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.
Sane people still make irrational decisions.
It's one of the weird dichotomies of our species.
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.
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."