Who replaces Jensen Huang at Nvidia now?

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Down To Business with Bobby Kerr on News Talk, sponsored by Bank of Ireland.

Emmet Oliver (0:08)

Now, there's only one business story dominating, and it really is just the dominant story, both here and in the US and across the world, particularly in technology, that is Nvidia. We know Jensen Huang has left, has departed the company. He was being heralded until probably about a week or so ago, as being a very farsighted, almost visionary tech leader. Nvidia a few months ago was the most valuable company in the world. I notice it's a good bit of that now, as Apple reasserts its place and Microsoft, of course, up there too. But what happened here? Was this a sort of Cold War style spying scandal or is there a little bit more to the story? So joining me here in studio is Charlie Taylor, who is the technology and innovation editor at the Sunday. Whoa, that was close, at the Business Post.

Charlie, you're first of all very welcome.

Charlie Taylor (0:52)

We're no longer at the Sunday. Oh, every day of the week.

Emmet Oliver (0:55)

So Jensen Huang, we've all been watching it during the week. The funny thing just to get it out of the way is despite all these bad and negative headlines, the shares are only down about 6% on the week. So, you know, it got very excitable, but I'm not sure how damaged has the company actually been.

Charlie Taylor (1:09)

Well, I mean, you know, it's not great because, I mean, that's still, it's estimated between 450 and 550 billion. So it's a small amount for Nvidia, but quite a sizeable sum.

Yeah, and it comes on the back of, there's been a lot of negative sentiment towards tech. Generally, there's been a lot of, you know, results are out relatively recently for all the big tech companies. And a lot of them got punished by investors who were like, is this AI thing ever going to pay off? So over the last six weeks, I think Nvidia has lost something like nearly 2 billion. It was ranked at 5.8 billion market cap just last month. And now that's down to 4 billion, which is still sizeable.

Emmet Oliver (1:45)

Trillion, right?

Charlie Taylor (1:46)

Trillion, yes, trillion, billion.

Emmet Oliver (1:47)

That's not going to be our business of trillions big stuff.

Charlie Taylor (1:50)

You know, down to 4 trillion. So it's a sizeable drop for that. Now that's only a certain amount of that is attributable to the scandalous. Sure, and there are general industry friends and so on. But it's bad timing to see the least, you know?

Emmet Oliver (2:03)

Now we have two layers to the story. We have the spying piece, which is with a woman called Alice Wong, who led one of the company's customers. So that's where they originally intersected, presumably. The second one, though, is a more conventional extramarital affair with a lady called Kimberly in the company as well. So, I mean, could any CEO survive these, do you think?

Charlie Taylor (2:22)

Well, I think it looked as though he was going to survive the first one, surprisingly, because you're there kind of going, if you're linked with someone that your own government is calling an alleged spy and suggesting that, you know, this is not a good relationship in any means, you know, given the friction between the US and China, you would kind of think that's, you know, you're going to be, you're gone, you're straight away, but it looked as though he was going to survive that because this talk of this came up a while ago. The New York Times reported a few months ago that there was concern over this relationship. And then, you know, and then when it broke the story about it happened in the MIT, I think about a week ago, it looked okay. Trump was like, hey, well, you know, I mean, we hardly need to go into his morals and his moral standing. But, you know, I mean, it was like sort of, you know, Trump and loads of others seemed to rally around him and it looked as though he might be okay. There's going to be questions to be answered, but he'll be all right. But then the second affair came out, the Washington Post, I think, published that or the MIT again on Tuesday or Wednesday. And then that was it for him. Not least because there's talk of other relationships as well that haven't been disclosed yet. There's rumors of one that we have another employee at Nvidia.

So between all of those things, that was it. I think the board just went, investors are not liking this. He's out.