Nvidia's board ousted CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday after he confessed to an affair, TechCrunch reports, adding that there are also reports of another affair with a direct report. According to TechCrunch, one of the women is suspected by the U.S. government of being a spy for China and is an executive of a Singapore-based neocloud suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips to China. Republican committee chairs are summoning Huang to testify in closed-door sessions, and Nvidia is hunting for a new CEO, the outlet says.
In an opinion column, TechCrunch argues several of Huang's causes have lost their champion. Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a deal expected to close in the first half of next year pending regulatory approval. In July, Huang organized a letter backing open-weight models signed by hundreds of tech companies, and over 100 companies joined Nvidia's Open Agent Safety Platform. A line of Nvidia-powered AI PCs for running agents locally is due this holiday season.
The column also points to Huang's data center financing. Citing Forbes, it says nearly half of roughly $80 billion in data center bonds issued this year were rated junk. It cites Bloomberg for Nvidia's reported $750 billion in circular deals as of July, by some accounts, and CNBC for a $105 billion financing backstop for an OpenAI data center in Ohio. In August, Huang announced that Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR had committed up to $500 billion for build-outs, with Nvidia guaranteeing the GPUs would retain value as collateral. TechCrunch says Wall Street is concerned Nvidia's stock could crash.
