Nvidia’s board could decide as soon as today to remove Jensen Huang, the company’s founder and CEO of 33 years, following revelations of two alleged extramarital affairs, including one with a woman accused of being a Chinese intelligence agent.

The Wall Street Journal first reported that Huang admitted to an affair with someone alleged to be a Chinese spy. Days later, The New York Times reported a second alleged affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reports directly to Huang.

The timing couldn’t be worse for Nvidia. The company dominates the AI chip market and has become one of the most valuable companies in the world on the strength of surging demand for its GPUs. Now it’s facing a leadership crisis without a succession plan in place.

Congress isn’t waiting for the board. House Republicans have called Huang to a closed-door briefing by end of day Wednesday to answer questions about the alleged Chinese spy affair. The national security implications are obvious: Nvidia controls critical AI infrastructure, and its chips power everything from ChatGPT to military applications.

TechCrunch has already published a “highly unscientific” list of potential successors, which tells you everything about how unprepared Nvidia is for this moment. After 33 years with Huang at the helm, there’s no clear number two.

One investment intelligence consultant told TechCrunch that Huang’s behavior may be more common in the industry than people want to admit. “There are a lot of senior people in the industry that know this is happening, and are effectively condoning it,” they said.

The market has already reacted. Nvidia’s stock dropped following the initial reports, though the company’s fundamental business hasn’t changed. It still has a near-monopoly on AI training chips and a massive backlog of orders.

But leadership matters, especially when you’re sitting at the center of the AI boom and handling technology with national security implications. If the board removes Huang, whoever takes over will inherit a company at the peak of its influence and under intense scrutiny from Washington.

The board meeting could reshape not just Nvidia but the entire AI industry. Huang has been the face of the GPU revolution, the guy in the leather jacket keynoting every major AI announcement. His departure would create a vacuum at exactly the moment when AI chips are becoming strategic infrastructure.

For now, the industry is watching and waiting. The board could decide today. Or it could drag this out. Either way, Nvidia needs to answer a question it’s apparently never seriously considered: what happens after Jensen?

OpenAI Crosses $10 Billion in Quarterly Revenue

While Nvidia deals with its leadership crisis, OpenAI just hit a milestone that shows how much money is actually flowing through the AI industry right now.

The company brought in $10 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter, up almost 50% from the $6.7 billion it recorded in Q2, according to TechCrunch. That’s $40 billion annualized, assuming the growth continues.

For context, OpenAI was reportedly doing around $2 billion annually in early 2024. The acceleration is striking, even in an industry that’s used to hockey-stick growth.

The revenue comes primarily from ChatGPT subscriptions and API access. Enterprises are paying for access to GPT-4 and other models, and consumers are paying $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro subscriptions.

This matters because it shows the AI boom isn’t just hype and infrastructure spending. Real revenue is flowing to the companies building models, not just the ones selling shovels. OpenAI is proving there’s a business model here, even if the path to profitability remains unclear given the massive computing costs involved.

It also validates the bet Microsoft made when it invested $13 billion into OpenAI. That investment now looks prescient, even if the partnership has had its awkward moments.

The question is whether OpenAI can maintain this growth rate as competition intensifies. Google, Anthropic, Meta, and others are all pushing hard into the same market. But for now, OpenAI is capturing the lion’s share of consumer attention and enterprise spending.