Huang leaves Nvidia: open AI and Hugging Face in uncertainty

On November 12, 2026, Nvidia announced Jensen Huang's immediate resignation after revelations about his affairs, one of them with a woman U.S. intelligence reportedly judged to be a Chinese spy, which leaves Hugging Face and open AI in uncertainty. The same day, an independent report read the trace of Blackwell GPUs, which require an export license, in the weights of six Chinese models.

In short

• On November 12, 2026, Jensen Huang resigns as chief executive of Nvidia, which he co-founded in 1993. Colette Kress, the chief financial officer, becomes interim CEO; there was no succession plan. The stock opens down 14 percent and closes down about 4 percent.
• Huang defended open AI (a letter from 25 companies, the Nemotron models). His departure leaves Hugging Face in uncertainty: the 12.9 billion dollar deal, announced on September 3, is due to close in the first half of 2027, the U.S. Justice Department is looking at its effects on competition and Kress's position is not public. No source says it is called into question.
• According to the Wall Street Journal (anonymous sources), Huang mocked Kress in August over her questions about Nvidia's financing deals; a viral post of November 13 mixes this with an OpenAI guarantee cut in August and TSMC orders that "may slow", two elements weaker than the post says.
• The same day, the "Unemployment Labs" report claims that six models from four Chinese labs (DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax, Ant Group) were initialized on Blackwell GPUs, which require an export license to China.
• What the report establishes: access to the hardware. Not smuggled chips: Blackwell machines can be rented in data centers outside China.
• For a developer: the dominant supplier loses its public face in a week, and the evidence that export restrictions leak comes from analyzing public files.

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