英伟达董事会宣布黄仁勋辞职，CFO暂代CEO

Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news. The Nvidia board has announced that Jensen Hang is out as CEO. The board just issuing a statement saying that CFO Colette Crest will become interim CEO.

Hong's resignation is well rippling through the AI trade already.

Absolutely. A negative reaction, Ed. I think Nvidia is set to raise nearly $600 billion in market value.

That puts it on track for its biggest 1-day decline since January of 2025. It's now a sub4 $4 trillion market cap company.

There's been a lot of worry that something might deflate the AI bubble. I don't believe the concern was that the thing falling apart was going to be Nvidia itself. I'm David Gura and this is the big take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Bloomberg's AI buildout reporter Dena Bass and senior editor for tech policy, Michael Shepard, on the extraordinary departure of Jensen Huang and what it means for Nvidia and the AI industry moving forward.

The latest act in this drama played out through the night. Nvidia's board started deliberating on Wednesday night and we didn't hear from the company until Thursday morning right before the markets opened here in the the US. Dina, first of all, just remind us sort of how we got here to this emergency meeting of Nvidia's board.

Sure. So, there was reporting that disclosed that uh Jensen Wong had had an affair with a woman who there are allegations the US government believes to be a a Chinese spy. There are now a lot of questions as to whether there were national security issues, whether there was information that was disclosed through that relationship, whether Nvidia's AI chips made their way into China, you know, chips that were restricted from export.

Then yesterday afternoon, the New York Times reported that there had been additional affair, this one with a subordinate who reported uh to Jensen, which you know, we now have two affairs, one raising national security concerns and one raising corporate governance concerns. Uh and at that point uh we ended up with this board meeting and and the decision that's been announced this morning.

Mike, it's such a sprawling story. So yes, it's a corporate story about this company about Jensen Huang and the affair that he had with this woman suspected of being a spy. The report that Dina just mentioned in the New York Times adding to to that part of the story. But from where you sit in Washington, it very quickly in light of what Dena just said about the role that Jensen Huang plays in in our geopolitics became something of acute interest to policy makers and politicians in Washington as well.

Oh, very much so. Because Nvidia has been under scrutiny over whether it's been complying with US export restrictions designed to keep its chips out of China. And in fact, as Dina pointed out, the company at the center of this scandal uh whose executive had become romantically involved with Jensen Wong, that company, Mega Speed International, was under investigation by the Commerce Department and the Justice Department for possible breaches of those US export curbs.

And it really has also added some friction and an irritant to USChina relations. You know, if you just step back and think about it, the two largest economies in the world are competing for an edge in artificial intelligence, and they've been trading accusations back and forth about unfair play. China complaining about export curbs and the US accusing China of essentially stealing technology from American frontier model developers.

Tina, can you talk a bit about how closely intertwined Nvidia and Jensen Huang are? How much of the company is by his design and molding?

The company is 100% in made in his image. He's the founder. Founder CEOs are always extraordinarily powerful. You think of, you know, Bill Gates, you think of Steve Jobs, both of whom were co-founders. This is a company Jensen built and he is behind every single one of its key strategic decisions over the the history of the company, getting them into, you know, graphics chips. uh then ultimately parlaying that into this absolutely completely central dominant role in artificial intelligence chips.

He has over 50 had over 50 people reporting directly to him. So in addition to the company being very much his there was not a lot of succession planning and he was personally in charge of making you know the vast majority of critical decisions overseeing the majority of key leaders. you take that person out, it's hard to really fathom what it will look like in the future. Whatever the answer is, it's going to be different.

It's going to have to change dramatically because you no longer have this person who's entirely sort of, you know, out of the ordinary, one-of-a-kind, running it and leading every moment.

You've both laid out sort of how we got to this meeting, and Dena, I wonder if you could kind of set up the stakes here as these directors met. What do we know of sort of what went down uh at that meeting? What was on the agenda? and uh indeed how difficult a decision this was for those directors.

This is an incredibly difficult decision. Nvidia does not appear to have an obvious succession plan. Uh there isn't anybody set up uh clearly to take over. They have named CFO Colette Crest uh you know in the interim but it it doesn't appear that they had done planning for you know what would happen if under the normal course of events if Jensen retired or something like that. I suppose they thought they had more time.

And the question now becomes, do you attempt to promote an insider who knows the NVIDIA culture really well? Do you go to an outsider? And how do you find someone who combines the the skills and the experiences that Jensen Wong brought to this? It's a company that's deeply technical that updates very complex set of semiconductors very frequently but at the same time also has to manage an you know potentially even more complex global supply chain a network of global investments.

There is a tremendous number of things that were on Jensen's plate, often personally, and the board had to determine whether it was more important to handle the inc increasingly acute situation that his personal life has caused the company or risk fig, you know, trying to find somebody who could in some way replace him. And again, knowing that a vote to do that is, you know, almost certainly a vote to significantly change the company.

There had been, Dina, as this scandal unfolded, um, a lot of criticism about Nvidia's corporate governance, of the pretty unchecked power that Jensen Huang had. You laid out sort of the role that this board had been playing. First of all, why was it fashioned in this this way? Why didn't that lead to changes within the company sooner? Why wasn't there more concern evidently about there being a kind of keyman issue here with with Jensen Huang being so important to the company itself?

You know, as is often the case in again, particularly in founder le companies, but in companies that are riding high, when your market cap is $5 trillion, you're on top of the world. It looks like you're doing everything right. The person leading that company has tremendous power and it it often is, you know, power that is unchecked until a deficiency in governance gets revealed. You know, sometimes in this fashion,

Mike, you were on air. You were on Bloomberg TV when this announcement was made and and you watched in real time as Nvidia's stock started to sink. How are investors processing this in Nvidia without Jensen Wong as CEO?

Well, they really do have to regroup. Uh, one of the Nvidia bulls before Jensen's uh, resignation a few days earlier, Dan Ies, and we all know him well, had said that the loss of Jensen Wong to the company could be something that shaves as much as 30% off the market value of Nvidia. But one thing that's important to remember is that, you know, the company still has very strong products and a very strong hold on