现在的问题是，黄仁勋能否挺过这一关。为了思考接下来可能发生的情况，这位编辑周日与耶鲁管理学院领导力研究高级副院长、首席执行官领导力研究所创始人杰弗里·桑内菲尔德（Jeffrey Sonnenfeld）教授进行了交谈，该研究所曾在其CEO峰会上接待过黄仁勋。桑内菲尔德表示，他喜欢黄仁勋，并认为黄仁勋的事业仍有挽救余地，但他给出的概率是“大约五五开”。他还提出了许多值得深思的观点。
首先是声誉受损。桑内菲尔德指出，迄今为止，黄仁勋一直“受到科技界所有人的敬仰和信任”。但他称这一事件是“判断力极其糟糕的表现”。即使黄仁勋只是天真无知，他说，“除了他之外，英伟达的任何其他员工都会因此被解雇”，仅这种鲁莽行为就足以导致“信心的不可挽回的损失”。
我们还谈到了先例，但事实证明，真的没有这样的先例。桑内菲尔德观察到，幸存于个人丑闻的高管通常会在另一家公司重拾旧业。前惠普（HP）首席执行官马克·赫德（Mark Hurd）就是一个例子。在2005年至2010年间，他将惠普推向了行业收入榜首，但在提交掩盖与承包商私人关系的虚假费用报告后被迫辞职。甲骨文（Oracle）大约在一个月后聘请了他。黄仁勋没有类似的举动可做，因为英伟达是他的公司。
至于英伟达内部的继任者名单，那也基本上不存在。虽然像英伟达这样规模和重要性的公司内部通常存在层级结构，但黄仁勋尽可能保持了扁平化管理，据他自己称，他有大约60名直接下属。这种结构使得很难确定谁将从内部接替他的位置（尽管他的两个孩子都在英伟达工作，有时也是继任猜测的对象）。这不会阻止未来几周肯定会出现的全球猜谜游戏。桑内菲尔德说，危机中的董事会经常寻求来自外部的“救世主式解决方案”，并将前谷歌首席执行官埃里克·施密特（Eric Schmidt）作为一个提议浮出水面。
英伟达在一个庞大且复杂的循环融资网络中的核心角色，使得这一特定困境尤为棘手。英伟达不仅是推动AI繁荣的最大芯片供应商，也是建设背后的主要银行。除了投资数百家小型初创企业外，英伟达还投资了OpenAI、Anthropic、xAI、CoreWeave和Nebius。今年8月，它还与美国阿波罗（Apollo）、贝莱德（BlackRock）、黑石（Blackstone）、 Brookfield、高盛（Goldman Sachs）和KKR签署了初步协议，旨在动员超过5000亿美元的资金，黄仁勋曾表示英伟达可能为其提供高达四分之一的担保。这一举措被广泛解读为分散风险的一种方式。然而，处于中心的领导层危机正是跌倒演变为螺旋式下滑的原因。
那么，英伟达的董事会现在可能在做什么呢？桑内菲尔德指出，黄仁勋主张向中国出售先进芯片的做法已经让人们感到焦虑。英伟达支持的Anthropic公司的达里奥·阿莫代伊（Dario Amodei）在今年1月的达沃斯论坛上就向中国出售芯片一事发表了许多看法，将其比作“向北韩出售核武器”。
与此同时，英伟达周日表示，黄仁勋将继续管理公司。即使对于一位已经花费大量时间在全球各地推广英伟达的首席执行官来说，这也是一个艰巨的任务。首先，三位众议院主席要求黄仁勋在11月18日进行闭门简报。英伟达也将在11月17日发布最新财报。桑内菲尔德预计，即使黄仁勋保留头衔，他也必须移交部分日常决策权。
目前只有一件事是确定的。黄仁勋并不拥有那种能够巩固其在英伟达权力的超级投票权股票。桑内菲尔德经常主张采用双重股权结构以赋予创始人权力，并表示黄仁勋在没有这种结构的情况下取得成功，是对这一观点最好的反驳。但如果黄仁勋拥有这种结构，桑内菲尔德继续说道，将他罢免会更加困难。
黄仁勋很可能挺过调查（桑内菲尔德希望董事会澄清他并未故意协助任何人）。更大的考验在于，当英伟达的员工、客户和合作伙伴，以及间接地，那些在401(k)计划中持有英伟达股票的数百万美国人，必须决定一个主要建立在黄仁勋判断力之上的AI经济是否仍然有意义时。
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Nvidia’s board announced Sunday that it’s launching an independent investigation after CEO Jensen Huang told staff he was unfaithful to his wife. But this isn’t a case of just another CEO having an extramarital affair. The romantic interest is Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, whom U.S. officials believe is a Chinese spy who was feeding information back to Beijing. In short, the stakes reach well beyond Nvidia, given how many tech and financial partners depend on its place at the center of the booming AI economy. “I’m responsible for an entire industry,” Huang recently told Bloomberg in a sit-down.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington dismissed the allegations in late October as “groundless smears and slanders,” and no one has been charged. But U.S. intelligence officials reportedly briefed President Donald Trump about their concerns a year ago, and unnamed senior officials inside the Trump administration told the Times that they doubt Huang could have remained unaware all that time of Alice Huang’s intelligence-gathering role for China. When Trump was first briefed, the Times reported, officials didn’t believe Huang knew, and isn’t clear whether their assessment has changed. The board, meanwhile, says it sees no sign that national security or company secrets were compromised, and that Huang is staying on.
