AFP via Getty ImagesIn recent years, Jensen Huang has been riding high on the crest of the AI wave as his company Nvidia became one of the most valuable in the world.
It only took a few days for it to all come crashing down.
Back-to-back revelations of two affairs involving the CEO, including a romantic relationship with an alleged Chinese spy, upended his seemingly untouchable status as a leading tech figure and led to his resignation from the company he helped form.
His departure leaves uncertainty in the global stock market, which leans on his microchip company, and over the future of a US company seen as a linchpin in the country’s race for AI dominance over China.
This hit the company’s shares, and they sank again after the New York Times reported that Huang had had a second affair with an executive at his own company.
Huang is well known in the technology, business and political world, but despite his company’s rocketing rise over the past four years, he perhaps isn’t as big a household name as fellow tech bros Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg.
However, Huang is probably more consequential to the development of AI across the world due to Nvidia making the best microchips in the business, which are used to power the technology.
The company, which is still valued at more than $4 trillion despite recent events, is at the centre of the AI race between the US and China, the world’s tech and economic powerhouses.
This has led to Huang holding court with both US President Donald Trump and China’s President XI Jinping. The leather-jacket wearing CEO has access to the world’s powerful like few others.
His remarkable rise to the top of his profession has led to him being dubbed the “Taylor Swift of tech” and seen him amass an estimated fortune of $145bn (£109bn), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Despite always donning his trademark black leather jacket look, Huang has worked for years to present himself as a family man, someone who exemplified the American Dream.
Born in Taiwan in 1963, Huang and his family moved to the west coast of the US when he was nine years old. He graduated as an electrical engineer from Oregon State University, and then with a master’s degree in the same field from Stanford University.
It was at college where he met his current wife, Lori Mills. The pair were lab partners and married in 1985, eight years before Huang founded Nvidia.
They have two children, Madison and Spencer, who now both work at their father’s firm.
He worked at US chip firm AMD before co-founding Nvidia. Known as “Daddy Huang” in Taiwan, he has a reputation as a workaholic with incredibly high standards for his staff.
The company became a key provider of computer chips and circuits used for gaming before it expanded in direction and entered the world of AI. It now creates the key processing chips used to power the growing technology.
Huang has hailed AI as a “new industrial revolution” that is on par with the advent of electricity.
“Jensen Huang is a tech visionary of the likes of Steve Jobs,” Stephen Witt, the author of Thinking Machine, a biography on the Jensen Huang, told the BBC, adding that he was responsible for creating AI hardware as we know it today.
The Nvidia co-founder has a famously close relationship with Trump. At a recent AI summit at the White House, where 42 tech executives were present, the president was flanked by Huang and Musk.
It was no surprise that Huang was at the top table. Companies using Nvidia’s chips include Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic.
In essence, Huang’s customer base includes the biggest firms on the planet and they are spending plenty on Nvidia’s products.
This intertwining of companies means that the negative impact being felt by Nvidia, on the stock market for example, could perhaps have wider implications on other companies and the wider economy.
Witt told the BBC that Jensen Huang had gone to great lengths to present himself as a family man, and that it was “very important to him”.
“He praises his wife, he talks about her in very glowing ways,” he 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.”
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, had backed Huang to continue in his role at Nvidia. The president described him as “honourable”.
