黄仁勋婚外情曝光，英伟达董事会正评估其去留

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news. [music] Welcome to the Daybreak Asia podcast. I'm Doug Krer. Nvidia is facing a potentially historic [music] change in leadership with CEO Jensen Hong's future now in question. The company's board is meeting to discuss Hong's fate and we are told Nvidia is working with an outside firm to identify possible replacements. All of this follows new reporting from the New York Times that Hang had an extrammarital relationship with an Nvidia executive who reported directly to him.

And according to Gregory Allen, the CEO of Decision Tree Research, finding a replacement for Hong could prove difficult. The challenge is that Nvidia as a corporation is not really set up to accommodate his loss. Jensen has previously described Nvidia, the company as the F1 car built around him as the driver.

As part of our special coverage, Bloomberg TV host Heidi Strad Watson, Averil Hong, took a closer look. They were joined by Bloomberg senior editor Mike Shepard in Washington DC along with Bloomberg strategist Sunonny Banga in Sydney and the global head of tech research for Bloomberg intelligence Mandep Singh in New York. We hear first from Mike Shepard who was asked what Hong's potential departure could mean for the broader AI and tech ecosystem given Nvidia's role as a major investor and source of financing across the AI industry.

The blast radius from this as you indicated will be significant because Nvidia has been such a key financeier and supporter of so many other companies in the larger artificial intelligence ecosystem. We can just name a few. Core Weeave is one open ANI and Anthropic as well. Nvidia had signed up as uh one of the private placement investors as part of the upcoming Anthropic IPO just as an example. But even more so, Jensen Wong himself has truly been an evangelist of the AI boom.

And he has used that position to really also forge a close bond with President Donald Trump here in Washington. And the way he has constructed the company too, Heidi, there's no question that he has made it hard for him to be replaced as the top person at the org chart. He is not only uh the CEO, but he is really the heart of the organization and the visionary who has been driving it in the more than three decades he has been its leader.

Michael, as the Wall Street Journal is reporting though, the Nvidia board is preparing to meet as soon as today and Jensen Hang could be ousted. What do we know about what the board's considerations are at this stage and the extent in which there is a clear line of succession when it comes to who's going to helm this company?

We don't know internally from the board itself what they will be looking at. But they have said uh according to their statement on Sunday after Jensen Wong admitted the affair with Alice Wong, the Mega Speed executive who is suspected of being a Chinese spy, they said that they would be looking into whether any company secrets have been divulged. They didn't think so at the moment. Uh and also whether any national security matters had also been exposed.

But there is no question they would also have to look at his conduct and whether the this indiscretion might have been multiplied by other affairs or incidents. And the New York Times was reporting just before we came on air here in Washington for balance and power uh in the 5:00 hour uh the Times reported of this second uh romantic relationship that he had with a subordinate Adam Vidia. And of course that raised uh yet another question and added a complication and perhaps a fatal blow to his uh ability to stay on the job.

Many investors had hoped that he might be able to weather the storm just given how hard it is to replace him. And Nvidia does not have a succession plan in place. He told Emily Chang in an interview recently that he in fact planned to stay in the job really in in a way for the next two decades. He thought there would be a successor somewhere within the ranks of Nvidia, but they haven't identified one publicly and he certainly did not do so in that conversation with Emily.

Michael just highlighted that key man risk there and the question, you know, that we've been asking is whether this is a micro risk, an idiosyncratic risk for Nvidia, whether this is something that has much broader fallout. You see the reaction in core shares for example. What's your feel on how this plays out? I mean the semiconductor ecosystem does move together and Jensen Hong has been an incredibly important advocate of moving the industry to where where we're heading and where where we are today.

So there's obviously going to be a lot of uncertainty that kicks in. What does this mean for capex plans at TSMC and um does this mean that um we are going to potentially slow that down? So does that mean that we need less lithography equipment at ASML? These kind of uncertainties is just going to weigh heavily on investors minds and the semiconductor trade's been under pressure in recent weeks and months with a lot of political change and really only recently has been finding its feet.

Uh and the core numbers sort of suggested that maybe we we've we're through the worst and now this this uncertain uncertainty and fear kicks back in. um just leaves investors not really sure how to think about semis and maybe just supports the broadening uh trade in tech

mandib let's bring you in here what's your take on this the growth prospects for Nvidia a company that's still shown strong earnings growth of course we'll find out more next week and also liquidity do you think this poses given the uncertainty around leadership the growth prospects for this company

yeah look there's There's no doubt that there will be an impact uh when it comes to you know the growth uh forecasts for Nvidia even though they have been uh you know beating and raising every quarter for the past uh you know six to seven quarters but uh I I think uh you know when it comes to guidance anybody new who gets appointed will be quite conservative you know here given what's uh happening and and Clearly Jensen had a big hold on you know uh the product roadmap and and his vision about you know the ecosystem that Nvidia has crafted around AI.

So uh I I think this is where uh you know competitors like AMD, like Google TPUs and and Amazon will probably have a chance to uh improve their market share when it comes to that accelerator market that Nvidia dominates and rest it's about execution. But there's no doubt that Nvidia won't be as aggressive as they've been in the past 2 to three years when it comes to setting goals and overachieving them. Mike, the key aspect of this obviously is is the decisions of one man of Jensen Hong, but I do wonder how much this is also going to go to questions over appropriate governance uh and standards at Nvidia, right?

Do we know in terms of who who knew about uh these affairs? Because according to the New York Times report, one of them took place at an internal NVIDIA conference and clearly there were people that were speaking to media now that knew knew that this was going on. That's a great question, Heidi. That is one we are really digging into right now to try to figure out who inside the company had some awareness of the various relationships we're talking about here, not only with uh the Ambidia subordinate uh vice president of healthcare, uh but also with Alice Wong, the mega speed executive.

Uh somebody had to know. But in the Times report just now, they do point to uh security having noticed a bystander filming this interaction with between Jensen Wong and the Nvidia executive uh at a hotel where this conference was taking place in March. So it does raise questions about who at a senior level had some idea and whether any of that had been disclosed to the board. uh just giving Jensen's position this is the kind of material relationship that the board would have an interest in knowing at some point.

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