Jensen Huang: Silicon Valley superstar engulfed by personal scandal

Huang founded Nvidia with fellow electrical engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993.

The company was originally known for chips that process graphics, particularly for computer games.

Eventually it changed focus to AI, a field it now dominates.

“In 2012 these machine learning neural net researchers started to use it for that purpose and Jensen immediately recongnised that this was going to be a massive industry and the future of computing. He began to pour enormous amounts of resources into building what was essentially the AI hardware market,” says Witt.

“Today when we think of that, we think of these giant data centres – none of that existed. There were no customers for the stuff he was building. In fact his first customer was Open AI at the time they had 30 people – he actually gave it to them, he donated it to them.”

Nvidia is now worth some $4.5 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies ever.

“The first real neural net of modern times on an Nvidia network was Alex Krizhevsky’s Alexnet and they trained that on two Nvidia cards in Alex’s bedroom. Now we do the same thing but we do it with 200,000 – 300,000 cards and instead of doing it in a bedroom we do it in a giant barn full of computers called a data centre,” adds Witt.

“So when you think about a data centre buildout, when you hear the AI infrastructure buildout, Jensen runs a tollbooth. All of that goes through him. And it made his company at least temporarily, the most valuable company in the world.”

Nvidia’s board has announced a probe following reports by the New York Times that Huang had engaged in a romantic relationship with a woman believed by US intelligence to be a Chinese spy.

For now, though, Nvidia’s board appears to have little appetite for removing Huang, saying in a statement on Sunday that they have “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team”.

Sources tell the BBC his removal is unlikely because there is so much money at stake. There is also no clear successor to the 63-year old tech boss.