From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.
This is the timeline:
Nov 8 : Jensen issues apology. NVIDIA allows him to use nvidia.com for this
Nov 8 : The Board of Directors publicly backs him up with a "vote of confidence" by stating: *"no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that "The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team."* -- from https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/statement-from-nvidia-board-of-directors
Nov 11 : 2nd affair gets exposed in the news
Nov 11 evening : emergency meeting of Board of Directors is called to fire Jensen Huang
Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.
Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
I've not fired very many people before, but deception removes any ambiguity as to whether or not someone should be fired.
My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it. From all appearances, NVidia was playing ball with the Trump administration. He was a frequent ally of President Trump, Trump supposedly knew about this information for the last year and sat on it, and even the CIA leaks that started it stressed how much Huang had praised the Trump administration. Reportedly they had already voluntarily stopped exports to MegaSpeed [2] as of June 2025. China, however, has a lot more to gain from his departure. It's going to harm NVidia very severely: reportedly he's very hands-on, "the conductor that makes a very complex operation work", and as a founder the whole knowledge pyramid that the company is based upon rests with him. If they want their domestic hardware industry to surpass NVidia, the easiest way to do that is to take out NVidia leadership.
I suspect that he was compromised by both the CIA and CCP, and with tensions rising between them, eventually found a situation where they each wanted him to do different things, and he couldn't satisfy both. Likely the CIA got wind that the CCP was going to move with their leverage, and published to stave that off. This also has the nice side benefit for U.S. power of letting the other side know the extent to which the CIA knows what you're doing, and showing that even the CEO of the richest company on earth is not immune to U.S laws. But it's still a net negative to U.S. power to have Huang out as CEO of NVidia, simply because it's such a net negative to NVidia. This is only a desirable outcome if he's going to be ousted anyway, or if he is otherwise compromised to become a Chinese puppet.
I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes. First affair, okay, it could be an indiscretion that happened in the past, cut ties and do damage control. But if there's a second (and third and fourth and many others?) affair and everybody knows about it, it becomes impossible for Huang to lead the company because everybody has so much leverage on him.
Money is like oxygen. If you deny oxygen/money to the Chinese chip market, they can't grow as fast. By supplying China with chips, all the money will go back to the US and not enough money will go to Chinese chip manufacturers to help them advance the way Nvidia can.
This is what Jensen was saying and he is 100% correct here. The chip ban to China will really help them catch up because the money will recirculate since they have no choice but to buy Chinese chips, and in the end it will make them much stronger.
Watched the interview and as far as I see he was getting 'heated' because he was speaking the obvious truth and being frustrated by poorly informed questions.
This is entirely expected from somebody like him who has a long history of being on the right side of technical argument.
He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US - replaced by a ex-CFO.
Let's expect better of leadership than to be criminal.
For the record I think that less than half of the people who thought the dress was black and gold were being influenced by the Chinese government to take that position.
Marriages of 41+ years can get into any kind of dynamic.
Uh... but we do!
---
I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.
Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.
My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.
Jensen
---
Source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
Are they though? As long as they're in the good graces of Trump, is the Justice Department going to do anything about it?
This story has more to it that will come to light .. I'm sure of it.
Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
For someone not familiar with American law: How the fuck is that a bigger problem than the Chinese spy ?
Is there any explicit rules at NVidia forbidding that in a code of conduct somewhere ?
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.
Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.
Nonsense. Nvidia's employees created that value, not Jensen. Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created, just like in every other company. CEO worship is absurd.
Like it's an extremely common sentiment when working for a large company to look at the SVP or CEO and go "that person is a dumbass, everyone in charge is a dumbass". Yet when looking at other companies somehow we forget about that and put the companies success on the CEO or top level execs. Instead of remembering "no, it's probably the small army below them figuring out how to manage upwards to prevent the idiot in charge from tanking everything"
Tell me you know nothing about running a company without telling me. Just because one CEO got caught screwing over a Chinese spy that doesn't mean all CEOs are useless people. That's just lazy generalization.
Edit: Guess I am arguing with a bot lol
Alternatively if the company tanks the board will have a reckoning similar to the OpenAI debacle.
Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.
The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.
It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.
This is a CYA move by the board as all this is becoming public.
They did ~$90B in revenue last quarter.
I sometimes can't imagine the avarice it takes to do things like this. Could you imagine having a $100 bill in your hand and going "Yea, I'll break the law and possibly destroy my life to steal $7.50"
The quote about succession planning is also a little out of context, he phrased it more that there should be continual information and responsibility sharing such that succession planning is effectively redundant or unnecessary.
I always wondered why investors were ok with not having any control due to dual structure shares and board composition. A "Great Men" theory of the world is a convenient and satisfying narrative, but it's usually not the best at explaining things. As the saying goes, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men".
