alt Hacker NewsJensen Huang resigns
Comments
I think a lot of people here seem to underestimate how much of a CEO's job is perception.
"Oh who cares who he slept with, he's been great for Nvidia. Nothing has been proven."
He's one of the most visible CEO's in the most visible industry in the world, and the entire AI economy is dependent upon them. The perception of him as stable is incredibly important.
Merely the suggestion that he is having affairs with people with close ties to China's government, given export controls, is a huge PR problem. Adding in an additional affair with someone under him. And the likelihood that there may be even more out there.
I doubt the Board wants to get rid of Jensen Huang. He's done incredibly well for them. But right now, there's a huge PR shitstorm swirling around the company.
Maybe in six months it all dies down and he comes back, who knows. But right now, you really can't just ignore the problem and hope the media doesn't care about the whole "well she was only sort of a spy" situation.
I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
Anthropic and OpenAI are pouring money into this
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.
Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.
I hope this won't change NVIDIA's refusal to block inference for unsigned and registered open-models in the firmware of modern GPUs. Anthropic and others are pushing hard on this. First the hardware export ban, eventually the software one via hardware-enforced execution controls like IETF hinted at
I think this just confirms that he had knowledge of gpus going to China and the board wants to minimize the damage now. His infidelity does not help but I doubt the board would have ousted him for that
It's bizarre to me how many people here seem to seriously believe this is actually about cheating on his wife. It seems pretty clear that this is related to the glaringly obvious, continued export of GPUs to China, expressly violating an export ban. Combine that with having an affair with a woman who just so happens to be integral to the smuggling operation. It just looks too bad. Opens Nvidia up to a world of hurt once the dems take over in January, and Huang himself to serious criminal charges. And that's just the stuff that's public information. We have to assume the board knows more than us.
This stuff has probably been going on behind the scenes for a while. The leak about the affair is just the catalyst that accelerated it all.
It is baffling to read comments that this is excusable or he should be retained 'in interest of the shareholders'. Setting aside the obviously poor judgement, the appearance of impropriety has serious ammunition behind a situation that already looked weird. More practically, he's compromised now. Whether it's further scandal or the impending criminal investigations, there might be further hooks people have on him.
The quote about succession planning is also a little out of context, he phrased it more that there should be continual information and responsibility sharing such that succession planning is effectively redundant or unnecessary.
I always wondered why investors were ok with not having any control due to dual structure shares and board composition. A "Great Men" theory of the world is a convenient and satisfying narrative, but it's usually not the best at explaining things. As the saying goes, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men".
Jensen, even after decades, remained deeply involved in many operational decisions with 40+ direct reports. He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy. Jensen gets to retire with $100B+ and not deal with the crap.
I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support. This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
Can't help that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the China hawk fraction of the US government and associated entities (i.e. Anthropic) obviously brought the hammer down on Jensen here, even if he arguably brought about his own downfall with the affair.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
Just a sad state of affairs. Jensen was by far the biggest voice pushing for open weights and keeping the Anthropic / OpenAI doom narrative from getting out of control.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
I'm actually surprised at this. I figured everyone would justify keeping him because he made Nvidia (and investors) so much money. Money > anything else
He wanted to have the cake and to eat it at the same time. I've seen CEO's who handled this in a much more orderly way, such as: getting a divorce, then announcing internally to the company that he is getting a divorce, then announcing he has found new love with a certain person at the company and in the same sentence announcing that the certain person effectively no longer answers to him, but to the board or something like that.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me. This is a man who could be fired just for OFFERING to have sex with a subordinate. The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind. But we live in an age where the only truth people believe is the one that makes them feel a certain way, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
The smuggling and romance details that have been exposed so far are either well known or immaterial to the business. So why the crazy urgency now?
Perhaps some influential folks want to support Anthropic's IPO by showing that the open source models will soon be blunted/outlawed, but IPO-ing into a crash seems like a high price for that moat.
Or do similarly influential folks want to tank AI as a whole but couldn't politically afford a crash before mid-terms?
The apologists in this thread are absolutely shocking. Jensen is a ruthless CEO who clearly lacks moral fiber. Why do we idolize and "feel" for people like this?
Interesting that 18% of Nvidia's revenue comes from their 2020 Mellanox buyout. Might rank among YouTube as one of the most profitable corporate buyouts ever.
About their new interim CEO Colette Kress:
>'She starts her day talking with Israeli execs because Nvidia's major Israel operations (post-Mellanox acquisition, ~6k staff, ~18% of revenue via networking chips) are business-critical'
NVIDIA without Jensen? That’s a huge risk. The company may be bigger than ever but replacing its visionary won't be easy.
My understanding is that NVidia's organisation is very flat and Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type. Moreover there was no succession plan. I get that having an affair with a spy is not great but isn't it risky to replace him now?
For all his faults, I do feel for Jensen. He built this thing from an absolute scratch. He had a lot of luck on the way, from crypto to CUDA. And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago.
I don't understand. Who's driving this change? The board, the administration, or who?
Given the report that the US gov knew about this for a while, it seems more likely that it's coming from the administration?
Lot of comments here stating with absolute certainty that China wanted Nvidia chips (they've previously ordered Chinese companies to not buy Nvidia chips https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...) and that Alice Huang is a CCP spy (zero public evidence of this).
How illegal is it for a CEO to sell goods (potentially a core component used in military weapons) to a foreign government after your government said not to?
Nothing here makes sense.
One thing is clear: his extramarital affairs are not the reason why he did it.
There is something extremely important we don't yet know and may never know.
He didn't resign because of two affairs. He resigned because there were a LOT more than two affairs. I'm sure they wouldn't stop coming after enemies and the press smelled blood in the water.
Huang is the classic example of an entrepreneur who grew up and came of age at the end of the Cold War, at the height of globalization and the Pax Americana: focused mainly on business, with no obligation to take sides for any national interest. Unfortunately, those days are over, and, reluctant to fully adapt, he has paid the price.
I didn't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
Bummer. He stood in the way of regulatory capture and AI monopolists had him removed. I foresee the open model / open weights ecosystem eventually getting locked down, especially the most competitive Chinese models.
One thing which isn't adding up to me. Everyone is breathlessly reporting that in the past three years (or whatever) megaspeed obtained $7.5B in nvidia chips. Nvidia's revenue is about $6B per week. If the fear is that China's AI research is catching up due to those chips, which seems like a percent of nvidia's production, does that mean China's researchers are so efficient they only need that 1%, or does it mean they are getting a lot more AI compute through other channels?
It doesn't seem fair that you're being ousted from your own empire by a bunch of randos, an empire you built from scratch and nurtured.
One should never give up control it seems. Zuck is right.
I don't know, I just have a feeling he'll be back. Steve Jobs style.
This could turn out to be the best thing for AI. I hope Jensen starts a new startup and challenges NVDIA. This will enable more options of GPU for end users and break NVIDIA monopoly.
I seriously didn’t think they would let Jensen go over 2 affairs. Is it something more than the affairs that I do not know about?
Makes me think, life’s so fragile. Jensen put 30+ years into the company and this is how it ends, hopefully not, but still sad.
This is going to be very unpopular here, but this domino triggered by the China hawks in the current admin (and the handful of dem lobbyists in the pocket of openai/ant) is going to go down in history as a massive geopolitical and technological blunder.
Huawei just announced a fully domestic computer, Deepseek is rumored to be training v5 right now on entirely domestic Ascend chips.
I know eventually there will come out all the justifications for how this was to protect AGI, etc. But this move has also now tipped the scale beyond just the hardware bifurcation, but also the open vs. closed and commons vs. sovereign models. This isn't just chopping off your nose, this is America purposely gouging out it's eyes and removing it's ability to see down the road. Jensen Huang was the world's best shot and trying to keep a global AI world together, but one side has made their voice on that extremely loud and clear.
