Jensen Huang: The Circuit Interview Filmed Weeks Before His Nvidia Exit

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO on November 12, 2026, one day after Bloomberg published a 45-minute interview filmed at the height of his power. In The Rise and Reckoning of Jensen Huang, Emily Chang of The Circuit follows him through Paris, London, Stockholm and Berlin in October, then reframes the footage around what came next: his admission of an extramarital affair with a woman US officials reportedly suspect of spying for China, a board investigation, and his exit. This post was written on the day of the resignation. The facts are still moving, and we will update it as primary sources land.

TLDW

Chang spent four days with Huang as he sold Europe on sovereign AI built on Nvidia chips, and pressed him on AI safety, China, circular financing, jobs and succession. Huang answered every hard question with the same move: the technology is controllable, the fundamentals are sound, and customers choose Nvidia freely. Weeks later, reporting on his relationship with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang and a second alleged workplace relationship ended his 33-year run. Nvidia says he resigned, Bloomberg says the board ousted him, and CFO Colette Kress is now interim CEO.

Thoughts

Nvidia had no successor because its founder thought of succession as a problem for two decades from now. Asked whether his daughter is in line for the job, Huang says he hopes “the next leader of the company is already at NVIDIA,” then frames the timeline as “20 years from now.” He closes with a line that reads very differently today: “just as I can be fired, the next CEO has to be hired.” He meant it as proof that he stays humble. It was also an accurate description of a company with no chief operating officer, no board chair and, as Chang notes, “no one designated to potentially replace him.” Nvidia’s transition announcement fills those gaps in one day: Kress as interim CEO while staying CFO, longtime director Harvey Jones as the first chair in company history, and a search that will consider inside and outside candidates.

“They don’t depend on us, they choose us” is the sentence the market tested on November 12. Chang asks when the reliance of nearly every AI lab on one company becomes a systemic risk, and Huang rejects the premise. Choice and dependence are not opposites, though. A customer can choose a supplier freely and still be unable to leave. NBC News reported that Nvidia shares fell as much as 12% in early trading before recovering to a loss of about 4%, while AMD rose. That is a large move for a company whose chips, software and order book did not change overnight. What changed is that investors had priced one person as part of the product. Huang says in the same interview, “I’m responsible for an entire industry.” He was describing the concentration Chang was asking about.

Huang’s safety standard for AI agents is stricter than the one his own company applied to its CEO. He tells Chang that agents must run inside “rigorous containment systems,” get “minimum rights,” be “treated with zero trust” and be “monitored all the time,” and that any lab unable to do this should stop. He dismisses the claim that models cannot be contained as “just made up. Nonsense.” It is a serious engineering position, and it is the logic behind Nvidia’s OpenShell release. Yet the same film shows a chief executive with lots of direct reports, no meetings, family members on the payroll and a phone line to the president, overseen by a board that had never appointed a chair. Containment and monitoring are governance ideas before they are software ideas. Nvidia built them for agents first.

The case for selling chips to China just lost its most effective advocate, and the case itself is now harder to hear. Huang says the Chinese market is “completely blocked from us today,” calls US policy “a mistake” that is “hard to unwind,” and argues that China is a competitor, not an enemy. Those are defensible claims that many economists share. They now arrive attached to a man whose relationship with an executive at a company US officials suspect of smuggling chips is under investigation. Representative John Moolenaar, who chairs the House China committee, responded to the resignation by urging Congress to pass export control legislation. The merits of the argument have not changed. Who is allowed to make it has.

Key Takeaways

Nvidia’s official wording is that Huang “resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.” Bloomberg’s headline says the board ousted him, and CNBC cited a person familiar saying directors decided the night before.
The spy allegation is unproven. It rests on unnamed US officials and a reported internal memo, first described by the New York Times. Alice Huang has not been charged, Singapore says it did not investigate her for espionage, and China’s foreign ministry calls the claim a smear.
Huang admitted the affair in a November 8 memo to employees: “I was unfaithful to my wife.” Nvidia’s board said it had no reason to believe company secrets or national security were compromised.
A second report, from the New York Times on November 11 and citing people who worked at Nvidia, alleged a relationship with an executive who reported to him. No one involved has confirmed it on the record.
Megaspeed International, described in the film as one of the largest buyers of Nvidia chips in Southeast Asia, denies wrongdoing. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia’s top lawyer contacted the Commerce Department in 2025 during a probe of the company.
Huang told Chang there is no end game to his dealmaking: “I don’t have a plan. I’m not trying to get anywhere.”
Sovereign AI, in Huang’s definition, means a country controls its own data and can adapt open models, even when the hardware is American. Chang points out that more sovereign AI also means more demand for Nvidia.
Huang says Nvidia has invested close to $100 billion over five years, never leads a round, and “in all cases” owns less than 20% of a company. He claims that money drew at least five times as much from other investors.
On the bubble question his answer is that the shift is “too fundamental” to reverse, and that young AI companies are going through growing pains like the early internet.
He expects Nvidia to keep “kind of doubling every year” for several years, with the build-out maturing in about a decade and then settling into replacement cycles like PCs and phones.
Asked whether Nvidia would stop selling to a lab doing something dangerous, he says “of course,” but only if the company knew “for certain” that its technology was harming people.
Chang’s hardest question, about workers who learned AI and still lost their jobs, gets a reply about construction, electrician and plumbing work created by data centers.

