Tech billionaire Elon Musk has said it “would be an honor” to hire Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, who is currently under investigation from his own board of directors and the FBI after admitting having an affair with a woman alleged to have been a Chinese spy.
The board of Nvidia is reportedly considering whether to oust its CEO. Stocks in the company have fallen on the news, and the New York Times has reported that Huang had a second affair with an executive at his own company.
The prospect of the 63-year-old Huang losing his job at Nvidia, which he co-founded in 1993, has sent shockwaves throughout the tech industry. 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.
Nvidia’s board may decide to keep Jensen Huang on. Certainly tech executives have been calling for such a decision. Tim Sweeney, boss of Fortnite developer Epic Games, has been vocal in his support for Huang. He tweeted: “This would be an Apple firing Steve Jobs level of idiocy from Nvidia’s board if they did that, and a grievous harm to the United States of America.
“The dude truly is the visionary driver of the future of tech from the gaming GPU era to CUDA to AI supercomputers.”
It’s worth noting that Sweeney is all-in on AI, and recently triggered a “huge pivot” of his company to retool it for “maximum AI acceleration.”
The board may, however, dismiss Huang and appoint a successor on an interim basis. Or, Huang resigns, putting himself on the market as a potential competitor to the company he built. In that scenario, Elon Musk may make a move. The Tesla owner took to his own social media platform, X, to say it would be “an honour” to work with Huang at SpaceX.
While Huang clearly has the backing of his fellow leaders in tech, he faces calls to resign from several U.S. lawmakers. There is also a reported move to tighten Nvidia China exports. Beijing has warned the U.S. not to use the spying allegations as a pretext to once again restrict tech sales to China.
Photographer: Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Wesley is IGN’s Managing Editor. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
