Jensen Huang Resigns From Nvidia After 33 Years in Charge

Read the episode (Narration script)

Good morning and welcome to Cyber World News. Big one today. The man who ran the world's most important chip company for thirty three years is out, and a large share of the planet's office email went down the same afternoon. Also on the rundown: Google, a 2013 iPad, and an embroidery machine. Let's get started.

Jensen Huang has resigned from Nvidia. The company announced Thursday morning that he is gone as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately. Chief financial officer Colette Kress is interim CEO and keeps the finance job too. Longtime director Harvey Jones becomes the first board chair Nvidia has ever had, which says something about how much of the company lived in one person. The board says it will look inside and outside for a permanent replacement.

This follows Huang's admission last weekend that he was unfaithful to his wife, reports that US intelligence suspects the woman involved of working for China, which nobody has proven, and reports of relationships with two Nvidia employees. Reuters added the second of those on Thursday. Bloomberg reports he fought to keep the job and gave up late Wednesday night.

The stock fell as much as 14 percent at the open, then closed down a little over 4. Nvidia has shed about 490 billion dollars in value since last Friday. Vanda Research says small investors bought a net 111 million dollars of the shares in the first half hour, more than 40 times a normal open. Inside the company, Wired reports a post titled Bring Back THE Boss drew more than 1,600 comments, most of them in favor. Flowers and candles appeared outside headquarters, which is a new way to mark a resignation.

The reason this reaches past one company: under Huang, Nvidia also became the banker of the AI build out. Bloomberg counted about 750 billion dollars in deals, as of July, where Nvidia invests in customers who then buy its chips, and TechCrunch notes it agreed to backstop 105 billion in financing for an OpenAI data center in Ohio. Huang was the one selling those arrangements to Wall Street. Kress faces investors on Tuesday's earnings call. Huang has agreed to testify to Congress behind closed doors before Thanksgiving.

While all that unfolded, a lot of people couldn't email anyone about it. Microsoft 365 went down Thursday, hitting Outlook, SharePoint, Copilot and parts of Teams. Downdetector logged nearly 140,000 Outlook complaints at the peak, which the BBC puts at 2,000 times normal, with effects in at least 74 countries, including government systems in Singapore and Japan. Microsoft's explanation is that a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable and the rest strained under the load. Then the fix didn't take. A core process on the affected servers kept getting overwhelmed, and Microsoft's own admin dashboard was unreachable for a stretch. The company says it was not an attack. Early this morning its status page still read service degradation. Electric truck maker Workhorse postponed its quarterly earnings over it.

Google had a split screen day. It released Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a fast, cheap model at a dollar fifty per million input tokens, which Google says edges out its own larger Argon model on one independent index. It is going into Search for everyone, worldwide, and Google calls it the biggest model upgrade Search has had.

Meanwhile, in Chicago. Earlier this month Google told schools that Search for students now comes with its AI answers attached. Chicago Public Schools, which blocks generative AI for students, now says that if it can't get Search without the AI Overviews, it will look to other search solutions. About 30 parents, teachers and students protested outside Google's Chicago office, chanting, Hey Google, nice try, we don't want your Gemini. Take it or leave it is a weak pitch once the customer says leave it.

A company called Edge0 released an open model with 145 billion parameters that it says runs on a laptop with 48 gigabytes of memory at around 80 tokens a second. Only about 10 billion parameters fire on any given step, so the popular parts stay in memory and the rest waits on the drive. The benchmark scores are the company's own. At the far end of the same idea, a project called smolmaxxing got a 16 billion parameter model running on a jailbroken 2013 iPad Air with one gigabyte of RAM. It manages about three tokens a second. Nobody needs this. It's wonderful.

Meta's Muse agent will now phone American businesses for you, if you pay 20 dollars a month. Meta's Alexandr Wang suggests the cable company, the DMV, or a restaurant without online booking. TechCrunch notes the snag: plenty of receptionists hang up the moment they realize it's an AI.

A few more before we go. TSMC told US regulators that personal data of current and former employees was posted online. It says the data matches what a cloud vendor held, and it has found no evidence its own systems were breached. Anthropic's IPO site now gives dates: pricing on November 18, trading on the 19th, with ordinary investors able to request shares through brokerages like Fidelity and Robinhood. And a developer, annoyed that a 300 dollar embroidery machine wanted a subscription, reverse engineered its Bluetooth and released a free app instead. It's called ZigZag.

That about wraps it up for today, friends. Thanks for listening; see you tomorrow!