Jensen Huang leaves Nvidia as tech's last showman founder era ends

The departure

Jensen Huang has left Nvidia, the company he cofounded, according to The Verge. His exit follows reports that he enabled two chip smuggling scandals and allegedly had three extramarital affairs, one of them with an alleged Chinese spy while he was also meeting with President Donald Trump.

The news lands at a delicate moment. Nvidia sits at the centre of the global AI boom, and observers are watching to see whether the scandal could disturb the wider US AI industry and even the stock market.

Why Huang mattered so much

Huang was not simply the head of the first company to reach a $5 trillion valuation.

He was also a showman in the tradition of Steve Jobs. He opened keynotes in a black leather jacket, greeted a 14,000-person arena of fans and influencers in January 2025 like a rock star, and loved to demo eye-catching technology onstage, from gaming graphics and physics to AI weather simulations and digital copies of real factories.

Analysts quoted by The Verge describe him as the closest thing tech had to Jobs. Pat Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy called him both the visionary and the tactical leader, while Jon Peddie put it simply: Jensen is Nvidia, and Nvidia is Jensen.

The succession problem

Replacing Huang will not be easy, because he built Nvidia around himself. Around 60 employees reported directly to the CEO, and he had no named successor. The 63-year-old once said he preferred to die on the job, and suggested he might work until he was 90 or 100, then keep leading the company as a robot.

Peddie believes nobody inside the company wants to step into his shoes, so an outsider will have to be found. Whoever takes over will not have the same ambitions or the same contacts, he told The Verge.

Is Nvidia in trouble without him?

Analysts do not think the company faces immediate danger. Moorhead calls the departure a stock shock rather than a business shock for the next year, because the roadmap and manufacturing plans are locked in through 2027. The real question, he says, is whether Nvidia keeps inventing at Huang's pace once those plans run out, and whether customers start hedging during the leadership vacuum.

Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies says nothing changes strategically. Several future chip generations are already in design, in tape-out or on order, and Nvidia has spent years securing supply, from leading-edge wafers and advanced packaging to HBM memory and rack-level partners. That supply position does not leave with one person.

IDC analyst Tom Mainelli agrees the technology roadmap is sound and the team behind Huang is still in place, though he expects bumps along the way. Dave Altavilla of HotTech Vision and Analysis notes the real test is whether a successor can sustain the same long-term vision and willingness to invest ahead of the market.

The end of an era

Huang's exit closes a chapter for more than one company. Other founder CEOs have already moved on: Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped away in 2019, while Microsoft and Apple have each changed leadership twice since the days of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Elon Musk did not actually found Tesla, and Mark Zuckerberg has not shown the same blend of vision and stagecraft.

Huang's own story had humble beginnings. He started the company at a Denny's diner, and in 1996 Nvidia nearly went bust while building a failed graphics chip for the Sega Dreamcast. Even after missing that deadline, Huang personally persuaded Sega to invest $5 million, according to a Wall Street Journal report from 2024.

That gamble paid off many times over. Whether Nvidia can keep its momentum without the man who made it will define the next phase of the AI industry.