Jensen Huang resigned Thursday as Nvidia CEO after admitting to an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. His departure raises concerns about Nvidia's future commitment to open source AI, a cause Huang championed as both a safety measure and a business strategy to diversify the company's customer base beyond frontier AI labs.
Huang had positioned open source as good for innovation, diffusion, and sovereignty while backing Nvidia's development of the Nemotron family of open-weight AI models. He also signed an open letter earlier this year with 25 companies, including Microsoft, Meta, IBM, and Palantir, urging the U.S. government not to over-restrict open-weight AI models.
Nvidia's CFO Colette Kress has been named interim CEO. The company has yet to finalize its $13 billion deal to acquire Hugging Face, whose CEO Clem Delangue said the platform would continue fighting for open source regardless of what happens next. Nvidia also agreed to pay $6 billion for a non-exclusive license for open AI coding startup Poolside's technology.
One Nvidia employee told TechCrunch they don't expect the leadership change to affect Nemotron development. But open source community members worry that a new CEO may be more cautious about supporting the open model ecosystem. Huang's exit could also strengthen arguments in Washington for tougher restrictions on Chinese AI companies, particularly given the scandal surrounding his relationship with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive and alleged spy, and his efforts to loosen chip export controls.
Despite these concerns, Nvidia still needs an open AI ecosystem to maintain its customer base as major clients like Google and OpenAI develop their own chips.