What will become of Nvidia and Sino-American relations without its chip rock star?

The motto that Jensen Huang used to repeat to Nvidia employees was: “The company is always 30 days away from bankruptcy.” I like the fact that we cannot rest on our laurels regarding our position within the company, that we cannot take it for granted and that we are always vulnerable: “We must always earn it, and we must always strive to improve,” he said a month ago in an interview with Bloomberg. Yesterday, shortly before the stock market opened, following weeks of daily revelations about his extramarital affairs – first with a businesswoman whom US intelligence believes to be a Chinese spy, Alice Huang, then with a company executive who reported directly to him, Kimberly Powell – the company’s board of directors announced the CEO’s resignation from all his posts and the appointment of Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer since 2013, as interim CEO. Shares plummeted this morning; since the ‘two Huangs’ scandal broke, the company’s share price has hit its lowest level in 14 years, and many analysts and investors have begun to express concerns about the ‘disproportionate’ impact that Huang’s resignation would have on Nvidia. It marks the ‘end of an era’ for a company that, for over thirty years, has had a single face: that of Jensen Huang, his Tom Ford leather jacket, which had become the symbol of his rise and his loyalty to his family – ‘I don’t know where my jackets come from; my wife and daughter dress me,’ he had said – and which, in the space of a few days, has turned into a letter of apology, a fall into a sensational trap set by the Chinese Communist Party, and the manifestation of his midlife crisis.

Just a few weeks ago, his departure was unthinkable; even before the board of directors met, doubts had emerged that it would lead to a change in leadership at the company, which has always had a ‘flat’, horizontal structure – the benefits of which Huang himself boasted about, as it was able to ‘empower everyone, so that information circulates quickly’ – which is why he had dozens of people reporting directly to him. Yesterday, that power backfired on him and was used to make the company more top-down for the first time, with the appointment of its first chairman, Harvey Jones, a technology sector expert who will be tasked with overseeing the CEO’s work. Not even the protection of the U.S. president was enough: Trump defended his “chip man” to the very end, vouching for his honesty and insisting he should remain at the helm of the company—so much so that he would even have taken him along to his next meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Yesterday he wrote on his social media platform Truth: “NOW THAT JENSEN HUANG, CEO of Nvidia, who has done a fantastic job, has resigned, there is only one man who can take his place: TIM COOK of Apple. A legend replaces a legend!”

In recent years, Jensen Huang had built a personal relationship with the President and with the Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, who had eased restrictions on the sale of chips despite concerns about Chinese espionage and smuggling; and in July 2025, he had travelled to Beijing with the news that deliveries of his H20 chip to Chinese customers were resuming, boasting of Nvidia’s full commitment to serving the Chinese semiconductor market, whilst already maintaining ties with the alleged Chinese spy. Yesterday, the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry in Beijing, Mao Ning, said that “the United States should stop fabricating so-called espionage stories as a pretext for imposing technology bans”, playing down the espionage scandal, which has been absent from the Chinese media and social media, which have instead focused on Jensen’s infidelities and private life. James Palmer, deputy editor of Foreign Policy and an expert on China, told Il Foglio that although China continues to deny the espionage allegations and is treating the matter as an American pretext, “it risks suffering a significant impact, because there will be far greater mistrust – not so much regarding chip sales to China itself, but rather regarding the circle of companies in places such as Singapore that often act as channels to circumvent restrictions. Perhaps they benefited more from the information than from Chinese influence, having Alice Huang as an informant: they had a direct line into technological discussions at the White House”.