SANTA CLARA (The Thursday Times) — Jensen Huang has resigned as chief executive of Nvidia, the company he co-founded 33 years ago and built into the world’s most valuable chipmaker, after reports of an affair with a woman US officials believe was a Chinese intelligence asset.
Nvidia’s board said on Thursday that Huang had stepped down as president, chief executive, and a member of the board with immediate effect. Colette Kress, the chief financial officer, will serve as interim chief executive while keeping her finance role, and the board has begun a search for a permanent successor that will consider internal and external candidates.
The board also named Harvey Jones, a former chief executive and executive chairman of Synopsys, as its first-ever chair. Nvidia has until now had no board chair and no chief operating officer.
A statement that skipped the scandal
The company’s statement did not mention the allegations. “Jensen’s contributions to Nvidia are profound,” it said. “The board and the company thank Jensen for his immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry.”
“The board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption,” Jones said. Kress said she was committed to “building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years”.
Nvidia said it would still report its third-quarter results on November 17 as planned.
How it unravelled
The resignation came a day after reports that the board was preparing to remove him. Huang had been under pressure since reports that US intelligence agencies believed he had been targeted in a Chinese espionage effort through his relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive of Singapore-based Megaspeed International, a big buyer of Nvidia hardware. She is not related to him.
In a message to staff at the weekend, Huang admitted he had been “unfaithful” to his wife and said he would cooperate fully with an independent investigation the board had ordered. A further report on Wednesday said he had also had a relationship with a senior Nvidia executive.
China’s foreign ministry has called the spy allegations baseless, and Megaspeed has denied any wrongdoing. Shareholders have filed a proposed class action accusing Nvidia and Huang of hiding the risks.
Huang turned Nvidia from a maker of video-game graphics cards into the dominant supplier of chips for artificial intelligence, worth about $4 trillion, and became one of the most closely watched figures in the technology race between Washington and Beijing.
