It’s been just a little over twenty-four hours since Jensen Huang’s ignominious resignation from Nvidia, the company he cofounded in 1993 and turned into a tech behemoth. And already an army of employees is calling for his return.
Before Nvidia’s board of directors announced Thursday morning that Huang would be stepping aside, to be replaced by longtime company CFO Colette Kress, a veteran engineer at Nvidia submitted an internal post urging the board to take employee sentiment into account before making a final decision, Wired reported Thursday evening. It has since turned into a kind of petition for the disgraced ex-CEO’s return, garnering more than 1,600 comments, many of which are reportedly supportive of Huang’s reinstatement as CEO.
Some current and former Nvidia staffers have also publicly lamented Huang’s departure since Thursday morning, describing him as a singular and visionary leader without whom Nvidia will be left rudderless, to the detriment of the entire American AI effort. “His departure is a huge loss,” Denis Timonin, an engineer who left Nvidia in 2024 to found his own company, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “An affair, on its own, shouldn’t outweigh decades of leadership. The serious questions deserve real answers. But the soap opera shouldn’t decide his future… I want Jensen to keep building and leading. There’s too much important work ahead.”
Huang is currently suspected of having had at least three extramarital affairs: one with a woman believed by U.S. intelligence agencies to be a Chinese spy, another with a Nvidia executive who reported to him, and a third—reported Thursday by Reuters—with another Nvidia employee.
SpaceX owner Elon Musk, himself no stranger to controversy, has said it “would be an honor” to hire Huang. (Musk is also no stranger to making grandiose claims on social media, so please take that with a hearty grain of salt.) And the podcaster Lex Fridman, who interviewed Huang earlier this year, wrote in an X post Thursday that Nvidia’s decision to part ways with Huang “is a huge mistake, for America and for humanity.” Fridman compared Huang’s departure to Steve Jobs’s 1985 ousting from Apple, which followed a dispute with then-company CEO John Sculley. But Huang’s departure was “much bigger,” Fridman wrote, “given the role of AI in defining the future of our world.” Jobs famously returned to Apple in 1997, initially as interim CEO, and went on to pull the company back from the brink of bankruptcy.
But there’s another much more recent Silicon Valley putsch that Huang’s departure brings to mind: the firing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, almost exactly three years ago to the day. OpenAI’s board of directors wrote in a blog post at the time that Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications… hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Chief technology officer Mira Murati was named interim CEO, but was soon replaced by former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. Five days later, amid intense employee backlash—including the resignation of company president Greg Brockman, who quit in protest—OpenAI agreed to reinstate Altman as CEO, and most of the board members who had fired him agreed to resign. Among them was cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who had reversed course and backed Altman’s return. Brockman returned as president, while Sutskever and Murati both left OpenAI the following year.
Importantly, Altman’s ousting was (at least ostensibly) motivated purely by concerns about his leadership style, whereas Huang’s involves his personal life. Timonin (the ex-Nvidia engineer), Fridman, and others have publicly argued that Huang’s sexual indiscretions shouldn’t condemn him as a leader, particularly at a time when the U.S. is competing with China to dominate the AI industry. That argument could sway the board to reverse its decision and reinstate Huang, especially if employee backlash reaches 2023 post-Altman-firing levels, though that outcome doesn’t seem particularly likely right now. The fact that one of Huang’s alleged affairs was with a subordinate at Nvidia does make it company business.
Huang certainly isn’t the first CEO to have been caught having extramarital affairs, and Nvidia has its financial future to think about, especially now that its overseas business could be squeezed by an expected federal rule that would impose new restrictions on advanced AI chips sent to overseas data centers, in an effort to prevent Chinese companies from remotely accessing them.
An affair with a suspected foreign intelligence asset, however, is something else entirely. Much remains mysterious about Alice Huang and her alleged links to Chinese intelligence. In an X post late Thursday evening, David Sacks—Trump’s former AI czar and current co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—declared that “the spy narrative is collapsing already.” Sacks linked to a CNN story reporting that U.S. national security officials disagree on whether the evidence shows Alice Huang knowingly spied for China’s Ministry of State Security. However, CNN also reported that some officials continue to consider her a significant counterintelligence risk, and that the FBI’s investigation is ongoing. (As of last November, Sacks had hundreds of tech investments, according to the New York Times.) Trump likewise told the TV personality Stephen A. Smith that he didn’t know if it had been determined yet that she is in fact a spy. (Trump reportedly purchased up to $1.6 million in Nvidia stock this past summer.)
“If the woman was not a spy, perhaps it would be different,” Trump told Smith, referring to Huang’s decision to resign. “But I can tell you this: Somehow, he’ll end up on his feet.”
