Elon Musk said on Saturday that chipmaker Nvidia would lose “critical” deals without its now-ousted chief executive officer (CEO) Jensen Huang.
Huang stepped down on Thursday after revelations of extramarital affairs, including one involving a suspected Chinese spy, plunging the chipmaker into crisis and sending shockwaves across an AI industry he helped bankroll.
In a post on X, Musk said that while Huang drove the supply chain “brilliantly” at Nvidia, many such deals were “a handshake with Jensen, not a written contract”.
“Without Jensen, at least some of those critical deals will be lost.”
The SpaceX boss went on to praise the former Nvidia CEO: “If Jensen gave me his word about compute delivery or I asked for components to be accelerated, he always came through.
“Sure, we’d put together a purchase order at some point later, but I never for a second thought it wouldn’t happen.”
The billionaire has separately said on X that a petition was underway to reinstate Huang and that he would sign it. It was not immediately clear whether Musk was referring to the internal effort reported by Wired.
Nvidia declined to comment on the Wired report as well as Musk’s post. Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
Pressure had mounted on Huang after reports said the 63-year-old, who is married, had an affair with Alice Huangan unrelated former executive of Singapore-based company Megaspeed, who US authorities had been investigating.
Nvidia then said its board was probing whether its then-CEO “has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort”.
On Thursday, CNN reported that the US intelligence community was still working to understand the relationship between Alice Huang and the Chinese government, with multiple sources telling CNN that the intelligence collected on her to date does not prove that she was acting as a spy for Beijing.
The report said there was “disagreement among US officials about the strength of the evidence that Alice Huang was recruited by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS)” to spy on Jensen Huang.
Insiders and tech titans in the running
Huang’s exit plunges the $4 trillion company into uncertainty and threatens to disrupt an AI ecosystem that he helped bankroll by pouring Nvidia’s swelling cash pile back into cloud providers, suppliers and the industry’s biggest labs.
Nvidia’s board has approached British chipmaker Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas in its search for a potential successor to Jensen Huang, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Haas’s name has been making the rounds among analysts since Huang’s exit. He spent seven formative years at Nvidia, rising to vice president and general manager of its computing products business, before joining Arm in 2013.
Nvidia’s finance chief Colette Kress is currently interim CEO.
Nvidia’s board said it was in the process of selecting a search firm for the CEO role and had not formally engaged any potential candidates.
Some analysts expect the next CEO to break from Huang’s three-decade reign as the hands-on “chief conductor” who personally steered engineering roadmaps, geopolitical negotiations over exports to China and massive investments across the AI ecosystem.
A potential shift toward a more institutional leadership structure would come as Nvidia faces heightened regulatory scrutiny and a growing consensus among US lawmakers to further restrict the company’s chip exports to China.
Analysts view Kress as a steady financial authority, while veteran engineer Ian Buck is seen as a top candidate after leading development of CUDA, the software platform that powers Nvidia’s AI chips.
Apart from Haas, external names discussed by analysts include AMD chief Lisa Su, who has navigated the key China market, and Micron chief Sanjay Mehrotra, whose memory chips power Nvidia servers.
Other candidates cited by industry watchers include Marvell head Matt Murphy and Apple hardware chief Johny Srouji, who oversaw the iPhone maker’s in-house silicon development.
Former Apple chief Tim Cook was floated by US President Donald Trump, as Nvidia’s board evaluates whether to prioritise financial continuity, deep technical expertise, or experience running a global tech heavyweight.
Source: www.dawn.com
