Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO of $4 trillion chip giant Nvidia, just days after news broke that he was having an affair with a Chinese data center executive alleged to have ties to China’s intelligence community.
The company named Colette Kress, its chief financial officer, as interim CEO. Nvidia confirmed the news in a press release Thursday morning.
As reported Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, the removal of Huang as CEO follows the revelation over the weekend that the company’s board of directors had opened an investigation into whether the company’s chief executive and founder had been targeted by foreign intelligence.
Huang had been revealed to be having an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), a Chinese citizen and executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company that buys chips from Nvidia to run data centers that sell computing power to Chinese AI labs. News reports citing US intelligence officials have claimed Alice Huang was working as a spy for China. She was reportedly under surveillance by US intelligence, as reported in late October by The New York Times.
The Information reported on Tuesday that Alice Huang is believed to be involved with a network of Chinese companies that facilitated the sales of $7.5 billion in chips to China. The US has tried to control China’s access to advanced chips for years, but reports show that there are still illegal operations smuggling chips on the banned list from the US to China.
The New York Times also reported on Wednesday a separate affair between Huang and one of his direct reports at Nvidia.
The announcement of an investigation has rocked the AI chip behemoth, which makes the cutting-edge chips that enable AI and AI data centers. A proposed class-action lawsuit was filed on Monday against Nvidia, charging the company made false or misleading statements about Huang’s affair and the company’s relationship with Megaspeed.
On Tuesday, the Nvidia board said it had “retained former acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Joon H. Kim and his firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct a thorough and independent investigation.”
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