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
Oh know, the consequences of my own actions have found me!
> But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
BUT THE COMPANY WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
It's mindboggling that you describe an apparently completely consensual affair as "sexual harassment". That's absurd.
Consider the case of Regina Santos-Aviles [1]. She committed suicide by setting herself on fire and had revealed that she'd been having an affair with her boss.
The power dynamics here are insane. Huang was the CEO and a billionaire. The legal liability that NVidia has or could have because of this is huge, particularly if they did nothing. Now there are big questions about who knew what when.
The reporting says somebody say them in a San Jose hotel and was basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment (I'm guessing; I don't know). Was that from NVidia or Huang personally? What NVidia staff, if any, authorized that?
If the board wants to really clean house they should authorize a thorough external investigation of that and any other possible affairs.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-gonzales-aide-affair-texts...
About their new interim CEO Colette Kress:
>'She starts her day talking with Israeli execs because Nvidia's major Israel operations (post-Mellanox acquisition, ~6k staff, ~18% of revenue via networking chips) are business-critical'
Given the report that the US gov knew about this for a while, it seems more likely that it's coming from the administration?
One should never give up control it seems. Zuck is right.
Huawei just announced a fully domestic computer, Deepseek is rumored to be training v5 right now on entirely domestic Ascend chips.
I know eventually down the road there will come out all the justifications for how this was to protect AGI, open vs closed. But this move has also now tipped the scale beyond just the hardware bifurcation, but also the open vs. closed and commons vs. sovereign models. This isn't just chopping off your nose, this is America purposely gouging out it's eyes and removing it's ability to see down the road. Jensen Huang was the world's best shot and trying to keep a global AI world together, but one side has made their voice on that extremely loud and clear.
Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.
Tin foil hat take: I think Jensen's been sniped.
None of them are able to put two and two together that this was a deliberate coup
And it seems like nobody is paying attention to what Jensen Huang was fighting for. He was against regulation of open source local models. He was against regulation shifting liability of local model developers as well as frontier models.
All in all without Jensen, it isn't just about NVIDIA, there's no one to champion for open source models and running them locally is going to get a lot harder and expensive. It's actually going to accelerate the monopolization of closed models and they will have to pass on the costs to consumers.
It's an L across the board and I'm noting the degraded quality of discourse on HN and that nobody is seeing through the veil here.
The dude is out at the absolute top of the company because he fucked too many women he shouldn't have and in a year people will be missing him when the AI reckoning for hardware manufacturers comes.
Edit: and hairworks! That fucking shit that tanked performance but was "a game changer" due to PR. Just like the fake frames and slop filter they're pushing now.
I was under the impression he sold it to a Singapore company, or even any other companies. What those companies do with those GPU is not his fault.
This whole thing is just a sad story.
Felt like he knew what he was talking about, and spoke with real passion and vision.
Watching tech keynotes these days feels like the same boring marketing script on repeat.
I’ll miss that.
It's possible Tim Cook's phone is ringing right now.
It would be interesting if the story unfolded with Jensen going to TSMC [1] and Tim Cook taking over NVIDIA.
[1] https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/tsmc-founder-morris-chang-...
Very very few HW CEOs have even the slightest ability to appreciate the key strength of Nvidia which is ability to build hardware and then drive it with outstanding software.
Look at AMD. Great hardware but hamstrung by their software for 20 years.
Hardware is not enough.
Export controls have been skirted since the Bronze Age.
Sure on the merits, there’s enough for the board to ask him to resign.
But it’s his company. He built it from nothing. You have to start with that.
He was sleeping with one of his customers—a huge conflict of interest. That alone is good grounds to get a CEO fired, but it only gets worse! Alice Huang, a Chinese national, was previously working for a CCP propaganda channel network with an impeccable acronym: CCTV. Her company was accused publicly and investigated by the government for suspected smuggling of sanctioned NVIDIA hardware into China. Now we learned he also had an affair with one of his direct reports — another diabolical conflict of interest, which alone could be good reason to oust the CEO and possibly the VP as well.
It's yet to be determined whether he disclosed secrets to the Chinese spy, or whether he at least privately admitted to the second affair (if not, that's even worse!)
It's not a single, horrendous mistake anymore but a pattern of disastrously poor judgement. Building an extraordinary company and technology shouldn't mean lack of accountability, and thankfully we found out today that even at the highest level it doesn't.
[0] https://fortune.com/2026/11/09/nvidia-board-probe-jensen-hua...
He's the hero we needed but didn't deserve. If this thing didn't happen my guess is open models wouldn't exist and we would be deeper and darker into the whole AI boom
o7
I don't want to sound like a Jensen apologist, obviously huge missteps on his part, but he was quite a figure in shaping the last few years broad economic narrative. Good or bad, he was a force in shaping one of the largest investments ever. Does that shift without him? Does it shift really quick?
