Thirty Years To The Top, Two Weeks To The Bottom: The Downfall Of Jensen Huang
For almost thirty years, Jensen Huang was the face of Nvidia.
He took the company from a small startup in a California diner to the most valuable hardware business in the world.
Then, in November 2026, his career came to a sudden end after a string of personal and national security scandals forced him to step down.
Jensen Huang’s story started far from Silicon Valley. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1963, he moved to Thailand with his family when he was five. In 1973, political unrest led his parents to send nine-year-old Jensen and his older brother to the United States to live with relatives.
The family mistakenly enrolled the boys at the Oneida Baptist Institute in rural Kentucky, thinking it was a prep school rather than a religious reform school for troubled youth.
Huang spent two years there dealing with daily bullying while working after class to clean the bathrooms.
His parents eventually moved to the U.S. and reunited the family in Oregon.
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In Oregon, Huang worked hard to catch up. At fifteen, he took his first job washing dishes and waiting tables on the graveyard shift at a local Denny’s.
He went on to study electrical engineering at Oregon State University, where he was assigned a lab partner named Lori Mills.
They married in 1985 and later had two children, Madison and Spencer, both of whom eventually took jobs at Nvidia. After college, Huang worked as a chip designer and earned a master’s degree from Stanford University at night.
In 1993, Huang sat down in a San Jose Denny’s booth with two fellow engineers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.
With $40,000, they started Nvidia to build better graphics chips for personal computers. Their first chip failed and nearly pushed the company into bankruptcy.
Huang had to lay off half his staff and bet the remaining money on a new chip design called the RIVA 128. When it came out in 1997, it sold over a million units in four months and saved the business.
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From there, Huang made a series of bets that changed computing.
In 1999, Nvidia released the GeForce 256, the first modern graphics processing unit, or GPU. Then, in 2006, Huang launched a software platform called CUDA.
It allowed researchers to use Nvidia’s gaming chips for heavy scientific math. Wall Street disliked the high cost of developing CUDA, and Nvidia’s stock struggled for years.
That gamble finally paid off in the 2010s and 2020s when artificial intelligence took off.
AI developers needed the exact combination of Nvidia chips and CUDA software to train their models. Nvidia’s market value briefly passed $5 trillion, and Huang’s net worth climbed to around $150 billion.
Alongside his wife, he put hundreds of millions of dollars in Nvidia stock into their charitable foundation, whose assets grew past $12 billion to fund university research centers.
At the height of his success, Huang’s career unraveled in a matter of weeks. On October 29, 2026, The New York Times reported that U.S. federal officials were investigating a close relationship between Huang and Alice Huang, a Chinese tech executive who had worked for Megaspeed, a Singapore-based firm that bought large numbers of Nvidia’s AI chips.
According to the report, U.S. authorities believed Chinese intelligence had recruited her as an asset.
On November 8, Huang sent a memo to Nvidia employees admitting to an extramarital affair and apologizing to his wife, his family, and his staff.
Nvidia’s board initially stood by him, saying there was no evidence that company secrets or national security had been compromised.
Just days later, however, reports came out about a second affair involving a longtime Nvidia executive who reported directly to Huang.
Following an emergency board meeting on November 12, 2026, Nvidia announced that Huang had resigned immediately as president, chief executive, and board member.
The company named Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as interim CEO. Huang’s troubles are not over, as three U.S. House committees and the Senate Banking Committee have called him to testify in early December 2026 about potential security risks tied to Nvidia’s overseas chip sales.
