Who could replace Jensen Huang? Nvidia looks for CEO candidates

Detailed summary

The crisis has highlighted Nvidia’s lack of a succession plan Read more at The Business Times.

NVIDIA’S board has been working with an outside firm to identify potential replacements for chief executive officer Jensen Huang following reports of multiple extramarital affairs, including one with a woman who is reportedly suspected of spying for China, a person familiar with the situation said.

The board is weighing the idea of naming a temporary chief while searching for a permanent one, the person said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public.

Directors were meeting on Wednesday to discuss Huang’s fate, according to people familiar with the situation. The Wall Street Journal said earlier that the board was preparing to oust Huang, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. Nvidia didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nvidia’s board has been facing a succession crisis since Sunday when Huang admitted that he’d had an affair with Alice Huang, a data centre executive at a company that is one of Nvidia’s largest South-east Asian customers.

The New York Times has reported that Alice Huang was suspected of operating as an agent on behalf of the Chinese government. The crisis escalated late on Wednesday, when the Times reported that Jensen Huang also had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice-president of healthcare, citing unidentified people who worked at the company. Powell didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The disclosure and subsequent reports have left the board with a difficult option: ousting the founder and only person ever to have run Nvidia, firing an executive who — at least until recently — had commanded widespread respect of shareholders and customers alike and oversaw a more than 700,000 per cent surge in the company’s share price.

His potential departure would leave a leadership vacuum at the roughly US$4 trillion chipmaker he co-founded and built over more than three decades to become the dominant supplier of AI chips at the centre of the global artificial-intelligence boom…

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