Nvidia founder Jensen Huang has resigned after two further alleged intimate relationships with company employees surfaced, on top of an affair with a businesswoman described as an alleged asset of China's Ministry of State Security.
Inside the world's most valuable company, the mood flipped within days. Employees who once spoke of having green in their blood or being green-pilled spent the week processing the loss of the chief executive who led Nvidia for 33 years, kept layoffs rare and made loyalty the company's defining trait. Its roughly 60,000 staff post one of the lowest turnover rates in tech.
Many assumed the board would investigate and Huang would stay. One employee put the collapse bluntly, saying the company went from superhero cape to forgetting your pants in three days. A venture capitalist who days earlier had put the odds of Huang losing his job below 10 percent called the resignation a shock.
Silicon Valley's response has been largely defensive. Venture capitalist Antonio Gracias argued that one mistake does not erase a lifetime of leadership in building Nvidia, while Sarah Guo said a founder who spent 30 years building such a company has earned the presumption that he should keep leading it. Industry figures had long called Huang irreplaceable.
No authority has formally accused Huang of wrongdoing in his dealings with Alice Huang, and China denies she is a spy. Nvidia's board does not believe he compromised any secrets but has hired Wachtell Lipton to investigate, and the FBI is looking into the matter.
The market has been less forgiving. Nvidia shares have fallen to their lowest level in more than a year, with quarterly earnings due next week. The deeper anxiety is whether a professional successor abandons Huang's habit of funding AI startups and acquiring companies such as Hugging Face, a strategy that has quietly propped up demand for Nvidia's chips and now leaves the broader AI trade exposed.