Yeah, this seems likely. It's also quite possible that he not only "didn't come totally clean" but outright lied to the board i.e. "this was a one-time thing"
Powerful interests want Nvidia to change directions and my guess is that they didn’t think that would happen under Jensen.
Nvidia’s Board is not a list of power players. They were, until now, largely pliant to Jensen. They flipped because they saw what everyone outside Silicon Valley did—that they personally, and Nvidia broadly, would pay the price for Jensen’s failures and potential crimes if his brand wasn’t severed from Nvidia’s.
Now that Trump looks like a weak lame duck, and congressional subpoenas are coming, the entire calculation is different.
Jensen Huang wasn't on board with that so now he's gone.
So no, it's not literally about his sex life, but pretending like that doesn't factor into the whole things seems like a very strange point for people to keep making. It may not be that 90% of the cause is "he had sex out of his marriage" but it's also not 0% (it surely doesn't make him a "good leader(tm)" if he's having sex with subordinates)
- July 25: Amid the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP publicly stated that Hayward had the board's full support.
- July 27: BP formally announced that Hayward would step down as CEO, with Robert Dudley replacing him.
Similar situations with Bob Chapek, Travis Kalanick, the Boeing CEO in 2019 when all those crashes were happening, Carol Bartz, Bob Diamond...
I've not fired very many people before, but deception removes any ambiguity as to whether or not someone should be fired.
My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it. From all appearances, NVidia was playing ball with the Trump administration. He was a frequent ally of President Trump, Trump supposedly knew about this information for the last year and sat on it, and even the CIA leaks that started it stressed how much Huang had praised the Trump administration. Reportedly they had already voluntarily stopped exports to MegaSpeed [2] as of June 2025. China, however, has a lot more to gain from his departure. It's going to harm NVidia very severely: reportedly he's very hands-on, "the conductor that makes a very complex operation work", and as a founder the whole knowledge pyramid that the company is based upon rests with him. If they want their domestic hardware industry to surpass NVidia, the easiest way to do that is to take out NVidia leadership.
I suspect that he was compromised by both the CIA and CCP, and with tensions rising between them, eventually found a situation where they each wanted him to do different things, and he couldn't satisfy both. Likely the CIA got wind that the CCP was going to move with their leverage, and published to stave that off. This also has the nice side benefit for U.S. power of letting the other side know the extent to which the CIA knows what you're doing, and showing that even the CEO of the richest company on earth is not immune to U.S laws. But it's still a net negative to U.S. power to have Huang out as CEO of NVidia, simply because it's such a net negative to NVidia. This is only a desirable outcome if he's going to be ousted anyway, or if he is otherwise compromised to become a Chinese puppet.
I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes. First affair, okay, it could be an indiscretion that happened in the past, cut ties and do damage control. But if there's a second (and third and fourth and many others?) affair and everybody knows about it, it becomes impossible for Huang to lead the company because everybody has so much leverage on him.
No they don't. They just lost access to Nvidia chips that they still rely on (even if not said out in the open). Alibaba's stock tanked on the news for example.
> I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes.
The role was to get the agenda off spying and export (the things you'd go to jail for)
They would prefer their companies buy local, as it will advance their local semiconductor infrastructure.
However, these companies would prefer Nvidia if they are allowed. All the advances in the past few years are due to advanced chips being restricted, so they had to step up.
They already do. Local produces maybe >5% of the volume needed. It's NOT prefer or not. It just doesn't exist.
Some people believe that the key moat for AI is the model, and under this model (hah) torpedoing NVidia would be bad for China and good for the U.S. because they won't have access to cutting-edge NVidia hardware for model-training. Other people believe the key moat for AI is the hardware, and under this model torpedoing NVidia would be good for China because it'd allow Chinese hardware makers to catch up and bad for the U.S. because it destroys our key competitive advantage.
Interesting that a policy decision depends so heavily on a question of fact, but that isn't unique to this issue. (I suspect that left and right would agree on abortion if they could agree on whether personhood begins at conception or birth, but they don't, so). There's also an element of time preferences here too: it's likely that model training is dominant now, but hardware will be dominant when you project out a few years, and so both factions could be right but on different timescales.
Exactly my read as well. "If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two."
After they caught him in a lie, they may not have been able to not fire him.
More seriously, I was also curious. A quick search seems to say the earliest recent source is https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
Don't live in Silicon Valley though.
https://nypost.com/2026/11/12/business/ousted-nvidia-ceo-jen...
I don't think this has anything to do with trust. It's absurd not to trust Huang as the best possible CEO for the company that he brought from zero to 5 trillion dollars in value. It's about being afraid of public opinion, and especially fear of being blamed for not taking the expected decision.
Huang betrayed 38 years of trust his wife put into him and recently betrayed the Board by lying to them. That's already admitted, no ifs or buts. He clearly had reasons, as he is a sane person. His reasons were romantic engagement with (alleged) spy. Since he is a sane person, he must have weighed pros and cons and still engage in an affair, even though it jeopardized his marriage and his job. The Board needs to do bunch of "what ifs" in such situation, including paranoid ones, such as "what if this woman had such access to NVIDIA tech stack that each cheap is infused with some form of Chinese virus". We simply don't know how far this goes, but this firing certainly shows much further than just a consequence of a romantic fling.
Perfect timing: https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...
