Today is a conflicting day for me, considering a scandal about Chinese spying, two extramarital affairs and corporate hubris have brought down Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia for 33 years.
I haven’t been able to absorb the shock of this moment, as Huang resigned from Nvidia this monring. The stock market has processed the loss, as Nvidia has lost $1.539 trillion in value in the last month and it is no longer the most valuable company in the world.
I also recognize the disappointment, anger and sense of loss about this event for Huang’s wife, his children, and the extended Nvidia corporate family. I have often taken pride in writing the very first story about Nvidia, back when I was at the San Jose Mercury News and he was touting his non-triangle graphics chips as Windows accelerators, before he started wearing black leather jackets.
His company was one of around 80 3D graphics chip design companies that emerged in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to compete as the digital world transformed from 2D to 3D visuals. He rode the wave of gaming graphics and found new uses for the parallel computing tasks in processing for neural networks, which led to AI. And that turned the company into the most valuable in the world, surpassing $5 trillion in value, and it made its game graphics business look puny. He was a celebrity in his native Taiwan.
Yet he engaged in risky behavior, somehow believing he could hide extramarital affairs from all of the cameras that were pointing at him.
Source link







