The downfall of AI’s $5.7 trillion man

详细摘要

The founder and CEO turned Nvidia into the linchpin of the AI boom. Can it survive without him?

In October, in a converted church in West London, Jensen Huang stepped onto a stage to preach to a packed congregation. The then–Nvidia CEO had a gospel to share with the politicians, tech executives, and journalists, Fortune among them, crowding the room: The AI boom was only getting started, and Nvidia was in town to help bankroll it.

“I’m gonna invest in you! I’m gonna invest in you!” he shouted at the founders in the crowd. “We’re not your largest investor, but we are your best investor.”

Huang’s London visit was one stop on a European charm offensive that also swept through France, Sweden, and Germany. At the time, the trip had the feeling of a victory lap. Nvidia is the default supplier of the vital chips that are fueling the AI industry’s rapid growth, and with a market cap that, at one point, topped $5.7 trillion, had seeded an entire ecosystem that came to depend on Nvidia’s support.

If the AI boom is a kind of religion, then Huang had been its high priest—proselytizing to investors and policymakers, ministering to the faithful, and doling out alms to needy startups, AI labs, and neoclouds. Nvidia was the world’s most valuable company, and Huang was one of the world’s most powerful men.

Just three weeks later, that victory lap across Europe looks more like a last hurrah. The man who sold the world his vision of an AI future was soon fighting for his own future—and on Thursday morning, the seismic news broke: Jensen Huang had resigned from his role as CEO.

His abrupt departure followed reports that U.S. intelligence agencies believed Huang had been involved with a woman who was working as a Chinese intelligence asset—Alice Huang (no relation), a former executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company that had bought billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips.

For the once seemingly untouchable founder, the fall from grace came fast. Within a week, Huang had sent a memo to Nvidia’s 42,000 staffers acknowledging he had been “unfaithful” to his wife and…

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