I would have preferred a slow fade into the sunset as a opposed to a dramatic exit. Yes, there would have always been a correction, but the bubble bursting explosively vs a more measured, slower correction will have different broader impacts and I just hope this doesn't push more towards the outcome that hurts a lot more.
Meaning that the 9 people pushing him out add up to own 0.36% of Nvidia share, only 0.36%
This is betray of shareholder interest. The board doesn't own Nvidia, this is not their business, yet only they can vote. they just want to finish as soon as possible, and you get a mad result.
When Cambridge Analytica happened, no one kicked Mark out of Facebook/Meta.
Not making excuses for Jensen, at his status and power level, this stuff goes with the territory. But I cant help but see a double standard here.
AI pushed Jensen into the spotlight very quickly and he didn't respond well, but he should go down in history as an extraordinary leader.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
I suspect the real reason the board fired him is he's been lying to the board. It's not the indiscretion it's the lie that gets you.
If he was lying about his affairs with staff then maybe he's been lying to the board about following export controls and other things.
If he knowingly sent GPUs to Megaspeed knowing they would get in Chinese hands, he is guilty of Conspiracy, Espionage, SEC violations, and Export Control violations.
Just the Espionage charge alone is 20yr to life, with the possibility of execution/death penalty.
He is superfucked.
I think the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. That opens up NVidia to a lot of legal exposure.
The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Skirting export bans is an unknown. I honestly don't believe this administration would let anything bad happen there. Jensen Huang is simply too rich and NVidia too big.
This was the founder? Damn!
I get that hardware requires much more capital and investment than a pure software company, but he had crossed the board-being-able-to-fire-you rubicon looong ago
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
Jack Clark Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic / head of the Anthropic Institute is the nyt and @AnaSwanson "source" he is the one coordinating a coup against Jensen.
Jensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
I remember Jensen saying he doesn’t have a contract with TSMC. The whole supply is based on a trusted relationship and handshake deals between the two CEOs. I wonder if that relationship is transferable to his successor.
Nvidia was/is such a fundamental cog in the american ai economy/ machine, what spies, what cheating are people obsessed about? Nvidia created the capital for its own success; read about it, think about it, be against it, be for it. The capital did not exist, they created it by neoclouds buying hardware which they wouldnt need for two years ahead by lender and vendor-backed financing; hardware, which would be replaced in another 2-4 years.
Will nVidia continue to provide the same backing to neo-clouds? Without nVidia backing are lenders willing to give more or less?
Forget about chinese openweight models, antropic or oai, I see this development as a huge spanner in the us ai economy, maybe the biggest blunder of the year.
And finally: Jensen selling to the chinese iron. Okay, was he the only one, god amongst mortals, in the fricking room. Who the heck comes up with these shallow plots...
From the NYT live updates.
Ah well, I'm somewhat seeing parallels to the 2023 OpenAI drama, not sure if this is gonna be how things end quite yet.
No, the alternative is not to “not having affairs”. Remember, we don’t need evidence to spin a narrative.
But talk about ruining a legacy before it really took off. I don't really have sympathy. But this guy should have carried around a piece of paper with some short aphorisms to look at everyday to anchor him back to reality.
The king’s crown tumbles. Stock is already down 10% this morning.
I wonder if this will be the catalyst for Nvidia losing the lead
(bad) jokes aside, it seems that the us gov probably dont believe enough on the affair case for gpus to appear in china and they got rid of the guy
i think this might be the end of an evolution era for nvidia.
Eh, i think he's acting as a heatshield for Nvidia, his affairs are irrelevant, but the Chinese sales could put both Nvidia as a company and him as CEO in jail... this allows them both to pretends it's a 'personal issue' and get away with it.
That bit with Dwarkesh was very prophetic in hindsight.
Conspiracy reaction: Something is going on here... obviously not due to sleeping with a spy...
May God have mercy on us all.
Waiting to see how market reacts, I am selling my shares.
Dear Jensen, time to start another company.
And if you believe in conspiracy theory, I guess anthropic is very happy.
[macrumors](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/12/johny-srouji-eyed-as-po...)
Handy thing for Trump to keep in his back pocket to distract Democrats attention if they won the midterms.
Think they take this stance when it's time to hand out yearly bonuses?
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
Every influential person, even middle managers, have a laundry list of “scandals” . The real question is why now and why him.
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
Perhaps this may help explain why it's unethical to date a direct report to those HNers:
- It's unfair to the coworkers of the subordinate, because the affair can give the impression of influencing promotion, personnel and monetary decisions you make in favour of the subordinate.
