The rise and fall of Jensen Huang – how the tech superstar became mired in scandal

Huang has hailed AI as a “new industrial revolution” that is on par with the advent of electricity. Nvidia is the world’s second most valuable company and its customers include the biggest firms on the planet, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic, all spending big on its products.

So it is no surprise that at a recent AI summit at the White House, Huang was picked out from a group of 42 to flank the president, alongside Elon Musk, both men with whom Trump has famously close relationships.

“Jensen Huang is a tech visionary of the likes of Steve Jobs,” Stephen Witt, the author of Thinking Machine, a biography on Jensen Huang, told the BBC, referring to the late boss of Apple. He added that Huang was responsible for creating AI hardware as we know it today.

He described him as a “demanding” boss, who “really pushes his people to the limit”.

But while the former Nvidia CEO is “very brilliant” and a “world-class computer scientist”, there’s also “a level of arrogance” and “a level of self-deception as well”, he said.

Huang had gone to great lengths to present himself as a family man, he added, something that was “very important to him”.

“He praises his wife, he talks about her in very glowing ways,” Witt added. “The fallout of this would be bad for anyone’s family. But for someone who has gone to such great lengths to cultivate an image of being a family guy and who keeps his children very close, it is very bad.”

First reports emerged on 29 October in the New York Times that Huang had conducted a relationship with Alice Huang, no relation. US officials allege the businesswoman associated with Singapore-based firm Megaspeed is a Chinese intelligence asset.

After the revelations of the first affair, Huang admitted to having been “unfaithful” to his wife and apologised for hurting their family.

Trump, as well as other leaders in the AI tech industry, initially backed Huang to continue in his role at Nvidia. The president described him as “honourable”.

But the reporting of a second affair, with Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare who has worked at Nvidia for 18 years, prompted a board meeting, followed by the announcement Huang was stepping down.

In the aftermath of that news Trump said Huang had done “a fantastic job” and proposed Tim Cook of Apple as a suitable replacement at the head of Nvidia.