Nvidia’s board is meeting today to decide whether to fire Jensen Huang, and the fact that this is even happening tells you everything wrong with how we think about technology companies.
The immediate story is messy. According to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, Huang had an affair with a woman alleged to be a Chinese intelligence agent. Then a second affair surfaced, this one with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s VP of healthcare, who reports directly to him. Congress wants answers about national security implications. The stock is dropping. And Nvidia, the company that controls the picks and shovels of the AI revolution, apparently has no succession plan.
That last part is the real story.
Nvidia is worth over a trillion dollars. It supplies the GPUs that train nearly every major AI model. It’s not just important to the AI industry, it basically is the AI industry’s foundation. And according to TechCrunch, the company has no plan for what happens if its founder and CEO of 33 years can’t do the job anymore.
This isn’t unique to Nvidia. We’ve built an entire technology sector around the cult of individual genius. Elon at Tesla and SpaceX. Sam Altman at OpenAI (until that brief, chaotic weekend). Zuckerberg at Meta. Huang at Nvidia. These companies don’t just have strong CEOs, they have irreplaceable ones. Or so we tell ourselves.
The problem is that irreplaceable people create fragile systems. When your entire company’s strategic direction, technical vision, and cultural identity flow through one person, you’re not running a modern corporation. You’re running a personality cult with quarterly earnings.
The alleged Chinese intelligence connection takes this from a corporate governance problem to a geopolitical one. Nvidia’s chips are at the center of the US-China AI race. Export controls on advanced GPUs to China have become a key tool of US technology policy. If the CEO of that company was in a relationship with someone working for Chinese intelligence, that’s not just a scandal. It’s a security architecture built on sand.
Congress is right to demand answers. But the deeper question is why we’ve allowed companies this critical to national interests to operate with so little institutional resilience. We wouldn’t accept a defense contractor with no succession plan and a founder who can’t be replaced. Why do we accept it from the company that makes the chips that power military AI systems?
TechCrunch published a “highly unscientific” list of possible successors. The fact that it’s unscientific is the point. Nobody really knows who could run Nvidia if Huang leaves because the company has been structured around the assumption that he never would.
This is a management failure that goes way beyond one CEO’s personal conduct. Nvidia’s board should have had a succession plan years ago. They should have been developing internal candidates. They should have built an organization that could survive losing its founder.
Instead, they’re scrambling to figure out who could possibly fill those leather jacket sleeves, and the options aren’t great. Internal candidates lack Huang’s technical vision and industry relationships. External candidates don’t know Nvidia’s culture or customer base. Either choice is a gamble with the company that makes the AI revolution possible.
Look at the other stories from today. Meta is losing its longtime head of infrastructure. CoreWeave is doing financial gymnastics to fund growth. Data center projects are stalling out. The AI infrastructure boom is running on hype, hope, and a handful of charismatic leaders.
That’s not a sustainable foundation for the most important technological shift in decades. We need institutions, not personalities. We need companies with deep benches, clear succession plans, and governance structures that can handle leadership transitions without existential crises.
The Jensen Huang affair is scandalous. The lack of a succession plan is inexcusable. But the real problem is that we’ve built too much of the AI future on great man theory instead of great institutions. If Nvidia’s board fires Huang today and the company stumbles, that’s on them. They had decades to build something more resilient.
The lesson for every other AI company should be clear: your founder won’t be around forever. Plan accordingly. Because the next scandal, health crisis, or sudden departure is always coming. The only question is whether you’ll be ready for it.
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