Jensen's the most pro-open weight guy and calmest on China public figure at that level.
Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.
Tin foil hat take: I think Jensen's been sniped.
Jensen should not have resigned. This entire thing has been played like someone in Washginton wanted him out. It's a sad day to see him go.
Jensen created value. He's also probably the most incompetent manager of recent times. Both can be true.
This smells like a hit job on Jensen Huang. Years from now, it'll probably come out that Alice Huang wasn't a spy for China and the whole Kimberly affair was a setup. Of course, by then, no one will care about the truth.
I think he should have fought to stay, not sure why he left on his own. I wrote a little blog post about it here: https://blog.jtoy.net/jensen-huang-should-have-fought-for-ag...
I'm probably failing to see enough nuance here, but isn't Nvidia taking a hit a good thing when they are basically a monopoly? It seems to me like unintentional self-inflicted anti-trust regulation. Nvidia's failure is another chip maker's opportunity. And it's not like Nvidia is going to instantly implode and take the stock market down with it. It would take the form of slowly losing market share as their products become less appealing for whatever reason, assuming the decline would happen under new leadership at all. Then we get real competition in the GPU market.
I feel this could be a chess move by OAI/Anthropic/AWS etc to get Chinese companies stop open source models and get hands on all Nvidia Chips. This real estate race is getting dirty.
https://claude.ai/artifact/KiUrnV8j5oxG9qoR4R5snQ
Sentiment cloud of this discussion.
From all the readings so far, it does not look like he knew he was under the spell of a honeypot, nor nvidia knowingly sold the chips in question, directly to china. The truth will come out one day, and it is might be an uphill battle to prove a criminal intent from Jensen.
On a more mundane level, since he can neither go to office, nor to the house, any guesses what his routine will be over next couple weeks? Not a perfect example, but for some reason, this reminds me of the last scene in Fargo where WH Macy gets holed up in a motel buying time.
I only wish he got ousted for being a liar about where the money was coming from during the crypto boom, or the super anti consumer policies like prohibiting OEMs from having a top of the line series with anything other than nvidia, refusing for years to support standard vrr and pushing for g-sync, artificially nerfing silicon capabilities in consumer grade dies and helping this bubble get bigger and bigger with bad accounting practices.
The dude is out at the absolute top of the company because he fucked too many women he shouldn't have and in a year people will be missing him when the AI reckoning for hardware manufacturers comes.
Edit: and hairworks! That fucking shit that tanked performance but was "a game changer" due to PR. Just like the fake frames and slop filter they're pushing now.
China wins in both cases. They just slowed down the biggest AI company in the US. Had he not resigned, they would've gotten more chips either way.
Why fire and not admin leave?
The investigation is just starting. He's been indicted but not proven guilty yet. What if the facts come to light and the issue is overblown or wrong?
He also hasn't had the chance to properly defend himself.
This is a permanent fix for a potentially temporary problem, and that is short sighted
Really disappointing to read the comments on HN
None of them are able to put two and two together that this was a deliberate coup
And it seems like nobody is paying attention to what Jensen Huang was fighting for. He was against regulation of open source local models. He was against regulation shifting liability of local model developers as well as frontier models.
All in all without Jensen, it isn't just about NVIDIA, there's no one to champion for open source models and running them locally is going to get a lot harder and expensive. It's actually going to accelerate the monopolization of closed models and they will have to pass on the costs to consumers.
It's an L across the board and I'm noting the degraded quality of discourse on HN and that nobody is seeing through the veil here.
Wtf why is everyone assuming Nvidia skirted an export ban and treasonously sold chips to China? It was done legally with the US government taking a cut: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/07/business/economy/nvidia-c...
Nvidia is a profitmaxxing company in a profitmaxxing economy and so it is going to profitmaxx; the criticism should lie with the US government: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/republican-senator-urges...