Nvidia's board is preparing to remove Jensen Huang as CEO after he acknowledged a second extramarital affair — this one with a subordinate executive, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The company's shares fell roughly 8% in after-hours trading following the report.

The board was set to meet as early as Wednesday to decide Huang's future. The alleged relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, who reports directly to him, compounds a scandal that began with reports of an earlier liaison with the head of Singaporean data center firm Megaspeed — a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy.

What does the first affair involve?

Nvidia's board launched its investigation after Huang acknowledged the relationship with the Megaspeed executive. The board said it found no reason to believe company secrets or national security were compromised. Lawmakers are less reassured.

• Three House committee chairs have requested a closed-door meeting with Huang.
• Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer, was previously investigated by the Commerce Department over possible chip diversions to China.
• Huang faces a proposed shareholder class action over the scandal.

"This is not just personal foibles," a senior government official who focuses on AI told Fast Company earlier this week. The alleged affair with a subordinate raises a different set of concerns, and could open new lanes of legal exposure for Nvidia.

Why does the succession vacuum matter?

Huang, 63, runs Nvidia through approximately 60 direct reports and an unusually flat structure with no chief operating officer, Fortune reports. The company has never publicly identified a successor, and Huang has reportedly said he does not believe in succession planning. If the board removes him, there is no obvious heir to a multitrillion-dollar company.

That structure once served Nvidia well. It streamlined decisions and made money at a scale few companies match. Now it exposes the central risk: a company built to an extraordinary degree around one person.

How did Huang build Nvidia?

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, after stints at AMD and LSI Logic. Their bet — that increasingly sophisticated graphics would require specialized processors — proved prescient. In 1999, six years after launch, Nvidia introduced the GeForce 256, marketed as the world's first GPU.

The most consequential wager came in 2006, when Nvidia introduced CUDA, a software platform that let programmers use GPUs for tasks beyond graphics. Huang banked on the idea that chips performing thousands of calculations simultaneously could open markets far beyond video games.

In 2012, researchers trained the AlexNet neural network on Nvidia GPUs, helping launch modern deep learning. A decade later, ChatGPT sent demand soaring as Silicon Valley raced to build AI systems. "We are at the iPhone moment of AI," Huang declared in March 2023.

What are the financial stakes?

The numbers behind the company Huang may soon leave:

• Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter — more than double the previous year.
• $89 billion of that came from the data center business alone.
• Microsoft, Google and leading AI labs all depend on Nvidia chips and the software ecosystem around them.

Huang involved himself in the minutiae of chip development and famously eschewed one-on-one meetings in favor of group discussions. He became one of tech's most recognizable figures, instantly identified by his leather jacket.

What happens next?

The timing compounds the risk. Anthropic is reportedly preparing to go public as soon as next week, amid growing investor anxiety over the enormous sums flowing into AI. Leadership uncertainty at Nvidia — the company supplying much of that buildout — could reverberate well beyond its own stock price.

For 33 years, Nvidia's fortunes have been inseparable from Huang's. The irony is sharp: the second affair, though the first carries far greater national-security implications, may be the one that seals his fate. At a moment when much of the tech industry's fortunes tie back to Nvidia, the company may now have to prove it can thrive without the man who built it.