Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns after revelations on extramarital affairs

Well, with Nvidia yet to make a decision on Jensen Huang's future at the company several days after it was revealed that he possibly had an affair with a Chinese spy, many were starting to believe that he maybe could survive the scandal. Well, the revelations late Wednesday that he had a second extramarital affair, this time with a fellow Nvidia executive, perhaps made it impossible for him to stay on. Jensen Huang did finally resign just moments ago Thursday after his affair with Alice Wong, of course, had raised national security concerns. For more, we're going to cross to our Washington correspondent, Fraser Jackson. Hi there, Fraser. So what more do we know about Wong's resignation then? Well, this is significant. Jensen Huang resigning as the president, the CEO, and also a board member of NVIDIA. That's effective immediately. He had about 3% or so shares in the company and those combinations of positions that he had a lot of control over the company. I think we can kind of read between the lines here that it looks like Huang has kind of resigned before he was pushed by the board. This looking a lot. A lot less kind of hostile, as it were, than if you had been fired. One eye definitely on that stock price, which has been tanking over the last few hours, especially before the stock market opens in a short while here in the U.S. Well, they have now appointed. Colette Kress as interim CEO, while she'll also continue her roles as the executive vice president and chief financial officer of the company as well. We can talk a bit more in a little bit. They've also appointed a first-ever chair of the board. That was insignificant because up until now, there hadn't been a chairman of the board of directors of NVIDIA. Up until this point, they've kind of had a lot of independence as people running that board. A lot of them had known Huang for decades. One was added in 2021, but that is a significant development that they clearly are now trying to bring themselves more into line with a more traditional structure of the board, which is quite fascinating. And that board is now initiating a search for a permanent CEO and will consider internal and external candidates. That then would be the first leader that NVIDIA has had other than Jensen Huang in the years since it was created, the 33 years since it was created. By Jensen Huang, who, of course, has made over 100, well over $100 billion from this company. And it's also interesting as well to note the fact that they say they're going to consider external candidates as well. In reality, there are very few people who would be able to. have this kind of level of CEO-ship for a company this size, which, of course, is so integral to the U.S. economy at the moment and also to the AI race as we continue, that in reality, it might be difficult for NVIDIA to be able to kind of poach some of that talent. But we'll see who they end up finding. Elon Musk, for example, has spoken about Jensen Huang and said that he would happily give Jensen Huang a job. So this is quite a big development that we've been tracking. Coming from Nvidia here and of course comes after days of those scandals that we've been covering as well. Now, Fraser, I mean, you spoke to just how essential NVIDIA as a single company is to the AI economy and thus to the American economy as well. Earlier this week, we've heard Donald Trump express nothing but support for Jensen Huang. I mean, how might his resignation change things? And what other reactions have you been hearing in Washington, at least prior to his resignation, to just how big of a deal this scandal is? Well, NVIDIA is an interesting company because I think... More casual people probably know NVIDIA through their graphics cards. They own about 90% of the market of graphics cards. So if you're a gamer, for example, and of course, we've got Grand Theft Auto 6 about to be released, which is going to be one of the biggest games of all time. A lot of people know NVIDIA because their graphics cards are effectively the market leader and the gold standard for graphics cards. But they own much more than that. And a lot more of their business comes from the data center markets, It's where they also own the market majority in that market as well. And it's that that has really kind of led them to have such a chokehold on the U.S. economy. They have spent a lot of time kind of schmoozing the tech and the chip manufacturers in Taiwan, for example. Jensen Huang had said that he was going to be investing well over $100 billion in Taiwan every year. And that is now worrying. Other manufacturers on the island of Taiwan as to whether the next CEO will be as kind of bullish, as kind of strong as Jensen Huang was in that regard. So this is going to be impacting, going to be impacting the market significantly. Last time I checked, the trading was down at around $155 a share here in the U.S. Yes, just on the 3rd of October, around a month or so ago, it hit its market's peak of around Around $243 a share. So you can see that it's basically lost a third of its value in that time, which is a massive cut. But that also, you know, could then lead