Jensen Huang’s exit from Nvidia raises questions about future of AI

Michael Dell described Jensen Huang as a “visionary of the AI age.” Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges said a photo with the Nvidia CEO produced more media coverage for his company than its iPhone launch. During the keynote of his annual Dreamforce conference, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff said, “Jensen, we’re all following you, bro,” as the two paced through the audience.

His fame extended way beyond tech. In May, Huang joined President Donald Trump on Air Force One for a trip to China to meet with President Xi Jinping. Three months later, Huang gathered six of the biggest names at the Nasdaq to announce on CNBC a proposed $500 billion artificial intelligence buildout plan, cementing his central role at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

As Nvidia became the first company to rip past a $5 trillion market cap, bending the laws of physics with its advanced graphics processing units and pushing the AI boom to seemingly endless bounds, the now 63-year-old Huang, clad in a black leather jacket, traversed the globe as the face of the brand powering the next industrial revolution.

Over the past week it all came crashing down. Following two reported extramarital affairs — one with an alleged Chinese spy and another with an employee — Huang is leaving the company he co-founded 33 years ago in crisis, and thrusting the AI market into chaos. The board is now left to pick a successor for a company that’s been run by a singular figure with no second-in-command. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress has been named interim CEO. Harvey Jones has been appointed chairman.

Nvidia has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

“How companies handle a crisis determines their future,” former Cisco CEO John Chambers, now a startup investor, told CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Wednesday. “How they handle this will determine if they’re a great company and a great leadership team beyond one person.”

It had been a tumultuous stretch for Nvidia, even before the Huang saga led the board to launch an investigation of the CEO’s behavior and the potential national security implications. The stock is on pace for its sixth straight weekly drop, which would be the longest losing streak since 2012. That includes a 9% slump last week after the midterm elections resulted in sweeping Democratic victories in both chambers of Congress, and the passage of dozens of ballot measures that could slow the buildout of new data centers.

Nvidia is scheduled to report quarterly results on Tuesday, and expectations remain high, with analysts projecting 92% year-over-year revenue growth to $109.2 billion, according to LSEG. That’s up 18-fold from the same quarter in 2022, just before OpenAI launched ChatGPT and kicked off…