Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday, days after he admitted to having an affair with a Chinese data center executive, whom the U.S. intelligence agency believed to be a Chinese government agent. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Huang also had an affair with an Nvidia executive.
Nvidia’s board said that chief financial officer Colette Kress will serve as the company’s interim chief executive until a permanent successor has been named.
Huang’s exit has triggered worries about Nvidia’s future as the world’s top chipmaker, and about the entire AI industry where Nvidia has been a hardware provider, an investor, and a community leader. Repercussions from the saga will impact China, which has yet to replace Nvidia chips with domestic alternatives, as well as Taiwan and South Korea, which host a vast network of Nvidia suppliers.
Here are the key questions emerging from Huang’s dramatic downfall.
Jensen Huang had been the biggest advocate for selling chips to China, which he argued helps America maintain its market dominance.
Despite the U.S. banning the export of advanced Nvidia chips to China, Chinese companies have been trying to access chips remotely by working with data centers in Southeast Asia.
Alice Huang, with whom Jensen Huang had an affair, served as the executive of Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, one of Nvidia’s biggest customers in Southeast Asia. The Information reported that Alice Huang helped move about 240,000 H100, H200 and some A100 chips into China. Her companies also invested in DeepSeek, promising to supply Nvidia chips.
The Nvidia scandal will likely lead the U.S. government to tighten chip controls. Anticipating a crackdown, Chinese AI labs are trying to lock in overseas supplies of Nvidia chips, while traders in China are stockpiling restricted chips, Reuters reported .
Chinese chips are catching up in performance, but Nvidia chips are still essential to the AI industry.
In the first half of the year, Nvidia shipped 678,000 AI accelerators in China, down 44% from a year earlier and making up 34% of the market, according to a Reuters report , citing IDC data. In the same period, leading Chinese chipmaker Huawei i Huawei Huawei is a Chinese technology company focused on mobile phones and telecommunications, and is seen as a poster child for China’s global tech ambitions. READ MORE shipped 572,000 AI accelerators, up from more than 300,000 a year earlier, accounting for 28% of the market,
Alibaba i Alibaba Alibaba, founded in 1999 by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma, is one of the most prominent global e-commerce companies that operates platforms like AliExpress, Taobao, and Tmall. READ MORE ’s chip unit T-Head had 7% of the market, followed by Cambricon’s 5%. Baidu i Baidu Baidu is a Chinese technology company that operates the country’s biggest search engine and video-streaming service iQiyi. READ MORE subsidiary Kunlunxin held 4% and Hygon had 3%.
Although AI labs are increasingly working with chipmakers to make sure their models can run on domestic infrastructure, most AI developers still train new models on Nvidia chips. Nvidia’s B300 delivers 6.75 times the arithmetic performance of Huawei’s best Ascend 950 chip, according to research firm Epoch AI . Huawei also lags behind Nvidia in production volume.
Jensen Huang enjoys rock star status across Asia, especially in his birth country Taiwan, where he would visit night markets, share snacks with fans, and host banquets with executives of Taiwanese suppliers. He said the company planned to invest $150 billion a year in Taiwan.
Many internet users expressed disappointment that they lost a role model in tech. Some wrote that the spy allegations and the criticisms of Huang would add to the discrimination of Asians working in America’s tech industry.
Huang’s departure is also creating uncertainty around Nvidia’s supply chain relationship with Asian companies. But several executives at Nvidia’s Taiwanese suppliers said they still expected steady orders from Nvidia in the coming years because of the sustained demand from the AI industry, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency.
