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Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it ever since. On Thursday he resigned. And some of his own employees want him back.

What happened

• The exit: Huang left as CEO, president and board member, effective immediately; the board accepted on Wednesday. CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO and stays CFO. Harvey C. Jones becomes Nvidia's first independent board chair.
• Why: days earlier Huang admitted an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company US officials suspect of routing Nvidia chips into China. A second affair, with an Nvidia executive, was reported on Wednesday, and Reuters reported a third, with another employee, on Thursday.
• The cost: shares fell nearly 12% on Thursday morning and as much as 19% since Friday, more than $855 billion. The Decoder counts about $1.4 trillion of market value lost since the first spy report on October 29.

The twist: staff want him back

Wired saw an internal "suggestion box" post, written by a longtime engineer before the resignation, asking the board to weigh employee sentiment. It has drawn more than 1,600 comments, most of them for bringing Huang back. "If you believe in the mission, bring back THE boss," one wrote.

Why it matters: replacing him is hard. More than 60 people reported directly to Huang, there was no succession plan, and The Decoder notes he held together about $300 billion of guarantees for smaller customers.

Washington and open source

• Congress: Huang agreed to testify to Republican-led committees. Democrats Richard Neal and Ron Wyden opened their own inquiry into how the Trump administration handled Nvidia's chip sales to China, saying the H200 arrangement worked through "what appears to be an unconstitutional export tax system".
• Chip tracking: Rep. Bill Foster told MIT Technology Review that Nvidia privately said the location tracking in the Chip Security Act is technically possible, while an industry group publicly called it "potentially infeasible".
• Open source: Huang backed open models like Nemotron, and Nvidia has not finalized its $13 billion deal for Hugging Face. CEO Clem Delangue says Hugging Face will keep fighting for open source.

For builders: nothing in your Nvidia stack changes this week. Watch who the board picks.

Models

• Gemini 4 Hydrogen: Google's new fast everyday model, replacing 3.8 Flash. Google says it beats the bigger Argon on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 51 to 50 at default and up to 54 at "xhigh", for $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 output. Argon is less than four weeks old.
• Harder-to-read models: OpenAI research, reported by The Decoder, finds that as base models get stronger, more reasoning happens silently, without the written scratchpad safety monitors read. Reinforcement learning also gives models more control over that scratchpad, and the trait passes from teacher to student models. No simple training fix worked; the trade-off comes from developers' choices of architecture and cost.

Outage

Microsoft 365 was down for almost two days: Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot failed for people and businesses worldwide. Microsoft extended its email timeout to 48 hours to keep delayed mail, says it found no sign of malicious activity, and The Verge reports the cause is linked to Azure VNet configuration changes. A full root-cause report is promised.

Shopping

A Podqi study shared with The Verge asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity where to buy from 151 brands. In 6,795 answers, Perplexity showed fake or risky shops in 15% of answers, ChatGPT in 8%, Gemini in 4%. Smaller brands are hit about twice as often.

Money

• OpenAI: quarterly revenue crossed $10 billion for the first time, Bloomberg reports, up almost 50% from $6.7 billion; the adjusted operating margin improved from -150% to -109%.
• LangChain: the agent toolkit raised $300 million led by Alphabet's CapitalG, at a $3 billion valuation.
• Nebius: plans $40 billion of spending in 2027, funded by customer prepayments and contract-backed loans. Its Vineland, New Jersey data center for Microsoft, a contract worth up to $19.4 billion, is months behind schedule.

Policy

Australia proposed its first mandatory rules for frontier AI makers: independent audits, ongoing safety checks, published safety frameworks, and immediate reporting of security incidents, enforced by a new oversight body next to the Australian AI Safety Institute.

Main story today: how Notion AI chats leaked through a vendor, Fireworks AI. Our full story is on the channel.

The through-line

What you can't see. A board that never planned for life without its founder, reasoning a model no longer writes down, a shop a chatbot never checked.

One thing to do today: before you buy from a link a chatbot gives you, check the address yourself.

Sources covered

1 story · 119 sources (75 news, 42 company, 2 voices)

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