South-east Asia is about to lose Nvidia’s best salesman

[SINGAPORE] The case for keeping Jensen Huang lasted about four days. On Sunday (Nov 8), Nvidia’s board said that it had confidence in its founder after he admitted to his staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife. Many of us argued that his private life was a matter for his family.

On Wednesday, The New York Times reported a second relationship, this time with Kimberly Powell, a long-serving vice-president who reports directly to him.

Within hours, The Wall Street Journal reported that the same board was preparing to push him out.

The second story changes things in a way the first did not. An affair is a private failing, but a relationship with someone who reports to you is a governance problem. Nvidia, like most large companies, has rules that discourage this.

Intel removed Brian Krzanich in 2018 and McDonald’s fired Steve Easterbrook in 2019, both over consensual relationships with employees. But both were hired managers who were far easier to replace than a founder.

The board no longer needs to prove anything about spies to make its case. Nvidia’s shares fell about 7 per cent in after-hours trading on Wednesday, leaving them roughly 14 per cent below where they stood before the first story broke.

How this scandal is different

Losing Huang would be no small thing, and comparisons with Apple after Steve Jobs or Amazon after Jeff Bezos miss the point, because those handovers were planned for years.

Tim Cook had run Apple’s operations for more than a decade before he took over; Andy Jassy spent nearly two decades building Amazon Web Services before he got the top job, and TSMC was run with two co-chief executives for almost five years before Morris Chang retired.

Nvidia has nothing of the sort. Huang has run it for 33 years with about 60 people reporting directly to him and no second-in-command.

There is simply no succession plan in place, and the board started working with an outside search firm only this week.

The closer precedent is Intel. When Krzanich left, there was no successor ready, so finance chief Bob Swan ran the company as interim chief executive for seven months.

A year later, Intel’s shares were down almost 9 per cent – at a time when the S&P 500 gained about as much.

The name most often floated for Nvidia’s interim job is that of its own finance chief, Colette Kress. Nvidia’s business is in far better shape than Intel’s was, and the fundamentals are unlikely to change, but the hole at the top looks much the same.

Hitting close to home

For South-east Asia, the loss is more personal than it looks.

Huang was Nvidia’s chief salesman in this region, and he did the selling himself – in prime ministers’ offices. He met Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim in December 2023 on a trip that included talks with Malaysian conglomerate YTL. In 2025, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum, the pair met again, by which time YTL had an artificial intelligence data centre running in Kulai, Johor.

In December 2024, he met Thailand’s then-prime minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra in Bangkok, and also Vietnam’s Pham Minh Chinh in Hanoi, where Nvidia agreed to open its first research centre in the country.

His pitch was “sovereign AI” – the idea that every country should own the computing power behind its own AI – and governments in the region bought it largely on his word.

An incoming finance chief or search-firm hire will not have those relationships.

The region also loses its cover. Huang was the loudest voice in Washington against tighter chip-export controls; whoever replaces him will spend the first months making peace with the House committees that want to quiz him behind closed doors.

The quickest way for a new boss to show that Nvidia is clean is to get tough on the customers who rent out its chips to Chinese clients, and many of those customers are in Singapore.

Megaspeed, the Singapore-registered firm at the centre of the first story, shows how that worked: The New York Times reported that its Malaysian arm, tied to a data centre in Johor, bought at least US$4.8 billion in AI equipment containing Nvidia chips in under two years.

Bloomberg reported that the city-state’s authorities barred its former executive Alice Huang from leaving the country in 2025 and questioned her over false import declarations. Megaspeed denies wrongdoing.

Think of the business model as a library barred from lending a rare book to a particular reader, so it sells the reader a ticket to the reading room instead.

In other words, the chips stay in Johor, while computing power travels north along a cable.

It is not just in Johor. A US think tank reckons about three-quarters of the offshore computing power used by Chinese companies now sits in South-east Asia.

The US House has passed a Bill that would extend export controls to cloud access, and these controls could affect even data centres in Singapore.

A scandal this size would certainly not hurt the Bill’s chances in the Senate.

The way the Singapore Police Force puts it: The Republic does not enforce other countries’ export controls.

But data centre operators are probably going to have to vet their tenants’ customers. This is going to spell a period of uncertainty for S-Reit investors holding Singapore data centres.

Nvidia will find a new chief executive eventually. Its chips will keep selling in the meantime.

What South-east Asia will struggle to find is another Nvidia boss willing to fly in, sit down with its prime ministers and argue its case in Washington.