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Jensen Huang was celebrated in the Trump White House as a "genius" and idolized by investors for turning Nvidia into one of the most valuable companies in the world. But within days, his personal situation fell apart.
On Thursday, he resigned following consecutive revelations of two extramarital affairs.
The news of the first, a romantic relationship with a businesswoman accused of being a Chinese spy, reverberated around the world, causing confusion among investors.
On Wednesday, reports emerged that the technology executive had also had an affair with an Nvidia colleague.
His departure generates uncertainty in the global stock market, which had already been shaken in recent weeks. Nvidia is a key player in the United States' dispute with China for technological leadership.
Huang may not be as well-known to the public as Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.
But its reputation in the industry, especially in relation to the expanding artificial intelligence industry, probably carries more weight. Nvidia dominates the market for microchips used to enable the new technology.
The company, which is still valued at more than $4 trillion despite recent events, is at the center of the AI race between the United States and China, the world's technological and economic powerhouses.
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Huang has had access to the centers of political power on an unparalleled scale, being courted by both US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
His extraordinary rise to the top of his profession has earned him the nickname "Taylor Swift of technology" and a fortune estimated at US$145 billion (about R$780 billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Despite always wearing his signature black leather jacket, Huang worked for years to present himself as a family man, someone who embodied the American dream.
Born in Taiwan in 1963, Huang moved with his family to the west coast of the United States when he was nine years old. He graduated in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and later completed a master's degree in the same field at Stanford University.
It was in college that he met his current wife, Lori Mills. The two were lab partners and married in 1985, eight years before Huang founded Nvidia.
They have two children, Madison and Spencer, who now work at their father's company.
He worked at American chipmaker AMD before co-founding Nvidia. Known as "Daddy Huang" in Taiwan, he has a reputation for being a workaholic and demanding extremely high standards from his employees.
The company became a major supplier of computer chips and circuits used in games before expanding its operations and entering the world of AI. Today, it develops the main processing chips used to enable this expanding technology.
Huang extolled AI as a "new industrial revolution" comparable to the advent of electricity.
"Jensen Huang is a technology visionary of the caliber of Steve Jobs," Stephen Witt, author of Thinking Machine, a biography of Jensen Huang, told the BBC, adding that he was responsible for creating AI hardware as we know it today.
The Nvidia co-founder has a notoriously close relationship with Trump. At a recent White House AI summit attended by 42 technology executives, the president was flanked by Huang and Musk.
It was no surprise that Huang was at the high table. Companies using Nvidia chips include Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Essentially, Huang's customer base includes the biggest companies on the planet, and they are spending big on Nvidia's products.
This interconnection between companies means that the negative impact felt by Nvidia, on the stock market, for example, could perhaps have broader consequences for other companies and the economy as a whole.
Witt told the BBC that Jensen Huang had worked hard to present himself as a family man and that this was "very important to him".
"He praises the woman, speaks about her in a very complimentary way," he added. "The consequences of this would be bad for anyone's family. But for someone who has worked so hard to cultivate the image of a family man and keeps his children so close, it's really bad."
After the revelations of his first extramarital affair, Huang admitted to having been "unfaithful" to his wife and apologized for hurting his family.
Trump, like other leaders in the AI technology sector, had supported Huang remaining in the role at Nvidia. The president described him as "honorable."
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