A Scorecard for Huang’s Exit From Nvidia

Detailed summary

The ouster of Jensen Huang from the chipmaker he helped found is reverberating throughout Silicon Valley, Washington and beyond.

Andrew here. The Nvidia soap opera continues. The Wall Street Journal reports that Jensen Huang belittled Colette Kress, then the chipmaker’s C.F.O. and now his interim replacement as C.E.O. (One question: what Kress’s ascension means for Huang’s children and son-in-law, all of whom are executives at Nvidia — and some of whom have clashed with her, according to The Information.)

All this paints an increasingly complicated picture for Nvidia and for Huang, who has been called to testify before Congress. More below.

The central figure of the artificial intelligence boom, Jensen Huang, is out as Nvidia’s C.E.O. Executives, investors and policymakers are trying to sort through the wreckage.

Nvidia is being led on an interim basis by its C.F.O., Colette Kress, who must steer the company through increasingly fraught times for the A.I. industry. (More on that below.)

Huang’s resignation is continuing to reverberate throughout Silicon Valley and Washington.

Details are still emerging about Alice Huang, whose cloud-computing company Megaspeed, based in Singapore, has been accused of smuggling Nvidia chips into China. Researchers and government officials are dissecting her involvement in a tangled web of companies that may have included Huawei, the Chinese chip giant blacklisted by the U.S., and DeepSeek, the Chinese A.I. powerhouse.

That said, some U.S. intelligence officials have suggested they haven’t yet concluded that Alice Huang was a spy.

Some in Silicon Valley are set to benefit from Nvidia’s distress. Chief among them are rival chipmakers who have tried to wean A.I. companies off Nvidia’s GPU processors. Shares in Broadcom (which has been developing a custom A.I. chip with OpenAI) and AMD jumped 5 percent on Thursday, though they’re set to give up some of those gains on Friday.

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