Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's CEO on Thursday after three extramarital affairs came to light, and within hours his ouster became the top technology topic on Weibo, drawing hundreds of thousands of comments from Chinese users mourning what one called the loss of Nvidia's soul.

Nvidia announced the resignation on Thursday. The scandal broke through a string of reports, including a New York Times account that Huang had an affair with Alice Huang, a Singapore-based Chinese businesswoman who was believed to be passing sensitive Nvidia information to Beijing.

Huang, a Taiwanese and American citizen, has long commanded unusual clout in East Asia. His Taiwan street-food crawls, annual appearances at Computex, and fluency in Mandarin made him a fan favorite across the region — a popularity now visible in the scale of the reaction on Weibo, China's equivalent of X.

What are Chinese users saying?

The outpouring went beyond celebrity gossip. Users framed Huang's exit as an institutional loss for the AI industry itself.

• "I feel that Jensen Huang has become the spiritual symbol of Nvidia," a user posting from Chongqing wrote. "With his departure, Nvidia may still be incredibly successful, but it will lack its soul."
• A lengthy post from a user in Guangdong Province argued that Nvidia's track record proves Huang is an "irreplaceable leader."
• Another Guangdong user said the AI era had lost its "spiritual leader" and questioned whether the narrative of AI could continue without Huang.

Fear ran alongside the eulogies. Several users voiced concern that Chinese Americans could be targeted in a crackdown on Chinese espionage. Hu Xijin, former editor in chief of the state-owned Global Times, wrote on Weibo that ousting Huang amounts to a "national security coup" and said the move will have "a profound impact on the situation of Chinese Americans."

Who gains from Nvidia's turmoil?

While Chinese social media lamented the departure, China stands to win from the fallout. Nvidia's stock price has fallen more than 8% over the past week, and analysts see an opening for Beijing's constrained but advancing AI sector.

"This would be a setback for the US, particularly as China continues aggressively investing in its own AI capabilities," Brad Gastwirth, global head of research at Circular Technology, told Business Insider's Alistair Barr.

Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group who leads the advisory's China practice and tech policy after 25 years as a US government research analyst, identified the likely winners by geography and product line:

• The "strongest potential beneficiaries in Asia are China's AI accelerator companies and Taiwan's custom-ASIC designers, with more selective opportunities for South Korea."
• The "immediate gains" for China, Taiwan, and South Korea would "come through greater investor interest and customers' willingness to evaluate alternatives to Nvidia hardware."

The strategic logic is straightforward. China has struggled to close the AI gap with the US largely because of a shortage of advanced AI chips — precisely Nvidia's product. Any erosion of the company's edge, or of customer confidence in its stability, weakens that bottleneck.

How strong is China's hand?

China's semiconductor industry remains constrained, but other parts of its AI sector have made measurable progress this year. Chinese labs are shipping frontier-level models at a fraction of the cost of US frontier models:

• Moonshot AI's Kimi K3
• Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash
• Alibaba's Qwen

All three made a splash in the global tech scene in 2026 for their capabilities relative to their price. Combined with the investor interest Triolo expects to shift toward non-Nvidia hardware, the scandal gives Chinese AI firms a rare alignment of optics and opportunity.

For now, two narratives are running in parallel: a Chinese internet grieving a leader it considered its own, and an AI supply chain already repositioning for his absence.