Nvidia After Jensen Huang: Who Holds the Relationships Now

After weeks of denial, Jensen Huang's resignation came late Wednesday night in what Bloomberg's reporting describes as an unconditional surrender. His demeanor had shifted so sharply that confidants noticed him using phrases like 'whatever' and 'I don't care,' a stark departure from the controlled, charismatic executive who had become, as Bloomberg's Ian King put it, the central banker of the AI industry.

The board's hand was forced by the admission that the relationship involved an employee, something explicitly prohibited under Nvidia's own stated rules. King told Bloomberg Businessweek host Carol Massar that once that detail was confirmed, the board had no choice but to act, and Huang had no way around it.

Nvidia's supplier ties with Samsung and SK Hynix ran personally through Huang, and Bloomberg's Seoul bureau chief Cat Barton noted that in Asian business culture those personal relationships carry enormous weight, so whoever leads Nvidia next will need to rebuild them quickly. CFO Colette Kress and her team are described as holding things together in the interim, while the Financial Times has floated Arm CEO Rene Haas, who previously worked at Nvidia, as a successor.

King stressed that the chips, the CUDA software platform, and the customer queue were built by the engineers rather than by any single executive, and only one sell rating remains on the stock. The open regulatory question is whether Washington's scrutiny of chips reaching Chinese users through offshore neoclouds, a structure Bloomberg's Joe Wiesenthal calls Mega Speed and the neocloud GPU access model, escalates now that the executive who navigated those relationships is gone.

Huang himself has hired a high-powered law firm and faces the prospect of congressional committees or subpoenas given the nature of the reporting around Nvidia's relationships with Mega Speed. Bloomberg's reporting also noted the company's general counsel had a role in trying to reduce scrutiny of that company, raising the question of how deep any further investigation might reach inside the organization.