Shortly after former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned amid a scandal involving multiple affairs and international espionage allegations, some employees of the company rallied to demand his reinstatement.
Nvidia's Board of Directors and the FBI launched an investigation into the 63 year old after he admitting having an affair with a woman alleged to have been a Chinese spy. The New York Times then reported that Huang had a second affair with an executive at his own company. It has since been reported that Huang had an affair with yet another Nvidia employee.
Nvidia provides advanced computer chips for everything from video games to cloud servers, but in recent years it has focused on the AI industry. Off the back of the enormous demand for memory to power data centers, Nvidia has become the world’s second-most valuable company, worth more than $4 trillion. However, stocks in the company fell on the news. Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers on Capitol Hill have said Huang has indicated he is willing to appear before Congress for questioning.
In the hours after Huang's dramatic exit, a 'suggestion box' post on Nvidia's internal message board urging the company's Board of Directors to retain the CEO took off, getting around 1,600 comments, according to Wired. A majority of those comments were in support of reinstating Huang, and largely expressed sentiments that the Nvidia co-founder was instrumental to Nvidia's success over the last 33 years.
The comments themselves ranged from one employee saying, "If you believe in the mission, bring back THE boss," to, "We are all humans and can make mistakes. Jensen did so many good things and he needs a second chance."
Nvidia employees have also taken to social media to voice support for Huang. Gavan Woolery, a senior research scientist at Nvidia, posted on X / Twitter: "Jensen Huang rescued me from probably living in debt the rest of my life. I was told I was one of just three hires that he approved during the pandemic, during a hiring freeze." Woolery added: "His personal life is frankly none of my business. But as a leader, I have yet to meet a better one. Ousting him is financial suicide, and I can only assume there is a hidden ulterior motive because I can't fathom any other reason for destroying the company's value."
Bryan Cantanzaro, VP of Applied Deep Learning Research and one of the people who helped invent DLSS, took to social media to say: "I'm terribly sad @JensenHuang is no longer leading @nvidia. Thank you Jensen. For the tireless work, for the focus, for the wisdom, for the support, for the vision, for the chance you gave me to do my life's work @nvidia."
Nvidia's employees are clearly fiercely loyal to the exiting CEO. According to a Blind survey of Nvidia employees conducted by Investing.com, 88% of workers thought Huang should have stayed on. That's contrasted with a seperate poll among a wider base of professionals outside of Nvidia, where support for Huang sat at just 60%.
It's not just employees that support Huang, though. Elon Musk has spoken out in support of him, as has Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who tweeted yesterday: "A sad day for Nvidia, developers, America, and all humanity. Jensen founded and ran one of the few companies to reach a massive scale while driving massive continued innovation and ubiquity, while others fell into the trap of ever-increasing extraction."
However, due to the amount of heat that Jensen Huang's various affairs have brought down on Nvidia, it's unlikely that he will be reinstated. Instead, Nvidia's board has appointed CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO until a permanent successor has been found. Regardless, none of this bodes well for the gaming hardware that Nvidia's current AI empire was built on top of.
Photo by Joel Saget / AFP via Getty Images.