Business Brief: Nvidia weighs firing Huang

Résumé détaillé

Leader of $4-trillion company makes questionable decisions

Good morning. The world’s largest artificial-intelligence company is sizing up a leadership change after revelations that founder and CEO Jensen Huang had an extramarital affair with a direct report, following news of another relationship with a suspected Chinese spy.

Also on our watch today: A fight over Monday night hockey, Anthropic’s elusive (in Canada) IPO and a growing gambling problem.

This has the feeling of inevitability, doesn’t it? Even as analysts warned that pushing out Jensen Huang would wreak havoc on the markets, even as Nvidia’s board said it had confidence in its co-founder and chief executive, and even as U.S. President Donald Trump seemed happy to let slide an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, it’s hard to imagine one of America’s most important companies being steered by a leader who might never escape questions about his exposure to the West’s greatest rival.

What appears to have brought the board’s kettle to a boil, however, was a more ordinary transgression – a second affair, this one with an executive who reported to him.

Directors were meeting to determine Huang’s fate as early as last night, the Wall Street Journal reported, hours after the New York Times published a story about an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice-president of health care.

The decision deepens the uncertainty that has hung over Nvidia since Huang’s relationship with a suspected Chinese spy came to light last month.

As scrutiny mounted over the nature of Huang’s first reported affair, many were questioning whether he was the target of a “honey trap,” James Griffiths writes – claims Beijing dismissed as “groundless speculation and slander.”

The board’s decision brings a potential end of an era for the company and the industry it helped create. In the course of building the world’s top supplier of AI chips and a US$4-trillion juggernaut, Huang became the world’s most influential proponent for the technology and brought massive riches to investors who bought in early.

Even…

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