people to jumping on that stock as something that they see could be ultimately a long term earner. Because Nvidia at the end of the day. Is the kind of market leader and effectively a monopoly when it comes to chips, which means that a lot of people could make a lot of money if they're dumping money into this now and expecting it to go back up to what it was expected to get up to, which is on three hundred and eight dollars a share over the course of the next 12 months. So we'll see where the stocks fall, but that could also end up dictating how the company acts to this, how they kind of. navigate these tricky waters, but it could also impact how Donald Trump sees this as well. He is a man who always has one eye on the stock market, and he's somebody who's built a personal relationship with Jensen Huang over the course of the last two years. He even summoned Jensen Huang to fly with him to Beijing on Air Force One for that summit in May, and we know now that previous... To him being summoned on the same flight, Marco Rubio had briefed Donald Trump about this potential affair with a Chinese spy. So, you know, we are getting a lot more reporting in the last couple of days about the role that Jensen Huang has been having, not only in Nvidia, but also in the AI market more generally. And also the role that his affair that he had with this woman has also been playing in the company at large. Fraser Jackson, our Washington correspondent, thank you very much. Well, we're going to continue to cover this story. As a reminder, then, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang has just stepped down. It is the chief financial officer, Colette Kress, that will take over as interim CEO as the company looks for a permanent successor, as we just heard our Washington correspondent, Fraser Jackson, say. Now, for more, we're going to speak to our international affairs commentator, Douglas Herbert, who joins me on set. Hi, Doug. Hi, Erin. So can you give us a feel for the big picture, the context of this resignation? Well, first of all, I think it's fascinating just how much, you know, there are big stories, big headlines, just how much literally the entire world, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say, has been hanging on the outcome of the fate of Jensen Huang, one man at the head of one of the world's biggest and most vital tech companies. And why is that? Because rarely in the history, you could say, in the history of major corporations, especially tech corporations, Has any one man... ...been so solidly identified with not just what the corporation does, but with its entire identity. The question being, what happens to that company if that one person... who is synonymous with the company itself is no longer there. How many companies can you think of who have had a leader like that? You might have with Apple, right? Way back, Steve Jobs. It was almost impossible. People didn't even know Apple. They knew who Steve Jobs was, and you couldn't dissociate the two. Elon Musk, right? More recently in the era of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk is practically synonymous with these companies. And you think if he's Severed from those companies, what happens to the companies? Do they continue to exist in their current form? Now, in favor of NVIDIA. Being able to continue to exist in some sort of very viable form without Jensen Huang, its co-founder at Intel, is the fact that it is literally at the apex of the driving technology of the 21st century right now. There's the AI race going on, a cutthroat race between China and the US right now, one in which Donald Trump has basically been extremely bullish on AI precisely because he insists it will be a disaster for not just the US, but for humanity as a whole if China is to win the AI race. So you have that. You have the fact that AI is just, it's the industry as a whole is too big to fail in a sense with or without Jensen Huang at the head of NVIDIA. But it's also the role NVIDIA has. You speak about big AI companies, right? Like OpenAI, Anthropic. These are companies that have the AI platforms, the models. What NVIDIA did is it's at the nexus of everything. It literally engineered the very advanced semiconductor chips. That enable these companies, the AIs, the OpenAIs, the Anthropics, to make, to feed their language models. Without NVIDIA, you essentially don't have right now an AI industry to the degree that, and here's an astonishing figure, that NVIDIA controls about 90%, 90% of the chips, of these advanced chips, the market for them, used to build these AI models. Does it mean. Down the road, Erin, some other company might not come up and steal the limelight and take some of that market share away. Sure, it could happen. Things evolve quickly in the tech world. But for now, Nvidia, if not the only game in town, is the absolute juggernaut. And so we'll have to see in the hours to come. Without Jensen Huang, how viable does it remain? How much room will there be for competitors to come in? And how will this shake up the whole geopolitical battle, that AI race I was talking about, between the US and China? Douglas Herbert, our international affairs commentator, thank you very much for that context.