The real reason Jensen Huang left Nvidia may have little to do with the affairs. On November 13, 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that the board's frustration pointed more at a high-risk business practice from his tenure: offering billions of dollars in credit guarantees to cloud providers and data-center developers that could not afford Nvidia's chips. Inside the company, meanwhile, employees are speaking up — one internal post has drawn more than 1,600 comments, most of them asking the board to bring him back.
How the $250 billion guarantee took shape
According to the Journal, the credit-support program was pushed by Huang's son-in-law, Nvidia vice president Nico Caprez, who promised partners financing within weeks in exchange for a cut of their revenue. The largest deal was an OpenAI data center in Ohio: Nvidia at one point considered a $250 billion backstop, and when the talks were reported on July 26, the stock fell 5% in a day, wiping out about $250 billion in market value. Then-CFO Colette Kress spent weeks renegotiating and cut the commitment in half; the scaled-down deal was signed in August. Huang had also publicly called Kress "a deer in the headlights" at a meeting that month, dismissing her as merely a "reporting CFO." Kress has now taken over as interim CEO.
Why employees want him back
The risk of the guarantee business is that Nvidia effectively used its own balance sheet to pay for its customers, manufacturing demand for its own chips. Huang privately admitted that big cloud providers were shifting to in-house chips and cutting their dependence on Nvidia, while the company still held large orders for wafers and memory from TSMC — a situation he described as an "avalanche" rolling toward the chipmaker. Critics count this kind of circular financing among the practices inflating the AI bubble. The employee backlash is real, too: WIRED reported that a longtime engineer posted in the internal suggestion box before Huang left, asking the board to seek employee views first; the post has since drawn more than 1,600 comments, most supporting his return. One employee sent a companywide email demanding the board explain its decision, and about two dozen staff publicly backed Huang on LinkedIn. One distinction matters: an image of a "letter signed by hundreds of employees" circulating online is unverified — the real channel was the internal post.
Taken together, the exit looks more complicated than a resignation over affairs: the board must deal with the exposure and broken trust left by the guarantees, while employees want to keep the leader who ran the company for 33 years. The next markers are Nvidia's earnings on November 18 — Kress's first report to the market, where analysts will press on the size of the guarantees and any writedowns — and Anthropic's listing on November 19, where Nvidia's $10 billion placement commitment could come under question. Nvidia's chip sales to China also face an investigation by Democratic lawmakers in the US, so the new management has no shortage of problems to handle at once.
