Who could replace Jensen Huang? Nvidia looks for CEO candidates

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 and US-China technology rivalry.

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Huang, 63, has no obvious successor and owns about 3.6 per cent of Nvidia’s stock. He also has dozens of direct reports, underscoring the tight control he maintains over the company.

Rosenberg said chief financial officer Colette Kress, who has held the role for more than a decade, would be the natural choice as an interim CEO, but said the bigger question was who would lead Nvidia’s technology roadmap longer term.

Odds on prediction market website Polymarket shifted sharply to show an 88 per cent chance that Huang would resign or be removed by the end of the year. Odds for his successor favoured Ian Buck, who oversees the business that serves Nvidia’s data centre clients.

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But keeping Jensen Huang in the role would likely subject Nvidia to a barrage of scrutiny from lawmakers, investors, customers and staff concerned over his relationship with Alice Huang and whether it put Nvidia’s trade secrets at risk — as well as his extramarital relationship with a person who directly reported to him at the company. The developments have also shined a light on Nvidia’s lack of a succession plan for Huang, and reinforced how inseparable the 63-year-old CEO is from the company and its success.

His potential exit would reverberate far beyond the company’s operations, and not just because Nvidia is the dominant maker of chips at the heart of the AI boom.  Huang is a consummate dealmaker and has used the company’s vast resources to invest in the AI supply chain and a variety of startups. He’s also a top evangelist for the AI revolution itself, downplaying fears about the risks to humanity and talking up the benefits. The company’s stock dropped 8 per cent in extended trading following the reports on Wednesday. Alice Huang was an executive at Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based firm that was spun out of a Chinese gaming enterprise. That company has been under US investigation for months related to potential chip smuggling, Bloomberg has reported. Megaspeed and Nvidia have denied wrongdoing, and Beijing has dismissed allegations that it spied on Jensen Huang. BLOOMBERG, REUTERS