For three decades, Jensen Huang has been the irreplaceable face of Nvidia. He co-founded the company in 1993, built it into the undisputed king of AI computing, and turned a niche graphics-chip maker into a $5 trillion juggernaut. In January 2026, when asked the secret to his longevity as CEO, Huang quipped: “The secret for being CEO for this long is, one, don’t get fired, and, two, don’t get bored”.
Ten months later, that first rule is hanging by a thread. Nvidia’s board of directors is now formally reviewing Huang’s future, and the company—the most important corporation in the global AI economy—is confronting a question it has spent 33 years avoiding: What happens if Jensen Huang can’t lead anymore? The answer, it turns out, is uncomfortably close to “nobody knows.”
The Scandal That Broke the Silence
The crisis erupted in early November 2026, when reports emerged that Huang, 63, had engaged in an extramarital relationship with a woman identified as Alice Huang (also known as Huang Le), a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed International. US intelligence agencies reportedly suspect Alice Huang of working for China’s Ministry of State Security. Megaspeed and its Malaysian affiliate allegedly purchased roughly $4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips between June 2024 and February 2026—a fact that has drawn scrutiny from the Commerce Department over potential export-control violations.
Huang admitted to the affair in a message to employees, saying he was “unfaithful” to his wife and that there was “no excuse” for his actions. The board immediately launched an independent investigation, stating it had “no reason to believe” that national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised.
Then the story deepened. Just days later, The New York Times reported a second extramarital affair—this time with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice-president of healthcare, who reported directly to Huang. Powell’s relationship with the CEO raises a separate set of governance concerns around workplace conduct and undisclosed conflicts of interest.
The board’s initial response was supportive. A company spokesperson said Huang was “committed to continuing to lead Nvidia as CEO without interruption”. But that unity has since fractured. By mid-November, the board was reportedly meeting to decide whether to oust Huang altogether, and had begun working with an external firm to identify potential replacements.
A Board With No Chair—and No Distance From the CEO
To understand why this crisis is so destabilizing, you have to understand the unusual structure of Nvidia’s board. The company has 11 directors, and all but Huang are classified as independent. Yet three of those independent directors have served since the 1990s, and a fourth, Mark Stevens, has been on the board for most of that time. The average board tenure is nearly 15 years—almost twice the S&P 500 average. Nvidia also operates without a permanent board chair, a rarity among major corporations.
These are not technicalities. They go to the heart of whether the board can credibly investigate its own CEO. “The board composition suggests this is… a CEO exercising effective control over the board instead of vice versa,” said Jill Fisch, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School. Long tenure can reduce directors’ independence and breed complacency—especially when the CEO is a visionary who has generated staggering returns. “How do you say no to someone with this track record of success?” Fisch added.
Three former employees told The New York Times that Huang has largely treated the board as a governance requirement rather than a genuine strategic partner. The board has enabled his unconventional management style, including an extraordinarily flat organizational structure in which more than 50 executives report directly to him—sometimes as many as 60. The result is a company that moves fast but is dangerously dependent on one person. “Jensen is Nvidia. Nvidia is Jensen,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC.
Under Delaware corporate law and Nvidia’s own bylaws, a majority of the board can remove the CEO “with or without cause”. The board has the legal authority. The question is whether it has the will—and the independence—to use it.
The Succession Void: A Crisis Within a Crisis
Even if the board decides to move on from Huang, it faces a second, arguably larger problem: there is no obvious successor. Nvidia has never publicly signaled a succession plan. The word “succession” appears nowhere in its most recent annual report to shareholders, compared with 25 times for Microsoft and 16 for Alphabet. Huang has said he does not believe in succession planning, reportedly fearing it would create divisions among senior executives. In 2023, he suggested he could run Nvidia for another three or four decades.
The internal bench is thin. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress is the most visible executive alongside Huang and has been floated as a possible interim CEO. She has worked at Nvidia for 13 years and previously held finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft. But analysts note that Kress, a finance specialist, is not a natural heir to a CEO whose superpower is technical vision and product strategy. Ian Buck, the inventor of Nvidia’s CUDA software and head of its data-center business, is another frequently mentioned internal candidate, though he has not been publicly positioned as a successor.
