It’s a story as old as time. Billionaire nerd boy meets girl. Girl is later suspected of being a spy. News at 11. Oh, and it’s also been reported that he was having an affair with one of his direct-report employees. When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang makes a "romantic" blunder, he doesn’t do it halfway. The boss of the world’s most valuable company – well, it was until recently, anyway – publicly resigned yesterday, November 12, as CEO, president, and board member, effective immediately. We don’t know if he jumped or if he was pushed. He left after admitting to having an affair. Although he never named an affair partner, one of the affairs was reported to be with Alice Huang, AKA Huang Le. She’s head of the Chinese company Megaspeed, which was an Nvidia partner. Megaspeed is accused of being a front for China’s government that was used to transfer Nvidia chips to China, although this hasn’t been proven. Some US officials also suspect [PDF] she’s working for Chinese intelligence, although the DoJ said it hasn’t yet reached a conclusion about this. The final nail in Jensen’s coffin came when The New York Times reported he had also allegedly had an affair with Nvidia’s VP of health care, Kimberly Powell. Jeeze, guy! In the aftermath, Nvidia’s CFO, Colette Kress, was appointed interim CEO. She won’t, I suspect, be in the job for long. CFOs are not CEOs. The jobs aren’t remotely the same. In most companies, Huang would be replaced by the COO. That can’t happen here. Nvidia doesn’t have a COO. Both inside and outside of Nvidia, Huang is seen as Nvidia, and Nvidia as Huang. These days, billionaire CEOs are perceived as God-kings who know all and rule all. Much more often than not, that’s BS. That isn’t the case with Nvidia. Huang co-founded Nvidia on April 5, 1993. He was appointed CEO on day one, and he never left the job. At first, the company staggered forward. When it released the GeForce 256 in 1999 , which it marketed as the first GPU, it started on its path to becoming the chip manufacturer of choice for PC gamers. It still is today. That’s a great niche, but it doesn’t make a company a trillion-dollar business. No, the path to that dizzying height came when, in 2006, Nvidia unveiled CUDA . This programming architecture opened its GPUs’ parallel-processing capabilities to scientific and other non-graphics workloads. From there, CUDA would become the foundation for most high-performance and AI computing. Huang was at the center of it all. He still was until now. At KubeCon North America , the trade show for Kubernetes, used in well over half of all AI projects, I spoke to many Nvidia employees. There were two things they all mentioned. First, they were in a state of shock…