From cleaning toilets to a $4.5 trillion empire: The stunning rise and sudden fall of Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang, the co-founder of Nvidia who had been the face of the company for 33 years, resigned from his job as CEO and from the board on Thursday at the age of 63 without any reason. Nvidia appointed Colette Kress, the Chief Financial Officer at Nvidia, to be the interim CEO and began the quest to replace Huang. This was the result of a turbulent 14 days during which Huang's marriage problems collided with US investigations into his affairs.

Born Jin-Hsun Huang in 1963 in Taipei, Huang spent most of his childhood in Thailand and later moved to the USA.

Inadvertently, Huang's parents packed him off to a Kentucky boarding school where he had to stay with children from rich tobacco farmers and endured bullying. He spoke about the tough life in the boarding school to NPR.

After reuniting with his parents in Oregon, Huang worked at Denny's, graduated as an engineer from Oregon State University, where he met his wife, and then worked at AMD and LSI Logic.

In 1993, Huang returned to Denny's with two partners, taking with them $40000 to start Nvidia and took the plunge in the 3D graphics processor business.

The invention of the GPU and the $160 billion leather jacket brand

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) was introduced to the world by Nvidia back in 1999. Although the company had no idea at the time, its invention was exactly the type of parallel processor that was needed for generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude.

Dominance: Extreme increases in demand across the world mean that Nvidia have been able to maintain margins that are higher than 70% and to fund and finance AI startups.

Rockstar image: Dressed in his recognisable black T-shirt and leather jacket (the jacket has been picked out by his wife, and Huang also has a tattoo of the Nvidia logo on his arm), Huang has a fortune of $160 billion after owning approximately 3.6 – 4% of Nvidia shares.

Relentless culture: Back in Taiwan, people were waiting in line for him at night markets, and at Nvidia employees described Huang as a paradoxical manager who cared a lot about his employees but always criticized mistakes saying that the company is only 30 days away from bankruptcy.

There was a clash between Washington diplomacy and national security concerns.

Huang developed an association with Trump in D.C. after the Biden administration blocked top-tier AI chip sales to China.

On December 2025, Trump endorsed Nvidia’s sale of sophisticated H200 chips to China, giving a percentage of the profits to America – a significant win for the company, leading to utmost frustration for the Washington hawks.

Nevertheless, behind the curtains, an investigation was underway.

October 2025: The Commerce Department begins looking into Megaspeed, a Singaporean data centre that acquired over $4.8B in Nvidia chips in two years, suspected of providing its clients in China with prohibited technology.

May 2026: Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Trump on Air Force One that the population had speculated Huang is involved in suspicious romantic relationships with a former Megaspeed manager Alice Huang who is reportedly involved in espionage against Washington. Huang boarded the trip to Xi Jinping in Anchorage.

The 14 days that ended a 33-year-long journey.

The scandal erupted publically on October 29 when the New York Times wrote about the intelligence figures speculating Alice Huang is connected to Huang and knows too much.

On November 8, Huang sent an email to Nvidia employees revealing his extramarital affair. He added, "I don't have an excuse for what I did. I am very sorry." This was happening as the board of directors of Nvidia had started an investigation against Huang.

On November 9, President Trump, in an interaction with reporters, expressed his belief that Huang was completely unaware of Alice Huang's alleged spying activities, while China, through its foreign affairs ministry, dismissed the whole saga as "baseless accusations to taint China."

On November 11, another report in the New York Times revealed that Huang had a close relationship with another female executive from Nvidia, due to which the board of directors had to meet again to reconsider Huang's position.

By Thursday, the person who was responsible for the boom of AI hardware in the industry had already resigned from his position, shutting down one of the most important stories in Silicon Valley history.

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