Nvidia stopped being just a technology company to become a piece of global infrastructure. With a market capitalization that has already surpassed the US$ 3 trillion mark in recent moments, the company is no longer just a GPU manufacturer — it is the beating heart of the artificial intelligence revolution. And at the center of this web is Jensen Huang, the 63-year-old co-founder and CEO who transformed Nvidia from a graphics chip maker into a global powerhouse in three decades.
But over the past days, what began as a personal scandal has assumed unprecedented corporate proportions. According to The Wall Street Journal, Nvidia's board of directors is preparing to remove Huang, who admitted to having had two extramarital affairs — one with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed who, according to American intelligence, is connected to Chinese intelligence services, and another with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, who reports directly to the CEO.
What makes this crisis particularly interesting is not just the scandal itself, but what it reveals about Nvidia's governance structure: a historically deferential board, no succession plan, and Huang delegating less than 60 direct executive reports. The company, worth about US$ 300 per share in optimistic scenarios, now faces a question that no analyst can answer with certainty: who replaces Jensen Huang?
A Timeline of Collapse
It all began on October 29, when The New York Times reported that Jensen Huang maintained a "close relationship" with Alice Huang from Megaspeed. What seemed like yet another corporate scandal story took on geopolitical dimensions when American authorities revealed that Alice Huang would be the target of a foreign intelligence effort. Megaspeed, according to reports, was already under investigation by both the United States and Singapore since October 2025 for suspected illegal chip sharing with China.
On November 8, Nvidia's board announced an independent investigation. Huang, in a message to employees, admitted the affair and said he would support any review. "I love our country and our company," he wrote, promising full cooperation. That same day, the company hired Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz — a renowned New York corporate law firm specializing in internal investigations — to conduct the probe.
But the narrative took another turn on November 11, when The New York Times reported, based on five internal sources, that Huang had also had an extramarital affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare. According to IB Times Australia, the board met on Wednesday night to decide the CEO's future, with no official announcement yet.
The Cost of Centralization
Behind the personal scandal lies a fundamental structural question: Nvidia depends so much on Jensen Huang that it has no identified successor. According to Melius Research, "Nvidia's problem is that there is no clear successor to Huang." Bernstein's Stacey Rasgon was even more direct, equating Huang with Nvidia itself. David Ives, an analyst at Riversea Assets, calculated that with Huang at the helm, Nvidia is worth US$ 300 per share, compared to US$ 225 without him.
Huang is known for delegating very little. He has himself stated in interviews that he has about 60 direct reports. The resulting organizational structure is more like a personal empire than a modern multinational. He is the public face of the company at meetings with national leaders and at industry events, centralizing strategic decisions, government negotiations, and end-to-end customer relations.
The current crisis exposes what many investors and analysts have already observed silently: Nvidia's governance is notably weak for a company of its size and importance. The board has 11 members, and Huang owns slightly more than 3% of outstanding shares. He is not the formal chair of the board. Even so, the corporate culture he built over three decades appears to have consolidated a personal power that is rarely challenged.
The New York Times highlighted in a specific report on November 10 that Nvidia's board "has a history of letting Jensen Huang get his way," pointing out that independent directors rarely challenged his decisions, from the strategic shift to AI and accelerated computing in 2018 to the controversial negotiations with China.
Market Impact
The financial panic was immediate. Over the five days following the first report of the scandal, Nvidia's stock fell about 11%, with intraday drops of up to 8%. At one point, the company's market capitalization shrank by US$ 350 billion, transforming what was the world's most valuable company into an exercise in crisis management.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia was working with an outside firm to identify potential candidates to replace Huang as CEO. Bloomberg confirmed the existence of this search, without revealing whether any decision had been made on the founder's continuation or departure.
What is intriguing is that, despite the entire scandal, Nvidia's core business remains intact. Data centers are operating, contracts with hyperscalers are signed, and demand for GPUs continues to outstrip supply. The problem is that Huang himself is, in many ways, the product: his charisma, his technical vision, and his ability to sell dreams to investors and engineers are part of the Nvidia brand.
What Comes Next
The question hanging over Nvidia is not just whether Jensen Huang will be fired, but whether the company can survive this transition. History shows that technology companies rarely fare well when they lose their founding CEOs — see what happened with Oracle after Larry Ellison, Twitter after Jack Dorsey, and Yahoo after Jerry Yang. Nvidia might be different, but the absence of a succession plan and the extreme centralization of power make any post-Huang scenario deeply uncertain.
There is an additional dimension: Nvidia's delicate relationship with China. Huang has always argued that the company must sell semiconductors to Chinese customers, even under export restrictions. If Huang is removed, the next CEO may adopt a tougher stance, potentially affecting a significant share of the company's revenue — and, at the same time, calming the political concerns in Washington that have been hovering over the CEO since the beginning of the investigation.
The world will watch the developments in the coming days. The board is already meeting. The Wachtell Lipton investigation is underway. And Nvidia, which one day was just a graphics chip company, has now become the most relevant case study on corporate governance in the artificial intelligence era.
Sources: Wall Street Journal, Semafor, TechCrunch
✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing
