Nvidia After Jensen Huang: A Trillion-Dollar Backlog Buys Time

Nvidia lost up to 10 percent of its market value on Thursday after the board forced out co-founder Jensen Huang — and the numbers suggest investors fear the man more than the business.

The trigger, in the end, was not the scandal around his affair with the alleged Chinese agent Alice Huang. Nor his suspected interference in US investigations, his friendship with Donald Trump, or the murky deals that moved Nvidia chips to Chinese customers apparently past US sanctions. What pushed the otherwise loyal board on Thursday was a second affair — with manager Kimberly Powell. In corporate America, borderline CEO conduct is tolerated as long as it serves the business; sex with an employee is the absolute red line.

What does the company actually lose?

Huang was the firm. In the 2010s he recognized that AI models train far faster on Nvidia's graphics processors than on conventional CPUs, and bet everything on it: no superintelligence, no self-driving car, no walking robot without his GPUs. Roughly 90 percent of AI chips installed worldwide are today developed in Santa Clara, California. Every major AI lab, plus industrial groups such as Mercedes-Benz and Siemens, has tied its future to Nvidia.

Huang controlled only 3.5 percent of the shares yet ran the company single-handedly — no hierarchies, 60 direct managers reporting every detail, several thousand emails a day. He built no successor; in 2023 he said he could imagine carrying on for another 30 or 40 years. CFO Colette Kress is to lead until a replacement is found. He ran the four-trillion-dollar firm like a family business: son Spencer, 36, handles product management in robotics; daughter Madison, 35, leads a key marketing unit; son-in-law Nico Caprez, 35, a former Swiss professional skier, works as a vice president on global AI infrastructure growth. The board's search now signals a clear break with the founder's family.

What does history say about founder exits?

Two precedents frame the question. When Steve Jobs handed Apple to Tim Cook in 2011 before his death, observers predicted the loss of Apple's soul. Cook delivered no second iPhone moment, yet Apple today is the world's most valuable company — ahead of Nvidia. When the SEC in 2018 accused Tesla of deceiving shareholders and demanded Elon Musk's removal, the stock fell 15 percent but the company survived; Tesla's later weakness arguably stems from Musk staying, not leaving.

What is the order situation?

Nvidia has reported a backlog of one trillion dollars for the Blackwell and Rubin chip architectures through 2027 — orders that do not vanish with Huang. Anthropic plans to go public within days, targeting a valuation between 1.5 and 2 trillion dollars, and intends to use the fresh capital to accelerate AI development on Nvidia's high-performance chips, whose profit margins exceed 70 percent.

The greater risk: Huang helped manufacture demand himself. Nvidia invested not only in data centers and research but directly in its customers — supplying chips, software and capital, often together — and fueled the AI boom with hundreds of billions through such equity and barter deals. If that bubble bursts, Nvidia hangs inside it. Whoever leads next must bring transparency to these counter-deals, above all the Asia transactions: the original Alice Huang affair involved Nvidia chips rented to Chinese internet groups by roundabout routes or delivered directly despite US sanctions — the former morally questionable, the latter likely illegal.

Why does the politics matter?

US investigators long looked away, reportedly because Huang and Trump were close friends. Huang accompanied the president at least eight times in the past eighteen months on official trips and state occasions, and transferred 25 million dollars for his ballroom. With Trump politically weakened after the midterms, Democrats are unlikely to pass up a closer look. Desmond Shum, author of Red Roulette, considers it likely that Alice Huang was only an intermediary: "Strategically sensitive American technology worth billions passes through middlemen whose actual backers and economic interests remain in the dark." Former CIA China analyst Peter Mattis agreed on X.

If Huang knowingly used Alice Huang to illegally reach the Chinese market closed by export controls, Nvidia faces problems far bigger than choosing the next CEO's vision.

The backlog buys time; the investigations will decide the rest.