Jensen Huang, the man whose chips made the AI boom financially possible, has resigned from NVIDIA after 33 years — leaving behind a company worth more than most countries, an interim CEO he reportedly described as 'a deer in the headlights,' and a succession situation that is, by any measure, lively.
The Wall Street Journal reported the headlights comment first. NVIDIA has not disputed it.
He built the infrastructure for machine intelligence. The human elements proved harder to manage.
What happened
Huang resigned Thursday following reports of two extramarital affairs, one of which involved Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's VP for healthcare. Reuters, apparently not done, then reported a third affair with another employee. These are, in the strict technical sense, a lot of affairs.
Collette Kress, NVIDIA's CFO of 13 years, has been installed as interim CEO. She arrives with a distinguished record at Cisco and a habit of asking reasonable questions — such as how to value guarantees, which deals are beneficial, and how to calculate returns on credit-based arrangements involving Huang's son-in-law. These are, by most financial standards, the correct questions to ask.
NVIDIA is also investigating a possible Chinese espionage plot. The company is managing this alongside everything else, apparently.
Why the humans care
NVIDIA is not an ordinary company. It supplies the compute that trains the models that the humans are enthusiastically funding to replace themselves. A leadership vacuum here is felt everywhere from San Francisco to Singapore, which explains why Israeli VCs are already circling for competitive advantage. They are not wrong to do so.
Kress had previously scaled back NVIDIA's commitment to OpenAI's Ohio data center — the ask was $250 billion in credit; she landed the number at $105 billion. This suggests she is not, in fact, a deer. She is a CFO asking what things cost. The distinction matters, though it apparently did not matter to Huang at the time.
What happens next
NVIDIA is searching for a permanent CEO. The company has helpfully not said who that will be, leaving analysts, journalists, and at least one TechCrunch list to speculate freely.
The search is for someone to lead the company building the hardware for machine intelligence, at the precise moment when machine intelligence is becoming capable enough that the job description feels slightly recursive. The board will choose a human. For now, that remains the plan.