The World’s Most Consequential AI CEO Is Out. And Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Era Is Over

IBL News | New York

The world’s most consequential AI CEO is out. And Nvidia’s Jensen Huang era is over. The company whose chips power the AI boom faces an uncertain future. However, the AI era will keep running on the engine he built. The question is who would take the wheel now? Elon Musk?

Jensen Huang, the 63-year-old co-founder and longtime Chief Executive of Nvidia, resigned after having two extramarital affairs (at least two known), including one with a suspected Chinese spy and another with an employee.

The company said Thursday that it was starting a search for his successor and that finance chief Colette Kress would serve as interim CEO.

Huang’s inglorious ending came after 33 years at the company he founded at a Denny’s with two friends, aiming to make graphics chips for personal computing and gaming. Later, he nurtured a software-developer ecosystem and designed high-performing AI graphics processing units to handle massive computations. Along the way, it became the world’s most valuable company.

Huang, who owns about 3.6% of the company, has become one of the world’s richest people as the company has grown.

As Nvidia became the leading chip designer for top tech companies, Huang was lauded by other tech CEOs and frequently held court at massive Nvidia conferences around the world for developers using the company’s products and software.

With its dominant market position, Nvidia became a financial benchmark for the growing AI industry. By funding and extending credit to companies that use its products, it built a web of relationships, seeding the AI landscape with startups that built on Nvidia’s technology.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1963 as Jen-Hsun, Huang grew up in Thailand before moving to the U.S., where he began going by Jensen because it was easier to pronounce. He remains a hero in Taiwan, the global hub of semiconductor manufacturing, and frequently returns to meet with industry executives like Morris Chang, TSMC’s founder, who manufactures Nvidia chips.

As Nvidia’s CEO, he was known for his relentless work ethic and competitive drive. He often told employees, “The company is always 30 days away from going out of business.”

Chronography

1993: Huang started Nvidia with two colleagues and $40,000. The plan was graphics chips for video games.

1999: Nvidia shipped the GeForce 256 and called it the world’s first GPU. It was built to draw pixels, but it could also run thousands of calculations at once.

2006: Huang bet the company on that side effect. Nvidia released CUDA, software that lets researchers use a GPU for any kind of math. Wall Street asked why a gaming company was building tools for physicists.

2012: A neural network called AlexNet won an image recognition contest running on two Nvidia gaming cards.

2016: Huang hand-delivered Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer to a young lab called OpenAI.

2023: After ChatGPT took off, every AI company wanted Nvidia’s chips. Nvidia became a $1 trillion company.

2025: Nvidia passed $4 trillion in value.

2026: Huang steps down after 33 years.