Back when I covered the tech industry for HardwareGeeks.com, if somebody mentioned NVIDIA, my first question was usually about a graphics card. How well did it run the latest game? Was it worth upgrading? Today, you can barely have a conversation about artificial intelligence without NVIDIA coming up. That’s how far Jensen Huang took the company he helped build.
When I read that Jensen had resigned, the affair itself didn’t surprise me. I spent years covering tech and traveled all over the world doing it. I went to events, parties, and after-parties hosted by NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, HP, and plenty of others. Over the course of those years, I saw things in the industry that I considered far worse than an affair. Most of it never made the news.
What caught my attention was the question of who knew what, and when. Jensen acknowledged having an affair. News reports identified the woman as business executive Alice Huang, whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly suspected of spying for China. Beijing denied the allegation. ABC News reported that President Trump was briefed twice about the relationship. Whether anyone warned Jensen himself is a question I’d like answered. The reporting I’ve seen establishes that the concern reached the president. It leaves open what Jensen was told.
That matters to me because I’d judge his decisions differently if somebody had sat him down, explained the risk, and he’d carried on anyway. There were also separate reports of a relationship with an NVIDIA executive who reported directly to him. If you work at NVIDIA, you have every right to ask how the company handles a situation like that when the person involved is the boss.
As a CEO, Jensen always reminded me a little of Hector Ruiz, the former head of AMD. When I was covering hardware, those were two people I wanted to hear from. I might have shown up interested in what the next chip could do, but I also wanted to hear where they thought the industry was headed. What I give Jensen credit for is seeing a future for graphics chips that went well beyond the games so many of us were using to test them.
I still think he was a great CEO. I also think he showed poor judgment, and this is a painful way to leave a company you spent more than three decades building. We’re all human. We all make mistakes, some worse than others. When I think back on the NVIDIA I covered and look at the company it became, I’m still going to give the man credit for what he built. And if you ask me whether he’ll find his way back into the industry conversation, my money’s on yes.
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