breakthroughs in AI in the last 10 years. During that time, Jensen managed Nvidia with a famously small team of around 42,000 (Intel has double that) in a unique style. The company executed ruthlessly and relentlessly under his leadership to become one of the most important companies in the U.S. economy today.
For his tenure to end like this is ridiculous; too far-fetched even for an episode of the HBO series Silicon Valley.
Jensen’s personal brand—the rockstar tech guru and charismatic business genius at the helm of the world’s biggest semiconductor company—is so irrevocably linked with Nvidia’s brand that it is going to be incredibly hard to separate them. But that is what must be done, and then, a new CEO must be found. For a company that has only ever had one CEO and with no obvious internal successor, that is going to be an enormous task. Nvidia’s board said it is considering internal and external candidates.
Even in the last few years, Jensen personally has had a huge impact on the industry with his bombastic stage presence and outspoken support for causes such as open-source models. He’s also given us so many iconic moments, from unveiling the A100 from the oven in his kitchen to introducing “Jensen math” and “the more you buy, the more you save.”
His departure has certainly left a big leather jacket to fill.
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RELATED TOPICS: AI MODELS, GPUS, OPEN SOURCE, SEMICONDUCTORS
COMPANIES: NVIDIA
Sally Ward-Foxton covers AI for EETimes.com and EETimes Europe magazine. Sally has spent the last 18 years writing about the electronics industry from London. She has written for Electronic Design, ECN, Electronic Specifier: Design, Components in Electronics, and many more news publications. She holds a Masters' degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Cambridge. Follow Sally on LinkedIn
Source: EE Times
