Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff leaves and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends during the 2026 Dreamforce conference held in San Francisco, California, USA on Tuesday, September 15, 2026.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Michael Dell described Jensen Huang as “a visionary in the age of AI.” deutsche telekom CEO Tim Höttges said: Nvidia The CEO got more media coverage for his company than the iPhone launch. During his annual Dreamforce conference keynote address, sales force “Jensen, we’re all after you,” Marc Benioff said as the two walked through the audience.
His fame extended beyond technology. In May, Jensen Huang traveled to China on Air Force One with President Donald Trump and met with President Xi Jinping. Three months later, Jensen Huang brought together six of Nasdaq’s biggest names to announce his proposed $500 billion artificial intelligence augmentation plan on CNBC, solidifying his central role at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
When Nvidia became the first company to surpass a $5 trillion market capitalization, bending the laws of physics with advanced graphics processing units and pushing the AI boom to infinite limits, Jensen Huang, now 63, donned a black leather jacket and traveled the world as the face of the brand powering the next industrial revolution.
Last week, everything came crashing down. Jensen Huang is threatening to plunge the company he co-founded 33 years ago into crisis and throw the AI market into turmoil following reports of an affair with a suspected Chinese spy and two affairs with employees. The board is now left to choose a successor for the company, which has been run by a unique individual without a second-in-command. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress has been appointed interim CEO. Harvey Jones was appointed chairman.
Nvidia did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“How a company responds to a crisis will determine its future,” John Chambers, a former Cisco CEO and current startup investor, told CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Wednesday. “How they handle this will determine whether they are a great company and a great leadership team that goes beyond one person.”
Even before the Jensen Huang scandal prompted the company’s board to launch an investigation into the CEO’s actions and potential national security implications, things had been tumultuous for Nvidia. Stock prices have been on a decline for six consecutive weeks, the longest losing streak since 2012. That includes a 9% drop last week after the midterm elections gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress and passed dozens of bills that could slow the construction of new data centers.
Nvidia is scheduled to report quarterly results on Tuesday, but expectations remain high, with analysts expecting revenue to rise 92% year-over-year to $109.2 billion, according to LSEG. This is an 18x increase compared to the same quarter in 2022, just before OpenAI announced ChatGPT and began the generative AI era.
This is a historic level of growth for any business, and especially noteworthy for a company that spent most of its first decades as a niche technology provider for video games.
Jensen Huang founded Nvidia to make chips for computer graphics, both for video games and rendering. In the early 2000s, he and other executives saw an opportunity to leverage GPUs for compute-intensive projects. This technology ultimately made Nvidia the most important player in the AI field and a key asset for the United States in national defense.
GPU allocation
In the process, Jensen Huang was the final decision maker, choosing how and when to allocate GPUs. The biggest buyers were hyperscalers – Amazon, google, meta and microsoft — We needed a chip to build our own AI services and make them available to our cloud customers. OpenAIMeanwhile, the company was sourcing GPUs for powerful models and consumer apps.
To expand its customer base, Jensen Huang designated computing power to a number of so-called neoclouds, including: coreweave and Neviusinject capital into companies and help them build large-scale businesses around GPU rentals.
Oracle gobbled up billions of dollars worth of GPUs, racking up massive debt in the process. Elon Musk’s xAI, now space xdid the same to build the Grok model before finally starting to rent out excess capacity. human And Google.
Jensen Huang wanted to make Nvidia a global standard. Last year, he asked Oracle to buy additional Nvidia networking hardware if it wanted to allocate it to cutting-edge Grace Blackwell chips, said two people familiar with the deal, who requested anonymity because the negotiations are private.
Nvidia announced in August that it would provide up to $105 billion in financing for its OpenAI data center in Ohio, which could be the largest data center of its kind in the world.
“He created a product that started an industry,” neocloud CEO Chris Miglino said. ax computing. “Without his leadership, we might have been years behind where we are today with AI chip technology, the driving force behind the neocloud market.”
When it comes to investing cash in fledgling startups, Jensen Huang is known for hosting entrepreneurs at Nvidia’s Silicon Valley headquarters. There may be 30 Nvidia employees in the room for the pitch meeting, but Jensen Huang is the only one to ask questions, said the people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
A source told CNBC that key aspects of project financing are so dependent on Jensen Huang’s approval that when he travels, those involved in the deal must wait for his plane to land before knowing whether negotiations can proceed or if terms need to be renegotiated.
Jensen Huang’s ambitions extended far beyond the U.S. He wanted to make a difference in China, which had become a difficult market for Nvidia under the Biden administration and was effectively off-limits after President Trump instituted tough export controls in his second term. Jensen Huang’s aggressive pursuit of China may have been his undoing.
Alice Huang, who had a romantic relationship with Nvidia’s CEO, was identified by U.S. intelligence as having been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to gather information about Jensen Huang, according to people briefed on the intelligence agency cited by The New York Times. She has business ties to Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based cloud computing company and Nvidia customer facing intense scrutiny for allegedly facilitating billions of dollars in exports of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
US lawmakers are up in arms, demanding not only Jensen Huang’s resignation but also a number of tougher investigations. Senate Banking Committee member Kevin Cramer, D-Del., expressed concern Wednesday.
“At the end of the day, what bothers me is that we don’t know what she knows about him that she can use to her advantage,” Kramer told CNBC shortly before Jensen Huang resigned, addressing the matter. “This person is now very vulnerable to blackmail and extortion. As a matter of national security, I don’t think we can take that risk.”
“Please leave the lights on.”
But industry experts are quick to emphasize how important Jensen Huang has been to the health and growth of the broader AI ecosystem. As he sought to expand his roster of financial backers and turn GPUs into what he called “investable assets,” he had some of Wall Street’s biggest names on speed dial, and had personal relationships with all the major figures in AI, like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.
On the deal-making side, Jensen Huang’s top lieutenants were Finance Director Kress and Corporate Development Director Vishal Bhagwati, the sources said, adding that all important decisions were made by the CEO. And the person behind Jensen Huang as he sought a financial backstop was Nico Caprez, the CEO’s son-in-law and the company’s vice president of global AI infrastructure growth, three people said.
Numerous Nvidia customers, partners and executives from portfolio companies told CNBC that Jensen Huang frequently emailed and called the CEO to offer support during difficult times.
Thomas Puig, founder and CEO of enterprise AI startup Alembic, said that after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in 2023, his company “was running out of cash for several weeks, and Nvidia was our biggest customer.”
“I emailed Jensen and they prepaid two years’ worth of bills so we could keep the lights on and people could keep their jobs,” Puig told CNBC.
That approach continued this week. Jensen Huang sent an email to the CEO of AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI on Monday, a day after publicly apologizing for his infidelity to his wife, according to people familiar with the matter. Fireworks, which Nvidia first backed in 2024, was dealing with a series of high-profile cyberattacks.
Jensen Huang, whose name suddenly became headline news for all the wrong reasons, was checking in just to see if he could help, the source said.
—CNBC’s Lora Kolodny, Jordan Novet and Seema Mody contributed to this report.
In focus: Nvidia’s Asian partners and deal ramifications
