Silicon Valley insiders nervously eye Nvidia scandal fallout Sara BLOOMBERG Fri, November 13, 2026 at 3:09 AM EST 3 min read NVDA +0.24% DATB.PVT Trade NVIDIA on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Hours after Jensen Huang resigned from Nvidia, shocked tech insiders at a conference in San Francisco saw his departure as troubling for the business but were uncertain over how heavy the impact would be.
Many were still processing the spectacular departure of the rockstar CEO, who came to embody the global boom for AI chips but fell from grace after revelations of multiple extramarital affairs, one reportedly with a Chinese spy.
"It's a blow to I think everything and pretty much every player in (the) space, except direct competitors," Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said in onstage remarks.
"The culture of the company is a lot... the personality of the CEO that is there for a long time," Ghodsi said.
A lot now "depends on who the next CEO is," he added.
Nvidia's board has appointed Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress to replace Huang on an interim basis, but it remains unclear who will take over in the long term.
Investors had begun taking a dimmer view of the company even before news of the scandal broke.
Nvidia's shares have lost 13 percent of their value since Monday, and are down more than 26 percent over the past month.
One venture capitalist told AFP that the fallout from Huang's infidelities was accelerating a correction that had already been underway.
Others were more sanguine about the industry's prospects.
"We're very sad to see Jensen go," Asher Spector, the founder of an artificial intelligence startup called Flapping Airplanes, said onstage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit.
"That said, Nvidia has been a great partner," Spector said, adding: "We're very optimistic."
A lighthearted note came from an arcade game in the style of "Mortal Kombat", which pitted tech CEOs like Huang, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Sam Altman and even disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes against each other.
Other major tech companies, including Microsoft, Uber and Apple, have survived and even thrived after the departure of era-defining executives.
Still, some attendees noted that Huang's downfall might leave competing AI chip designers circling for a chance to grab a piece of Nvidia's market share.
"It was kind of unimaginable to us that there would be a world where Nvidia wouldn't be the biggest player a few years from now," Robert Wachen, the co-founder of AI computing startup Etched, said.
"But now you see there's probably a pretty big opening" for other players in the sector, Wachen said.
Huang's exit has particularly rattled the open software community.
The former Nvidia chief advocated for an ecosystem that includes so-called open models, which users can download and customize to varying degrees.
That differs from leading model developers like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, and Anthropic, which crafts Claude, both of which push for closed models.
Huang was "the leader of the pack" for open models and his departure does "create a lot of uncertainty," Igor Babuschkin, the CEO of a startup called River AI, said.
He also led Nvidia to provide billions in financing commitments to other companies, notably a more than $100 billion data center for OpenAI, which sparked concerns about circular dealmaking and a growing tech bubble.
"Will circular deals face greater scrutiny and a reality check? Very likely," Hivemind Capital partner Emmanuel Vallod told AFP via email.
"But does that mean the music is about to stop? I very much doubt it."
