Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns after back-to-back affair revelations

Jensen Huang has resigned from Nvidia, the company he helped build into one of the most valuable on Earth. The 63-year-old walked away after back-to-back revelations of two affairs, including a romantic relationship with a woman alleged to be a spy for China. On Wednesday, reports emerged that the married CEO had had an affair with an Nvidia colleague. The New York Times then reported a second affair, with an executive at his own company.

The disclosures hit Nvidia's shares, and they sank again after the second report. Nvidia is still valued at more than $4 trillion and sits at the centre of the AI race between the US and China. After the first affair came to light, Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologised for hurting their family.

His departure leaves uncertainty on the global stock market, which leans heavily on the microchip company, and over the future of a US firm seen as a linchpin in the country's push for AI dominance. Nvidia's chips power Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic — a customer list that reads like the biggest companies on the planet.

President Donald Trump had backed Huang to stay in the job, describing him as honourable. At a recent White House AI summit attended by 42 tech executives, Trump was flanked by Huang and Elon Musk. Huang has also held court with China's President Xi Jinping, access to world leaders few tech chiefs enjoy.

Stephen Witt, author of Thinking Machine, a biography of Huang, told the BBC: 'Jensen Huang is a tech visionary of the likes of Steve Jobs.' Witt said Huang had gone to great lengths to present himself as a family man, and that it was 'very important to him'. 'The fallout of this would be bad for anyone's family,' Witt added. 'But for someone who has gone to such great lengths to cultivate an image of being a family guy and who keeps his children very close, it is very bad.'

Born in Taiwan in 1963, Huang moved to the US west coast at nine, graduated as an electrical engineer from Oregon State University and took a master's in the same field at Stanford. He worked at chip firm AMD before co-founding Nvidia, and met his wife Lori Mills as a college lab partner; the pair married in 1985, eight years before he founded the company. They have two children, Madison and Spencer, both now working at Nvidia. Known in Taiwan as 'Daddy Huang' and dubbed the 'Taylor Swift of tech', he has amassed an estimated $145bn fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.