Jensen Huang has spoken to allies about returning as Nvidia’s CEO, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, only days after he stepped down after admitting to having an affair with a woman with alleged ties to Chinese intelligence—and after powerful supporters including Elon Musk urged the company’s board to reinstate him.
Key Facts
FT cited multiple anonymous sources, including one who said Huang’s allies were putting together a “war room” to lobby for his return.
Multiple billionaires and Silicon Valley executives signed an open letter to Nvidia’s board over the weekend calling for Huang’s reinstatement, including Musk, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Y Combinator president and CEO Garry Tan, and YouTube co-founder and former chief technology officer Steve Chen.
The letter, which some Nvidia employees and shareholders also signed, called on the company’s board to reinstate him while “an independent investigation establishes the facts,” calling for “due process, not mob justice.”
Huang admitted last week to being “unfaithful” to his wife—following reports he had affairs with Alice Huang, a former tech executive with alleged ties to Chinese intelligence, and at least one company employee.
Reuters later reported he had affairs with two Nvidia employees.
At least one ally who spoke to FT acknowledged this could be a problem, telling the publication the affairs with employees could be a “fireable offence.”
Key Background
The pressure to reinstall Huang as CEO comes after Huang reportedly agreed to testify before a closed Senate committee in the next month regarding his relationship with Alice Huang, the former executive at Singaporean data center firm Megaspeed, which was previously under suspicion from federal regulators for helping China get around U.S. export controls on advanced artificial intelligence chips.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also reportedly agreed to testify before the Senate committee in December. During a Thursday White House meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blamed Lutnick and the Commerce Department for not implementing stricter export restrictions on Megaspeed, according to Axios.
Contra
Despite the support from Silicon Valley executives, Bessent still called for a “dramatic shakeup” at Nvidia on Sunday, including finding a new CEO from outside the company. Speaking to Larry Kudlow on Fox Business’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Bessent said he wanted to examine the corporate culture at Nvidia, specifically if the company was ignoring warning signs about deals with foreign companies or if it was “pressing these seemingly illicit sales to goose their revenues and their earnings.”
Bessent claimed Nvidia’s Chinese sales declined just as its Singaporean sales skyrocketed, but the company later stopped publishing these numbers. The treasury secretary still called Nvidia a “wonderful company” and Huang an “incredible innovator,” but said executives had a duty to comply with federal regulations.
“I can tell you that if this was a bank and they hadn’t complied like this, the OCC would be in there right now and a lot of the executives would be removed,” Bessent added.
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