Mandatory leave.

I don’t really want to write about Jensen Huang. I will. But since I don’t want to, I’m going to start with something else.   

I’ve worked for several companies in banking and finance that had a mandatory leave policy: employees were required to take at least five days of their annual allotted paid vacation time in a single stretch, ensuring at least one full week away each year. The goal of these policies wasn’t work-life balance, but security. The thinking, as it was explained to me, was that if an employee was engaged in ongoing fraud or embezzlement (or playing an ongoing shell-game to cover up something that had already happened), when they were gone for a week there would be nobody to keep up the charade. Numbers that only added up through careful manipulation would suddenly not add up. A hole that was hidden by continuing to move money around would suddenly go unfilled, hopefully long enough for someone else to notice.

Now, with that seemingly random bit of background exposition out of the way, let’s talk about the Huangs.

Jensen Huang, billionaire founder and CEO of Nvidia, the GPU powerhouse that drives (both technically and financially) much of the AI boom, is out. Huang’s resignation was announced on Thursday, November 12, following serial scandalous revelations. At the end of October, it came to light that Huang had an affair with one Alice Huang, no relation. Huang (the Alice one) is a former executive of Megaspeed, a Singapore company that was a customer of Nvidia. The New York Times reported that she is also suspected of being a Chinese intelligence asset; other reporting has also suggested that Megaspeed may be involved in smuggling export-controlled GPUs into China. Huang (the Jensen one) made a public apology to his employees and family, acknowledging the affair. Investigations were launched, but the Nvidia board initially stood by him.

For a couple more days, that is.

On Wednesday, November 11, the New York Times broke the story of a second affair, this time between Huang and one of his subordinates. The Nvidia board was reportedly considering terminating Mr. Huang, but by Thursday, he resigned.

And then, Reuters reported a third affair, this one also with an Nvidia employee.

This is a developing story; what I started to write about on Tuesday was badly out of date on Wednesday, and again yesterday. But one thread that was bothering me, even when I set out to write, still remains, and its implications are even starker now:

Wasn’t Jensen supposed to be the adult in the room?

This isn’t to say that I’m shocked by bad behavior of a man in power, a billionaire tech CEO. Or that I thought Huang’s character was beyond reproach before. (Honestly, his character wasn’t something I spent a lot of time thinking about.) But Nvidia has been the one bright light, financially, in the AI boom—until fairly recently, they were the only firm in the black on the Is AI Profitable Yet? leaderboard. Nvidia’s technology powers most of the advances in the sector, and its capital finances a fair amount of it, too. Huang has repeatedly skated, metaphorically, to where the puck was going, from PC gaming to crypto mining to AI data centers. He has grown Nvidia into the biggest company in the world, a nearly six-trillion-dollar behemoth at its apex just last month.

But to return to my initial aside, which I’m sure “seemed extraneous at the time” (to steal a line from Wayne’s World): Huang seemed like the biggest success story in AI, if not in the tech industry. But Huang is out, and—like an employee sent away for a mandatory week of paid leave—has lost much of his ability to shape the flow of information and the course of events. If anything untoward (or even unduly risky) was going on at Nvidia, it will now have an opportunity to surface. Here are just a few candidates:

Alice Huang was, at best, associated with a significant customer of Nvidia with an interest in bending his ear on U.S. trade policy vis-à-vis GPUs; plausibly involved in evading export restrictions on said GPUs; and, at worst, a spy for Chinese intelligence, who may have used her relationship with Huang to shape both Nvidia’s strategy and his own efforts to lobby the U.S. government.

Consider also the so-called “circular finance” arrangements. Nvidia, for example, invests in CoreWeave; CoreWeave buys Nvidia GPUs; Nvidia promises to purchase some billions of CoreWeave’s computing capacity should it go unsold. It is, in turn, CoreWeave’s financial backer, CoreWeave’s supplier, and CoreWeave’s customer. Following the money begins to feel like chasing one’s own tail.

And beyond whether Nvidia is paying for customers to buy their own product to drive the AI boom narrative (and stock price), there are also questions about how real the demand for AI compute is (and where it is located, if it is real). Tech industry critic and marketer Ed Zitron has accused Nvidia of channel stuffing—of bullying customers to buy up inventory of Nvidia’s products well in advance of their needs. And short-seller Culper Research has alleged that Megaspeed is far from alone, and as much as 20% of Nvidia’s fiscal 2026 compute revenue may have come from China through diverted chips and intermediaries.

Some of this has been documented; some is merely alleged. And Nvidia’s board says it had no reason to believe either proprietary company data or national security had been compromised. But Jensen Huang is now out at the company he founded. He is no longer in control of either the strategy or the story. His interim replacement, Colette Kress, has reportedly clashed with him on the company’s direction. Nvidia’s valuation has lost well over a trillion dollars in market value amid the scandal, and the national security implications of the Alice Huang entanglement are bringing new scrutiny to bear.

None of this necessarily amounts to fraud, but it suggests that Nvidia’s spectacular success rests on a complicated and risky set of arrangements Jensen Huang has spent years cultivating. Indeed, Nvidia had become the most valuable company in the world, but it did so by selling equipment to a wildly unprofitable industry. Nvidia has just lost the chief architect of a complex and daring strategy, as well as its most persuasive salesman. Now we’ll find out if the numbers still add up when he isn’t there.