Jensen Huang may really be stepping down: A second extramarital affair exposed, Nvidia has begun searching for a successor, and the crisis is starting to impact the entire AI industry.

Beating AI News Flash: Just three days after publicly expressing trust in Jensen Huang, the Nvidia board of directors is preparing to remove the founder who has steered the company for 33 years.

On the evening of November 11, US time, the board convened a meeting to discuss his future. Nvidia has commissioned an external firm to search for a successor and is also considering appointing an interim CEO first.

After the news broke, Nvidia's after-hours stock price plunged by more than 8% at one point. Combined with earlier declines this week, the market capitalization has evaporated by approximately $600 billion.

The direct trigger for the board's sudden reversal was the exposure of a second extramarital affair.

The New York Times, citing five Nvidia employees, reported that Jensen Huang also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, vice president of the company's healthcare business, who reports directly to him. Both are married, and they were photographed behaving intimately during the GTC conference in March this year. When a reporter asked Huang about the matter, he only said, "I don't think you should contact me directly," and hung up the phone.

The previously exposed Huang Le incident mainly involved chip transactions and potential information security risks. The newly disclosed relationship occurred between the CEO and a direct subordinate, further turning Jensen Huang's personal conduct into a corporate governance issue.

The Nvidia board had originally publicly expressed trust in Jensen Huang on November 8, then hired former federal prosecutor Joon Kim and Wall Street law firm Wachtell Lipton to conduct an investigation. Now, the directors have begun preparing for his possible departure.

Although Jensen Huang holds approximately 3.6% of Nvidia's shares, he does not have absolute control. According to the company's bylaws, the board only needs a majority vote to remove him from the CEO position, regardless of whether he is found to be at fault.

The real challenge is that Nvidia has virtually no ready-made successor.

Jensen Huang has served as CEO since founding Nvidia in 1993, long directly managing dozens of executives, with no clear second-in-command. CFO Colette Kress, who has managed the company's finances for over a decade, is viewed by investment institutions as a relatively suitable interim CEO candidate, but Nvidia has not yet formally nominated anyone.

Jensen Huang's value extends far beyond managing a chip company. He personally drove the company's shift from gaming graphics cards to AI computing, and integrated GPUs, the CUDA software ecosystem, and data center systems into a complete platform. He has also long personally coordinated key accounts, supply chains, and government relations, using Nvidia's capital to invest in AI startups and cloud computing companies, helping the entire computing market scale up.

Nvidia's revenue in the most recent quarter reached $96.2 billion, with its data center business contributing $89 billion. Large-scale AI infrastructure buildouts by Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI and others are all closely tied to Nvidia's product roadmap and supply capacity.

Even if Jensen Huang were to leave, the existing GPUs, CUDA ecosystem, chip production and customer orders would not be fundamentally affected immediately. What would truly be difficult to hand over quickly are the next-generation product roadmap, supply chain capacity allocation, and those large data center projects that require Nvidia to personally coordinate and provide funding support.

The market has already begun pricing in these two risks. When Nvidia fell more than 8% in after-hours trading on the 11th, competitors AMD and Broadcom instead rose about 4% and 3% respectively. But CoreWeave, an AI cloud service provider backed by Nvidia's investment, fell about 6%.

Nvidia was originally scheduled to release its quarterly earnings on November 17. Its previously issued revenue guidance for the quarter was as high as $108 billion. By then, investors will not only be watching how fast this AI chip giant can still grow, but will also face a question rarely seriously considered before: to what extent can the future Nvidia still rely on Jensen Huang?