Chapters

00:40 Jensanity and the Europe Tour

The film opens with news clips about the scandal, then cuts back to October. Chang joins Huang for four countries in four days, starting in Paris, where he is mobbed for photos and raffles off Nvidia computers. He says Nvidia invested $8 billion in European startups in a year and would announce two billion more. Chang lays out his five-layer cake of energy, chips, infrastructure, models and apps, and notes that Nvidia now invests in every layer.

04:58 Is There Zero Chance AI Ends Humanity?

Huang softens his earlier zero percent line into a claim about control: “it is in our control.” He argues that capability and safety advance together. In London he recalls Nvidia’s 1999 initial public offering and says he still does not know how to write a business plan. Chang runs through the biography, from Taiwan and Denny’s to the 2006 launch of CUDA and the early bet on AI.

09:06 Trump, Superintelligence and Self-Regulation

Huang describes his role with President Trump as informing, not agreeing. Chang covers the late September White House summit where the president rebranded AI as superintelligence and announced a voluntary accord. Huang defends letting builders help write the rules, arguing that companies should hold themselves to high standards first and that an auditing industry has to be created before regulators can lean on it.

13:02 Is It Sovereign AI If It Runs on American Chips?

Huang says yes. Sovereignty, to him, is control of your own data, culture and institutional knowledge, and a country can stand on the shoulders of giants by fine-tuning open models. In London he hands out investments on stage and praises data center operator Nscale. Days later, Chang reports, Microsoft pulled out of a deal with Nscale and investors began questioning its valuation.

16:48 China, Alice Huang and Megaspeed

Huang calls the loss of the Chinese market a policy mistake and says China and the United States both want prosperity, which should be comforting. Chang then inserts what was learned after filming. US intelligence has reportedly identified Megaspeed executive Alice Huang as a spy recruited to target him, he first called the contact normal, and he later admitted the affair. China calls the allegations a smear.

20:41 Slow Down, or Contain and Monitor?

Chang notes that Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk have all called for slowing down. Huang answers that safety is built from capability, citing retrieval, tool use and reflection as the fixes for hallucination. His one firm line is that agentic systems must be contained and monitored, and that labs unable to do so should stop their experiments. He would cut off a customer only with certainty of harm.

26:15 Cracks in the AI Boom and Circular Financing

In Stockholm, chip stocks are on a losing streak and CoreWeave is falling over its debt. Huang says the transition is too fundamental to reverse. On the charge that Nvidia funds its own customers, he says AI companies need billions in compute, that Nvidia invests to stay close to the best teams, and that it is never the largest investor. “We do as little as we can,” he says of the product line.

30:42 Is Dependence on Nvidia a Systemic Risk?

Huang insists customers choose Nvidia and that the company earns its position daily. He expects demand to keep doubling for several years before maturing. Asked whether a breakthrough in efficiency would hurt Nvidia, he says cheaper intelligence makes people more ambitious, so they use more of it, and the semiconductor industry becomes one of the largest in the world.

36:33 Jobs, Protest and Optimism

In Berlin, Huang tells Chang the sell-off will pass: “All of this is going to pass.” He answers the jobs question with construction and trades work. His keynote is interrupted by a protest over the reported use of Nvidia chips in Russian drones. Asked what happens if his optimism proves wrong, he says he will have done everything he could.

42:02 Is Your Daughter Your Successor?

Huang’s son, daughter and son-in-law work at Nvidia. He says he does not wish the job on his daughter, that anyone who wants it has to earn it, and that the pressure of being CEO should be high. His job, he says, is to create the conditions for the next leader to emerge from inside the company.

Early Reaction: Should His Private Life Matter?

Within an hour of the announcement, the AI creator world was already arguing about whether the board got it right. On the Stacked Show, hosts Nick and Jack split along the line that now runs through most of the commentary. One called the episode a “witch hunt” and argued that “people should be able to keep their private lives and their business lives completely separate.” The other gave the answer the board and Washington would give: an affair is a family matter, but a relationship with a suspected foreign intelligence asset touches Nvidia and the US government directly. That second point is the one the privacy argument has to get past, and so far nobody making it has.

The same split shows up among bigger names. CNBC relayed that Elon Musk said on X before the announcement that it “would be an honor” to hire Huang, and that he agreed with investor Gavin Baker that the board should wait for the investigation before acting. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao called letting Huang resign a mistake. The Stacked hosts reached for the obvious precedent, Steve Jobs, who was pushed out of Apple in 1985 and came back twelve years later, and predicted Nvidia’s board will eventually want Huang back if his successor wobbles. That is a guess, not reporting. Nvidia has said Huang will not work with the company in any capacity, according to NBC News, and the investigations that drove his exit are still open.

Notable Quotes

“Advancing capability, advancing safety are not in conflict. They are in fact one.”
Jensen Huang, to a Paris audience on AI risk

“We don’t have to agree on anything. It’s not my job to agree or disagree.”
Jensen Huang, on his relationship with President Trump

“I think we made a mistake, and this mistake is hard to unwind, but I did my best.”
Jensen Huang, on US policy toward selling chips in China

“Developing agentic systems without monitoring, it is extremely high risk. You should not do that.”
Jensen Huang, on the biggest AI risk he sees

“Well, they don’t depend on us, they choose us.”
Jensen Huang, on whether reliance on Nvidia is a systemic risk

“Then I can say that I did everything I could.”
Jensen Huang, asked what happens if his optimism proves wrong

“And just as I can be fired, the next CEO has to be hired. And I like it that way.”
Jensen Huang, on succession, weeks before he left Nvidia

Watch the full episode here: The Rise and Reckoning of Jensen Huang, The Circuit with Emily Chang.