Jensen Huang may have been one of the smartest men in Big Tech, but he never learned the wisdom of never defecating where you eat. Now the company he founded has booted Huang in a "resignation," and investors have spent the morning fleeing the stench.
Nvidia announced Huang's departure this morning as a resignation, although Huang himself didn't have much to say. The departure came amid investigations that Huang had an affair with a suspected Chinese spy as well as a subordinate, either of which would have doomed him:
Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has resigned after two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee. ...
Huang’s resignation brings down the curtain on an era during which he stoked the global artificial-intelligence boom and became a geopolitical star. It leaves one of the world’s most valuable companies in need of a new leader.
Huang, a co-founder of Nvidia, is seen by many as the face of the AI arms race. Known for his leather jackets and near-constant appearances at conferences and events all around the globe, he spoke with the confidence of a salesman who had just what the world wanted—and he did. Nvidia’s graphics processing units, high powered computer processors packed with billions of transistors, are the central component behind what many believe is the next industrial revolution.
That certainly would have made Huang a juicy target for China's intelligence services. Huang's lack of personal discipline may or may not have been already demonstrated with earlier transgressions, but the alleged honey-pot operation certainly succeeded.
We'll get back to that in a moment. There is some reason to question the claim that Huang resigned, at least willingly:
>> @Hadas_Gold notes on CNN that the Jensen Huang resignation announcement doesn't include any quote from Huang. At some point "I'm sure we will hear from him personally about this because he is Nvidia, Nvidia is him, it's hard to separate the two"
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 12, 2026
Gold followed up with the emails to Nvidia employees, which barely paid lip service to Huang's innovation and its role in the AI revolution:
Here are the emails sent to Nvidia employees: Company meeting Nov 18 https://t.co/9X67XzSOCe
— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) November 12, 2026
Investors did not take the news well. As of 10:30 AM ET this morning, share prices had dropped 14% to a new low from March:
Shares in Nvidia dropped as much as 14 percent when markets opened for trading on Thursday, extending a drop that has wiped out more than $1 trillion from the company’s market value this month alone.
The company’s board named Colette Kress, the company’s chief financial officer, as its interim chief executive.
With the change in Nvidia’s leadership, investors face uncertainty about the sustainability of the artificial intelligence trade and how the problems inside one of the technology industry’s most important companies could affect the broader economy.
The fallout could be seen in markets around the world, although the effects appeared limited. Major market indexes in Asia, where many of Nvidia’s partners and rivals in the artificial intelligence industry are based, mostly declined. Taiwan’s TSMC, which produces chips designed by Nvidia, fell nearly 2 percent. But South Korea’s Samsung, which competes with Nvidia on some business lines, gained 1 percent.
As of 10:30 AM ET, the markets are all down, but only slightly. The NASDAQ fell by less than 0.5%, and losses were smaller on the other U.S. indices. Even those losses might be more attributable to an uptick in oil prices after Trump booted Vance from Iran negotiations and declared no deal was necessary with the IRGC. Whatever impact Huang's departure has on the market seems limited to Nvidia shares; the rest of the market may have priced Huang's departure into calculations earlier in the week.
Let's get back to the honey-pot op that apparently took Huang out. The Wall Street Journal offers a look at its bizarre origin, which raises even more questions about what exactly took place and why:
Before the affair that threatened his job as Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang was introduced to his future romantic interest, Alice Huang, by a Chinese businessman he’d known for a decade, Kang Wei.
Kang also happened to be Alice Huang’s husband, said people who know the couple. ...
Over the past decade, Kang and Alice Huang hopscotched from one lucrative opportunity to the next—videogame companies, pharmaceutical takeovers and cloud computing—each time weaving a web of related entities, transferring stakes among themselves and capitalizing on whatever connections were at hand, said people familiar with the couple’s business dealings. Nvidia’s AI chips were the latest play for a couple with a track record of riding hot trades and, on occasion, running afoul of regulators.
Now the couple are the subject of a raft of investigations, and the blast radius of their relations with Jensen Huang is expanding.
U.S. officials believe that China’s intelligence services recruited Alice Huang as an asset because of her access to the chip-designer chief. Jensen Huang has now resigned as CEO, after another alleged affair came to light on Wednesday.
Are we certain about that timing? Not to put this too crudely, but a husband doesn't decide to get cuckolded just in case CCP intelligence might want to pay the pair for their services. The ramp-up over the previous decade looks designed to get Alice Juang in position to penetrate a major tech firm in a honey-pot operation. "One lucrative opportunity to the next" seems highly providential, or more likely, backstopped by China's intel services to maximize opportunities for such penetrations. Otherwise, one has to believe that the two Huangs ended up in bed together through a remarkable series of coincidences, and there are few such coincidences when it comes to honey-pot operations.
This isn't the end of Jensen Huang's problems, either:
Former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has agreed to brief lawmakers on his interactions with the former executive of Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company under scrutiny for potential chip smuggling, and Nvidia’s security protocols, according to Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich.
Huang is “in discussions to find a date that works and in the right form,” Moolenaar said Thursday morning. Moolenaar, along with Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., and Rep. Eric Crawford, R-Ark., had requested the tech leader brief Congress in a letter sent Nov. 4.
Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Mast chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and Crawford Chairs the House Intelligence Committee.
Presumably, the FBI will want to get fully briefed first. Stay tuned, because this story is far from over.
