Nvidia board moves to oust Jensen Huang over affairs

Good morning. The most powerful chip executive in the world is reportedly being fired not over a product failure or a missed earnings call, but over two affairs, one of which allegedly involved a Chinese intelligence operative. Meanwhile, OpenAI just posted $10 billion in quarterly revenue. The AI industry contains multitudes right now, and most of them are uncomfortable for someone.

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Nvidia's board had already opened an investigation into Jensen Huang's ties to a woman alleged to be a Chinese intelligence asset, a story that broke earlier this week.

Driving the news: The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday evening that Nvidia's board is preparing to dismiss Huang, its founder and CEO of 33 years. The move follows a New York Times report of a second alleged extramarital affair, this one with a current Nvidia subordinate. Huang had already admitted to the first affair, with a woman U.S. officials have described as a Chinese intelligence operative. Nvidia's stock fell on the news.

The second alleged affair involves an Nvidia executive who reports to Huang, raising separate questions about internal governance.
Huang has led Nvidia since 1993 and is widely credited with the company's pivot to GPU computing that made it the backbone of AI infrastructure.

Zoom in: China's use of what intelligence professionals call sexpionage, cultivating personal relationships to extract information or access, is well documented. Wired notes that recent high-profile cases have involved executives in sensitive technology sectors, making Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI training chips, an obvious target. The board's reported decision to act came quickly once the second affair became public, suggesting the governance problem, not just the security concern, became untenable.

Corporate governance experts told TechCrunch they have not seen a situation quite like this one at a company of Nvidia's scale.
The board had been investigating the first affair's national security implications before the second allegation surfaced.

Why it matters: Nvidia supplies the GPUs that run the vast majority of AI model training and inference worldwide. Leadership uncertainty at the company affects every team building on that infrastructure, from hyperscalers to independent developers. A prolonged transition without a named successor could slow decisions on product roadmaps and export policy at exactly the moment governments are scrutinizing chip supply chains.

Bottom line: The man who built the hardware layer of the AI era may be removed not by a competitor or a regulator, but by two affairs and a board that ran out of runway.

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Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome 2, a model that predicts how DNA variants affect individual cell types. The model takes a DNA sequence and a cell type as inputs, then predicts regulatory activity and the downstream effects of genetic variants specific to that cell context. That cell-type specificity is the meaningful upgrade over earlier approaches, which treated the genome more uniformly. It is available via the AlphaGenome API for non-commercial research. The work is aimed at helping scientists trace the cellular roots of disease from genetic data. (The Verge)

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United Airlines said it will not allow personal AI agents to book flights on its behalf. The airline cited privacy concerns and regulatory constraints, specifically rules around how customer data can be shared with third-party systems. United told the Wall Street Journal it has not seen significant volume of AI agent booking attempts yet, which tracks with what other businesses in travel and retail are reporting. The position puts airlines in an awkward spot as AI assistant makers push agentic booking as a core use case. Until carriers open formal APIs or partnerships, autonomous booking agents hit a wall at checkout. (The Verge)

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