- It places your direct report in a compromising position. Such a relationship is potentially coercive, because the direct report may fear reprisal, rendering any consent invalid. Many have commented that imputing coercion to any power imbalance leads to the absurd conclusion a rich person shouldn't date at all - however, this use of "slippery slope" doesn't offset your ethical duty as a leader. As the boss, you have to protect your employees, and placing them in this situation in the first place violates that commitment.
tl;dr you violate your duty of care, plain and simple, to everyone underneath you by doing this.
A pragmatic, ethical workplace policy is to instead date people not in your reporting chain. If that means you shouldn't date your employees as CEO, then that's responsible behaviour, not a chafing limitation.
---
Others have commented that Jensen's affair is plausibly fine because "we don't know his private affairs". Jensen has made an unambiguous statement about hurting his wife and family - if they were non-monogamous, Jensen has had the opportunity to disclose it. Absent that, you have to assume this was an illicit affair. Moreover, none of this changes the fact that having an affair with a direct report was entirely unethical.
Still others have attempted a whataboutism by asking why "other CEOs" haven't had this level of blowback for having an affair with a subordinate. Unfortunately, not every tragedy gets the same level of public reaction, for no other reason than timing, luck, or lack if engagement. We should be equally upset about all the other cases as a general rule, rather than relying on normalized apathy to lull us into complacence.
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
It's actually an excellent high quality service and with all the shortages should hopefully continue to get more and more successful. Cloud gaming will continue to become a more important part of gaming.
Now that Microsoft recently enshittified Xbox Cloud Gaming, we have a situation where GeForce Now is pretty much the only good option left.
One Blue Tsunami, and now all the oligarchs are suddenly turning progressive and transitioning! Trump was right all along. This is exactly what he was trying to warn us about.
Think of all the mistresses who will now have to accept and adapt to their oligarch lover's new gender -- Jensen has at least two that we know of, but when you see two ants in the kitchen, you know there are a lot more. I can't wait to see the wig Bezos picks out.
What is, however had, more interesting is that many of his statements did not age well. Now, mind you - I still think it is his private life at the end of the day; one can reason about foreign spies, but then the same question can be asked about Trump and his strange addiction to Putin. As well as how Jen-Hsun was so obedient to a mainland-China female, when the other Taiwanese are scared of being possibly invaded and subsequently killed by dictator Xi, just as dictator Putin commits to his own personal genocide against Ukrainians right now.
But, with regards to statements, I distinctly remember Jen-Hsun berating the british as incompetent economists. I watched that on a shorts on youtube; can not find it right now (google search AND youtube search sucks to no ends now). Well - he may be right that the UK suffers huge economic problems, but boy, this has not aged well. People will poke fun at his love of women potentially being spies while berating the british as being too incompetent in economics. Perhaps he was too incompetent in his own love life?
There will be an endless walk of shame for Jensen that would constantly drag the price of the company down, because this is the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to fly out of the gate in January and put the fear of god into the other billionaire oligarchs again. Punish one with extreme measures the others will fall in line, because at the end of the day they are all pussys.
Remember Elon wanted to do cagefighting with Zuckerberg. Those two losers had every excuse ready not to fight in the end. They didn’t even touch gloves for a single sparring. Manly men. All they can do is tough talk.
Plus the voters will see at least one party is doing something against blatant billionaire corruption, with corruption being the third most important topic in the elections.
There needs to be made an example of what happens to you if you start selling weapons-grade technology to the enemies of the United States for personal profit, and then think you are above the law.
This is not over for Jensen. And also not over for Nvidia, so the only sane thing to do is get as much distance between the "rogue" CEO and the company. Same for the White House, let’s see how often we see Jensen and Trump still together.
They are going to throw him under the bus and say he had the opportunity and the access and the power to do this without anyone else noticing, especially as he was sexually manipulating managers that directly report to him on important corporate issues.
They will make it look as though it’s all Jensen’s fault because otherwise they stop being a trillion-dollar company.
It’s a fitting end for Jensen Huang.
He gets taken down by the holy trifecta of power, money and politics he valued above his own marriage or what this whole mess would do to his kids.
He even lied in his public apology because he still was confident the other affair with his married manager would never surface because he truly believes he is smarter than anyone else.
What a loser. 140B deep pockets and still a loser.
Money is only paper. All that counts is family.
Threw away his life’s work, his marriage and every last drop of respect for him as a man, father and husband his kids could ever have for pocket change and some ass.
Colette Kress has brain of Marisa Mayer who destroyed Yahoo. A woke clown to lead technology company? No vision, no skills, no understanding of technology.
I think if you could know the truth, 75% of CEOs in the US probably cheat on their wives. They are not hired to be faithful to their wives, they are hired to increase the stock prices of their companies.
Like sure, if you're a good Christian, it's not good behavior, but ultimately, it's just having sex with someone. I want the guy to make me money and build a great company, I don't care who he has sex with.