If you didn't, you would be in for near infinite liability because it ends up as evidence that the culture from the top was tolerant of violations, etc. THis is not conjecture, it's what has basically always happened in the legal realm when companies try to work around it.
First, polyamory has been gaining popularity. But a lot of poly people I've met keep that strictly secret, because their friends and family wouldn't understand and would judge them harshly.
Second, the problem isn't that he slept with someone other than his wife (we don't know what kind of agreements they have in place, and ENM is a thing in 2026). It's that he slept with a subordinate. And that's a real problem due to the power differential that exists between him and his employees.
So it's not the second affair per se, but bad judgement. Dating at companies should only happen parallel in the hierarchy, not up or down.
What I'm pushing back on is the notion that someone should be judged simply for fucking someone who isn't his wife. There's a reason people keep ENM agreements a secret, due to the judgmental attitude from the public at large.
Hopefully alternative lifestyles will become normalized to the point where our descendants in 30 years will look back on us with the same disappointment that we look back in 1996 gay marriage laws.
ENM among older couples is particularly common. But sure, it's always possible that Jensen was just cheating on his wife without consent. The thing to watch for is whether his wife has expressed unhappiness publicly about the situation. Notice that in articles like https://archive.is/Ubg4k they'll do everything but ask her how she feels. Or if they have, it's possible she's refused to say anything on the topic. That silence means something, and we don't know what. So hold off on the judgments until we have confirmation that she's actually unhappy with it.
This isn't a story about the sex
It's normal for B2B companies screen for this before you even get a demo.
For a lot of people, it's about the sex. In fact if you only read the first paragraph, you'd come away thinking it was solely about the sex.
At least on HN the sentiment is more nuanced though, which is good.
Gaining popularity? With who? It's illegal in most countries.
That seems to be the most natural guess based on public information, but it's equally plausible that the board knows more than the public already, whether because they drove investigations, received disclosures from Huang, or received insider tips once the heat started rising. Trust aside, they may already might know worse and more materially or legally impactful things.
That's the kind of thing that a healthy class of professional journalists can help uncover and trace in a way that our post-journalism world is losing the opportunity to do. Even still, I wouldn't be surprised if further scandals for Huang or Nvidia started being reported in coming days and weeks. You might be right that it was just too many sex scandals and general loss of trust, but we just can't expect to know yet.
Reports are just breaking that this is indeed the case.
> Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with a second employee, according to two people familiar with the matter, Reuters has learned... Reuters is not naming the employee.
don't has to be a journalist, it could be a spy too... :-)
If we're just going to be purely speculative anyway, it could be the case Jensen is the one who himself leaked the 2nd affair, in order to continue this distraction strategy.
I wouldn't be surprised if 100% of the info we have on this is Jensen's PR. 1) Anonymous "leak" tweets are all PR agency slop -- real jouranalist scoopers would take credit to draw attention to themselves. 2) Any Federal investigators aren't going to say 1 word to the public. Ergo, it was always Jensen trying to keep the narrative on his affairs.
And if you want to be TRULY conspiratorial about it, perhaps one or both of the affairs never existed, only the smuggling.
There are certain lines CEOs of this level absolutely cannot cross, and a relationship with a subordinate is one of them. Hiding it, putting the entire company at risk for it, a board can’t trust a ceo that puts their extramarital dalliances ahead of the company’s interest.
Chips to China, on the other hand, is in the company’s interest. That’s what lawyers and lobbyists are for, and when they behave enough, that’s also what “rockstar” CEOs are for.
Jensen got too big for his leather jacket. Simple as.
If someone has been: 1. Managing the company well 2. Attracting and retaining good talent 3. Making money for shareholders 4. Building strong company fundamentals
Then forcing a resignation over this seems... odd. I was under the impression that barring this infidelity, Huang was one of the more sane tech CEOs. I feel like I could to literally any other CEO (Zuckerburg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Gates, Jobs) that have done something equally bad or worse, and haven't had to resign.
But in the big picture, isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?
Plus possible other events known to the board but not us. We’ll know eventually.
Once I worked at a company where the sales VP got caught embezzling by setting up (large amounts of) fake affiliates.
It boosted the overall revenue numbers, and I think they were impressed at how long he had gotten away with it, so they let him be ‘stolen’ by a competitor (who didn’t know the circumstances) while they swept it under the rug.
Easy 8 figures of revenue impact per year.
Pretty ingeniously evil, IMO.
If an exec is lying about this, what else might they be lying about? Embezzlement? Corruption?
This batshit insane decision by the board is a timely reminder that prudes truly do continue to thrive among us.
All 42,000 employees should be held to the same standard, otherwise you will end up with all kinds of problems within the company.
Company leadership should lead by example as well.
1 - did she feel pressured to have a relationship with him? It's hard to have genuinely free consent when he can make or break her career; and
2 - sexual discrimination towards every other employee. Did she get benefits from the relationship? It's more than fair for the rest of the employees to wonder if they'd also been eg sucking his dick if they would have gotten better raises, faster promotions, etc.
If you dissect the timeline of the events and various, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.
This is the timeline:
Before Nov 11, it looked like NVIDIA might try to ride out the storm and keep Jensen at the helm especially if they saw that the China accusations and evidence wasn't strong enough to be a problem. Again, it was totally unnecessary for the board to publicly back him up if they had plans to get rid of him because of China allegations. However, the Board of Directors emergency Nov 11 meeting is inconsistent with the Nov 8 statement affirming Jensen's leadership.Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.