Nvidia Board Preps Ouster as $400B Vanishes in Days

Nvidia has shed more than $400 billion in market value this week, and the board is reportedly preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang, who founded the company 33 years ago, according to a Wall Street Journal report late Wednesday. Four hundred billion dollars. Gone in days. Not because of a factory collapse or a failed product, but because of who one man slept with and who might have been listening.

Who Has the Power

Here's the machinery in motion. The board is weighing whether to cut loose the man at the top. The company hired Joon Kim, a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz who previously investigated sexual harassment allegations against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to run an internal investigation. The FBI is looking too. Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, a senior GOP member of the Senate Banking Committee, told Politico: "The potential for extortion is so tremendous that something as sensitive as Nvidia chips, I just think he's got to go." He added that "to me, that's a security risk."

Notice what's being guarded. Not workers. Not the public. The chips.

Huang, 63, has 60 direct reports and no clear succession plan. His two children and son-in-law work at Nvidia. That's not a company so much as a dynasty with a ticker symbol. Insiders told CNBC the mood inside is "sad" because longtime employees had viewed Huang as an infallible idol. An idol. Remember that word.

What They're Calling "Order"

Huang apologized in an email Sunday to "colleagues, shareholders and his family." He wrote: "To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done." On Monday he walked into the Santa Clara headquarters, led his regular morning meeting, apologized again, took no questions, and pivoted to the day's agenda. People inside tried to project "business as usual," one week before the quarterly earnings report.

Business as usual is the whole point. The earnings call doesn't care about anyone's grief.

Meanwhile the relationship reportedly dates to 2023. During it, Huang lobbied the U.S. government to lift restrictions on exports to China, helping facilitate shipments of at least $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips to Chinese firms, according to The Information. Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, built a network of companies with her husband and sister across China and Singapore to acquire chips after the Biden administration banned them. In December 2025, President Trump approved the sale of Nvidia's H200 chips to China. Huang reportedly attended a Mar-a-Lago dinner for top donors and gave roughly $25 million to Trump's White House ballroom project.

Read that sequence slowly. Export bans. Lobbying. A dinner for donors. Twenty-five million dollars toward a ballroom. Then an approval.

The Warning Nobody Acted On

A classified memo overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio found that Alice Huang was allegedly recruited by China's Ministry of State Security. Rubio, identified as Secretary of State and national security adviser, wrote a classified memo last year warning that Huang might be compromised, and repeated the warning in May en route to a Beijing summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Commerce Department began investigating Megaspeed at least a year ago over alleged backdoor shipments of advanced Nvidia chips to Beijing. China has denied the accusations, calling them a smear.

So the apparatus knew. For months, possibly longer. Asked Monday, Trump said: "They could have been mentioned. Certainly, it didn't make much of an impact on me." He said he asked Huang whether he knew she was a spy, and that Huang said, "I had no idea that she was a spy." Trump added: "I really believe him."

Nvidia, for its part, asserts it does not believe any corporate or U.S. secrets were compromised.

The warnings were filed away. The donor dinner went ahead. The approval came through. Now the board moves, the senator demands a resignation, and the investigators bill their hours. Somewhere in that chain is the question nobody in a position of authority is asking out loud: who decided that a few men's access, money, and promises should determine where the world's most sensitive chips end up?