External names have also surfaced. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been rumored as a potential stabilizer. AMD CEO Lisa Su—a relative of Huang—and Arm CEO Rene Haas, a former Nvidia employee, have been mentioned in analyst notes. Huang’s own children, Madison and Spencer, both work at Nvidia, but Huang has said he does not hope the job on his daughter and that any family successor would have to “earn it”.
The absence of a clear heir is not merely an inconvenience. It is a structural vulnerability for a company whose chips power the AI ambitions of Microsoft, Google, Meta, and countless startups. “The biggest issue is no human goes on forever, and this is exactly why you want a good succession plan in place if something like this were to happen,” said Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert. Peter Jaworski, a business ethics professor at Georgetown, put it more bluntly: the lack of planning suggests the board was “asleep at the wheel”.
The Market Has Already Rendered a Verdict
Financial markets have not waited for the board’s decision. Nvidia shares fell sharply as the scandal unfolded, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars from the company’s market value. At one point, the stock dropped 8% in after-hours trading following reports that the board was preparing to oust Huang, leaving it roughly 33% below its October peak. On the day the board’s investigation was announced, Nvidia closed 4.27% lower—a loss of about $190 billion—on a day when the Nasdaq rose nearly 3%.
Economist Mohamed El-Erian warned that the market may not have fully priced in the “key-man risk” that has always lurked beneath Nvidia’s success. For years, investors have been buying into Nvidia’s technology and Huang’s vision in equal measure. “The market has spent years assigning Nvidia a premium for exceptional execution,” said Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management. “It may now have to calculate how much of that premium was attached to one individual”.
The implications extend far beyond Nvidia’s share price. Nvidia sits at the center of an interconnected AI ecosystem—financing data-center buildouts, supplying chips to cloud providers, and shaping US policy on AI exports. A leadership vacuum could delay product roadmaps, unsettle customer relationships, and weaken Nvidia’s influence in Washington at a moment when export controls and national security are front and center. Rivals like AMD, Broadcom, and Alphabet could benefit as customers diversify their suppliers, but the broader risk is a slowdown in AI spending itself.
What Happens Next?
The situation remains fluid. Some reports, particularly from international outlets, have claimed that Huang has already resigned and that Colette Kress has been appointed interim CEO. Other, more cautious sources say the board is still deliberating and has not announced a final decision. What is clear is that the board has formed a committee of independent directors to conduct the investigation, and three House committee chairs have requested a closed-door briefing from Huang on November 18. President Donald Trump has expressed confidence in Huang, but political support may not be enough to quell shareholder unease and regulatory scrutiny.
Several scenarios are plausible. The board could reaffirm its support for Huang, accepting his admission of personal misconduct while concluding that no national-security secrets were compromised. It could place him on leave pending the investigation’s outcome. Or it could negotiate an exit—perhaps with an interim CEO like Kress, followed by a longer search for a permanent leader. Any of these paths would require the board to do something it has rarely done: assert its authority over the man who built the company.
The Bigger Lesson: Founder-Led Companies and the Succession Blind Spot
Nvidia’s crisis is, in one sense, a story about a specific scandal. But it is also a case study in the risks of founder-led companies that outgrow their governance structures. Huang’s flat hierarchy, his refusal to plan for succession, and his board’s long-standing deference all worked brilliantly while he was in the seat. They allowed Nvidia to move at the “speed of light,” as Huang has described it, and to outmaneuver larger rivals. But they left the company with no cushion when the unthinkable happened.
“You can’t base a company that big around one person,” Elson said. “You just can’t. What if he gets hit by a bus?” The bus, in this case, is a governance and reputational crisis that no one at Nvidia’s board seems to have war-gamed. The company is now paying the price—not just in market value, but in the erosion of the institutional trust that underpins its role as the backbone of the AI economy.
For Jensen Huang, the man who once joked that the key to a long tenure is “don’t get fired,” the next few weeks will determine whether that rule holds. For Nvidia, the question is larger: whether a company that changed the world can learn to function without the person who changed it.
