Jensen Huang spent decades honing a singular ability to cultivate relationships with politicians around the globe, growing Nvidia into one of the world's most valuable companies and the engine of the artificial-intelligence boom.
He made Nvidia a linchpin of the technological arms race, forging deals to provide cutting-edge chips and financial backstops to major tech players, from emerging cloud companies to leading AI providers. The company even sold a sweater with a cartoon of Huang on the front. Adoring fans mob Huang when he travels to Taiwan and around the world.
Now, his stature as the company's key man has become a major risk for Nvidia. Shares slid as much as 8% in Monday morning trade following the launch of a board investigation into reports that he was the target of a Chinese espionage campaign.
The co-founder and CEO has said he doesn't believe in succession planning, and has also said he hopes to cultivate the next generation of leaders so there could be many potential successors. With roughly 60 direct reports, Huang, 63, runs the company with a flat structure, saying leaders should continuously pass on knowledge and information as they have it.
"If it's true they really don't have much of a succession plan, then that's a problem," said David Larcker, a professor of corporate governance and accounting at Stanford University, adding that he expects the board to consult outside advisers and lawyers to make a plan if one wasn't already in place. "It can be difficult to do what's more traditional in companies where you literally have the rock-star CEO or the CEO who literally has control of the company."
Larcker has studied instances of CEOs having relationships with subordinates or outside contractors, and he has also looked at strong-willed tech founders like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. He said the current Nvidia predicament stands out because of the national-security implications and need for the government to be involved.
"This is so unusual it's not like you can call somebody up and they say, 'Here's a game plan for this that's very tidy,'" he said.
Nvidia's Investor Warning
Nvidia's latest proxy statement warns that it is "highly dependent on the services of our longstanding executive team" and that the failure to ensure effective succession planning could "hinder our strategic planning, execution, and long-term success."
The board hasn't publicly indicated who would succeed Huang if he were no longer able to lead. Huang co-founded the company in 1993, building it into a driving force of the AI boom by betting big on graphics-processing units that can process massive amounts of data. He owns 3.6% of the company, making him the largest individual shareholder.
Even if Nvidia could find someone to fulfill the same business functions as Huang's, his decades traveling the world to forge business and policy partnerships with CEOs and global leaders would be difficult to emulate, industry analysts say. He frequently talks to President Trump and travels to Europe and Asia to pitch top officials on the importance of AI and the free flow of chips around the world.
"Jensen Huang is irreplaceable. He's become a singular force in the geopolitics of AI," said Jim Secreto, a public-affairs consultant and former deputy chief of staff in the Commerce Department during the Biden administration. "No one else has his combination of technical expertise and personal relationships with world leaders." During a recent trip through Europe highlighting Nvidia's technology, he met with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, urging the countries not to enact burdensome regulations and asking them to move quickly to adopt AI.
Last month, Trump awarded Huang and other industry executives the National Medal of Science for their accomplishments in the sector. During a September live taping of the "All-In" podcast co-hosted by White House AI adviser David Sacks that featured Huang, Trump called the Nvidia CEO, who put the phone on speaker and praised the president for not overreacting to recent cyberattacks by AI models with overzealous restrictions.
Early in Trump's second term, Huang forged a close relationship with Sacks, a venture capitalist who shares a preference for limited government intervention in the development of AI. Since that time, the Nvidia CEO helped push Trump to approve exports of an older chip the company makes directly to China, implement an executive order targeting states that impose restrictive AI rules and give tech companies investing heavily in the U.S. exemptions from semiconductor tariffs.
"In many ways Jensen is Nvidia's Steve Jobs. That does not mean they cannot find a Tim Cook in the future, but it would be a massive changing of the guard, and the company has not been set up for that," said Daniel Newman, CEO of tech research and advisory firm Futurum Group, referring to the former leaders of Apple.
'Unparalleled access'
Huang has also used his clout with other industry CEOs to help shape policy. Alongside Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms, he helped lead a recent charge for top AI companies to agree to best practices for training new models and keeping them safe to prevent cyberattacks.
One of the companies involved was SpaceX, a top Nvidia customer. Huang and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk have worked together for more than a decade. In 2016, Huang personally delivered the first supercomputer for so-called deep learning to Musk when he was at OpenAI, inscribing it with a note saying "to the future of computing and humanity."
Like other AI companies, SpaceX relies on billions of dollars' worth of Nvidia chips to run its models. That dependency has made many CEOs wary of crossing Huang or endorsing policies that he opposes.
Earlier this year, Huang rallied support for an industrywide letter supporting open-weight models that are cheaper and more customizable after some administration officials considered banning some of the tools due to security concerns. Many of those open models are developed in China, and Nvidia is one of the top U.S. open-weight developers. The restrictions were never implemented.
Huang is close friends with business partners and even some rivals, including Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan, who placed a doctoral hood on Huang when he received an honorary doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University earlier this year. Nvidia invested $5 billion in Intel late last year to expand its partnership with the company after the Trump administration took a 10% stake in the company.
The Nvidia CEO regularly travels to Taiwan, where he was born and where most of the company's chips are manufactured by TSMC. Huang's trips are often whirlwinds, with admirers clamoring to take selfies and get autographs around meetings with key partners like TSMC founder Morris Chang.
Huang "has shown a unique knack for networking with the world's ultra-elite -- a rare skill in a sea of nerds," said Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation think tank. "It was this unparalleled access to politicos and other industry titans that made him such an attractive target for Chinese intelligence to begin with."