The question now is whether Huang can survive this. To think through what could come next, this editor spoke Sunday with famed professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management and founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, which has hosted Huang at its CEO summits. Sonnenfeld likes Huang, he said, and he called Huang’s career salvageable but put the odds at “about a 50-50.” He also had a lot more food for thought.
First, the reputational damage. Until now, Huang has been “revered and trusted by everybody in technology,” Sonnenfeld noted. But he called this episode “remarkably poor judgment.” Even if Huang was merely naive, he said, “any employee in Nvidia other than him would be fired over this,” and the recklessness alone would mean “an irretrievable loss of confidence.”
Sonnenfeld suggested that Huang’s saving grace could be what social psychologists call idiosyncrasy credits, if he can prove he was being duped. The term comes from Edwin Hollander, a social psychologist who proposed in a 1958 paper that people earn latitude in a group by showing competence and following its rules. Huang has been earning latitude since he co-founded Nvidia in 1993. But all that goodwill can run out when a screw-up looks self-serving or touches the group’s core norms. Here that group includes Nvidia’s board, its roughly 42,000 employees who are bound by security rules, and, in a looser sense, the U.S. government, given it restricts its exports.
We also talked about precedents, except, as it turns out, there really are none. Executives who survive personal scandals usually pick up where they left off at another company, Sonnenfeld observed. Former HP CEO Mark Hurd is one example example. Between 2005 and 2010, he turned HP to the top of the industry by revenue, then was pressured to resign after he filed inaccurate expense reports that hid a personal relationship with a contractor. Oracle hired him about a month later. Huang has no equivalent move to make because Nvidia is his company
As for the bench at Nvidia, that doesn’t really exist either. While there is typically a hierarchy inside companies of Nvidia’s scale and importance, Huang has kept things as flat as possible, with about 60 direct reports by his own account. That structure makes it hard to figure out who would succeed him from inside (though his children, both of whom work at Nvidia, are the sometimes the subject of succession speculation). That won’t stop the worldwide guessing game that’s sure to follow in the coming weeks. And boards in crisis often reach for a “messianic solution” from outside, Sonnenfeld said, floating former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as one idea.
Nvidia’s role at the center of a massive and complex circular financing web is what makes this particular predicament especially tricky. Nvidia isn’t just the biggest provider of chips driving the AI boom but also largely the bank behind the buildout. In addition to stakes in hundreds of smaller startups, Nvidia has invested in OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, CoreWeave and Nebius. In August, it also signed preliminary agreements with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion over time, and Huang has said Nvidia could backstop up to a quarter of it. The move was widely interpreted as a way to spread risk. Still, a leadership crisis at the center is how a stumble becomes a spiral.
So what’s Nvidia’s board likely doing right now? Sonnenfeld noted that Huang’s advocacy for selling advanced chips to China had already made people anxious. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, whose company Nvidia has backed, had a lot to say about selling chips to China at Davos back in January, likening it to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
Now the board’s independent members — meaning everyone but Huang — will have to establish what technology reached China if any, and by what routes, including by better understanding Nvidia’s relationship with Megaspeed. The Singapore cloud company, which grew out of a Chinese gaming business and became Nvidia’s largest buyer in Southeast Asia, bought roughly $2 billion of its chips, the New York Times reported in October 2025, raising broader questions about whether it was helping China circumvent U.S. export restrictions, either by re-exporting the chips to China or renting them to Chinese customers remotely. (An Nvidia spokesperson told The Hill after the Times report that the allegations were “thoroughly investigated and debunked last year.”)
In the meantime, Huang will keep running the company, Nvidia said Sunday. That’ll be a tall order, even for a CEO who already spends much of his time traveling the world to promote Nvidia. For starters, three House chairmen want a closed-door briefing from Huang on November 18. Nvidia is also reporting its newest earnings on November 17. Sonnenfeld expects that even if Huang keeps the title, he’ll have to hand off some of the day-to-day decision-making.
Only one thing is certain right now. Huang doesn’t own the kind of super-voting stock that would cement his power at Nvidia. Sonnenfeld often argues for dual-class structures that empower founders, and he says Huang’s success without one has been the best counterargument to that case. But if Huang had one, Sonnenfeld continued, removing him would be harder.
This episode may be remembered as a pivotal moment for how the tech industry guards its secrets. Sonnenfeld argues tech has been “way too lax” compared with defense contractors that face clearance regimes. The arrest last month of an OpenAI engineer points to the same problem. He was accused of hiding a recording device behind a TV in an executive conference room, and while OpenAI has said it has no indication that model weights, source code, or customer data were accessed, the case highlights how exposed tech companies are to people who get close.
Huang may well survive the investigation (Sonnenfeld hopes the board clears him of knowingly aiding anyone). The bigger test comes when Nvidia’s employees, customers and partners, and, indirectly, the millions of Americans with Nvidia in their 401(k) plans, have to decide whether an AI economy built largely on the judgment of Huang still makes sense.
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