The Fall of the A.I. King

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTGuest EssayNov. 12, 2026, 5:09 p.m. ETCredit...Nikita TeryoshinWe live in the age of artificial intelligence — an age that Jensen Huang, perhaps more than any other single person, has made possible. The systems we are building with Nvidia’s equipment will transform our society and culture in ways we can’t imagine. But Mr. Huang’s unraveling is not a technology story. It is a timeless tale of masculine hubris, of a man undone by reckless overconfidence. Some things never change.When I wrote my biography of Mr. Huang, I titled it “The Thinking Machine.” The name referred to the microchips that powered A.I., but also to Mr. Huang’s marauding, relentless intellect, which never slowed down or turned off. In the wake of his stunning departure, spurred by revelations that he carried on at least two affairs, one with a woman whom U.S. intelligence determined is a Chinese spy, and another with one of his direct reports, I should write a sequel: “The What-Were-You-Thinking?! Machine.”Let’s start with Mr. Huang’s affair with Alice Huang, an executive who managed a Singapore-based company that owns data centers in Southeast Asia. These data centers are suspected of helping Chinese A.I. developers circumvent U.S. restrictions on sales of Nvidia equipment. A recent report in The Information suggests they were used as a way station to illicitly smuggle some $7 billion of equipment into China. Since U.S. intelligence captured evidence of Mr. Huang in a romantic relationship with Ms. Huang, it’s hard to believe that he did not understand what was going on.Now consider Mr. Huang’s reported involvement with Kimberly Powell, an executive in the health care group at his firm and his direct subordinate. A former Nvidia employee told me this affair was common knowledge in the company — the same company that employs both of Mr. Huang’s children in executive roles. It’s a stunning and disrespectful display of arrogance. I asked the former employee why Mr. Huang would behave this way, right in front of his kids. The former employee said that it got him high — a narcissist’s high.I started hearing rumors of Mr. Huang’s infidelities earlier this year, but was unable to confirm them. Inside Nvidia, there was a culture of omertà that was difficult to break, and this enabled Mr. Huang to be his worst self. I sensed this deference, at times, in the sycophantic laughter of his subordinates when he was around, and the little things they muttered once he left the room. Ultimately, it took government intelligence to pierce Nvidia’s culture of silence — along with the reporters at this newspaper. But now that containment is shattered, and I will not be surprised if more women come forward. No one will be surprised.Mr. Huang went to considerable lengths to cloak his arrogance. When I first met him in 2023, he and his handlers were pushing the idea that he was a humble man. In our conversations, Mr. Huang was constantly deflecting attention away from his success, always quick to assign credit to his employees and executive staff members. He also liked to glad-hand service people. He’d been a dishwasher himself once, a point he never let you forget. He loved visiting small, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and leaving extravagant tips. I’d met him for breakfast at Denny’s, and he tipped our waitress $1,000 in hundred-dollar bills. He didn’t make a show of it, either. I had to track her down to ask.Over time, though, I began to suspect that this was an act, one performed not for the observer, but to flatter himself. In truth, Mr. Huang was quite arrogant. He had little tolerance for disagreement and almost no capacity for open discourse. When you contradicted him, even over the most trivial matter, it was like lighting a fuse. Stick to your position and soon he exploded, screaming at you for your idiocy. A harangue from Mr. Huang could last an hour or more; his executive staff appeared genuinely afraid of him. Listening to their stories, I was reminded of the abusive music instructor from the movie “Whiplash.”Mr. Huang went to even greater lengths to present himself as a family man. Here, the act was harder to detect and must have involved a great deal of self-deception. He spoke of his wife, Lori, and his kids, Madison and Spencer, all the time. Unlike his flimsy man-of-the-people shtick, this affection for his family seemed genuine. He traveled with them often, all over the world. He encouraged his kids to leave careers in unrelated fields to join him at his microchip company. Several weeks ago, at a wedding in Hawaii, he gave away his daughter Madison to Nico Caprez, another Nvidia executive.Mr. Huang met Lori when he was 17. The two were lab partners in an electrical engineering course and Mr. Huang was so shy it took him six months to ask her out. She was his first girlfriend and they married in their early 20s. She left the work force to raise their kids so Mr. Huang could pursue his dream of founding a company. He has spoken often of the sacrifices she made for him. His betrayal of her is absolute.While reporting his biography, I spoke to some of Jensen and Lori’s oldest friends. These were people they knew in their 20s, long before the money and the fame. I sometimes dropped little hints: Was there any chance of infidelity, perhaps? Any rumors of marital friction? Any “arrangements”? The response I got was that the Huangs’ marriage was happy, even ideal — something to be emulated.In a divorce, Lori Huang could become one of the richest women in America. It’s possible the Huangs signed a prenuptial agreement, or have some other agreement, but I doubt it. When they married, in the mid-1980s, neither had much in assets. The hundreds of millions of Nvidia shares they jointly own are held in family trusts. They recently donated $75 million toward a flagship building at Vanderbilt University’s new campus in San Francisco. Another building they helped fund at Oregon State University, where they met, is nearing completion. The hypocrisy is almost overwhelming. In the early days — the 1990s — Nvidia had been a boys’ club. The staff played video games and drank beer in the office, and almost no women worked there. Their mascot, for a time, was “Dawn,” an underdressed, large-breasted C.G.I. pixie. Dawn was memory-holed in 2020, around the time Mr. Huang started to talk about empowering women within the company. In 2023, while at Nvidia’s campus, I saw Mr. Huang make an impassioned call for gender parity at Nvidia, where men still comprise 80 percent of its employees. Maybe he had an ulterior motive.I was surprised — and, frankly, amazed — when Mr. Huang became President Trump’s close ally in 2025. He’d never shown much interest in politics and had limited Washington connections. He didn’t attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration. But soon, in a masterly display of social engineering, he’d gained the president’s trust, mostly by flattering him. By the time of the president’s tech summit at the White House this September, Mr. Huang was seated at Mr. Trump’s right arm.Mr. Trump and Mr. Huang have a fair amount in common: the bluster, the narcissism and, I suppose, the womanizing. But it was politics that triggered Mr. Huang’s downfall. He convinced the president to lift export restrictions on Nvidia chips to China, and this put him in conflict with the more hawkish elements on the president’s staff — especially Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose sharp criticisms of China at one point got him barred from that country. It was Mr. Rubio who oversaw the memo that exposed Mr. Huang.Now Nvidia must find a successor. That’s going to be difficult: Mr. Huang never groomed one and has no second-in-command. Colette Kress will serve as interim chief executive, but she comes from the world of finance, not electrical engineering, so I don’t think she can provide a long-term solution.Whoever replaces Mr. Huang must be a world-class computer scientist, someone who can close deals with powerful customers and also someone who can get on the phone to Taiwan and start screaming when the chips are delayed. Nvidia without Jensen Huang is like the Bulls without Michael Jordan. He built Nvidia from nothing but, through his arrogance and toxic self-regard, he has left an empty space that might be impossible to fill.Related ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT