American billionaire Jensen Huang faces Nvidia ouster as shares shed $600 billion

Taiwanese-American billionaire Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia Corp. and has run it for 33 years, is at risk of losing his job as chief executive after the chipmaker's board began preparing to remove him, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The report came as the New York Times disclosed that Huang, 63, had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care. Days earlier, Huang told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologized, as the board opened an independent inquiry into reports that he had been targeted by a suspected Chinese intelligence operative.

Nvidia has lost about $600 billion in market value since the scandal broke, and Microsoft Corp. has overtaken it as the world's second-most valuable company.

Huang's own fortune has taken a heavy hit. He lost $7.4 billion on Monday and another $8.6 billion on Tuesday, according to Forbes, which dropped him from eighth to 12th on its real-time ranking of the world's richest people. He recovered about $5.9 billion on Wednesday morning as technology stocks rallied. Huang owns about 3.5% of Nvidia and does not hold voting control, leaving his position in the hands of the board.

A search for a successor

Nvidia's directors met on Wednesday to weigh Huang's future and are working with an outside firm to identify candidates for the top job. Some board members favor Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress, who has held the role since 2013, as interim chief executive. Other names raised by analysts and investors include Ian Buck, the engineer who built Nvidia's CUDA software platform, and lead independent director Stephen Neal.

The board has not announced a decision. It has hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to run its inquiry, which a committee of independent directors oversees.

Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc. and SpaceX chief executive and the world's richest person, weighed in on Thursday. Replying on X to a post urging him to hire Huang, Musk wrote: "That would be an honor." SpaceX's artificial intelligence data centers run on Nvidia chips.

How the crisis began

The turmoil started with a New York Times investigation published on Oct. 29, which reported that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded that Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, was passing information to Beijing. Megaspeed is one of Nvidia's largest customers in Southeast Asia. The two Huangs are not related, and the report did not accuse Jensen Huang of knowingly taking part in any intelligence activity.

In a letter to staff on Nov. 8, Huang said he took full responsibility for his actions. "There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry," he wrote, adding that he supported the investigation and would cooperate fully. Nvidia said at the time that Huang was "committed to continuing to lead Nvidia as CEO without interruption." China's Foreign Ministry has called the spying reports "a groundless accusation."

President Donald Trump has defended Huang, calling him "an honorable guy."

Huang was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States as a child. He co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and turned a maker of graphics cards for video games into the dominant supplier of chips used to train and run AI models. Nvidia is due to report third-quarter results on Nov. 17, after guiding to revenue of about $108 billion.