As CNBC breaks news that NVIDIA’s board is meeting tonight to discuss Jensen Huang’s termination, here is an insider’s views: I worked at NVIDIA when it was a fantastic company. There was mutual respect, genuine intellectual debate, superb engineering and honest sales pitches. People cared about what we were building and how.
Then, in mid-2024, something changed. Dramatically.
It felt like an invasion of corporate marketing. Suddenly, we were being told that NVIDIA was changing direction and adopting what management literally called the “enterprise playbook.”
For those of us who had helped build the company’s engineering culture, it was a complete reversal.
During COVID, Jensen Huang had encouraged employees to be generous, support their communities and help people who were struggling. The message was about kindness and responsibility. Later, we saw cuts to education and philanthropic initiatives, including work involving robotics education.
At a company all-hands meeting, Jensen declared that NVIDIA didn’t need DEI. The change in tone was stunning.
Around the same time, we began seeing greater involvement from members of Huang’s family in areas of the business where engineering expertise and independent judgment should have been paramount.
His daughter’s growing influence was particularly concerning to some employees. There was an increasing emphasis on humanoid robotics, and questions arose about whether strategic decisions were being driven by sound engineering principles or the preferences of people with personal access to the CEO.
I also heard senior leaders privately express concerns about nepotism and what they described as “dynastic tendencies.”
The company increasingly emphasized “alignment.” But alignment with what? And with whom?
We were watching an engineering-led culture give way to one in which questioning decisions became more difficult and centralized authority seemed to matter more than open debate.
We also had fundamental concerns about the direction of AI development.
There is an important distinction between developing AI that operates locally, on devices and robots, and building ever-larger centralized cloud infrastructure. Both have legitimate uses, but they involve different technical, economic and environmental tradeoffs.
We believed NVIDIA was losing sight of some of those distinctions.
We were particularly concerned about humanoid robotics, the potential for advanced AI systems to be misused by authoritarian governments, and the environmental consequences of rapidly expanding energy-intensive data centers.
These were not abstract concerns to us. They were questions about technologies we were actually helping develop.
Eventually, we raised concerns internally and tried to change direction. We no longer believed we could simply go along with decisions we considered fundamentally wrong.
Now, with the revelations surrounding Jensen Huang’s personal relationships and the scrutiny of NVIDIA’s governance, I find myself looking back at 2024 with a very different perspective.
Public reporting has traced Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang back to at least 2023. That places the dramatic cultural shift we witnessed in 2024 within the same general period.
I cannot say whether those events explain the changes we witnessed. But the overlap raises questions I believe deserve examination.
The NVIDIA I knew was built on engineering excellence, intellectual honesty and mutual respect. What I experienced beginning in 2024 felt like a departure from those principles.
And I suspect I’m not the only employee wondering what happened.
The public deserves to know whether NVIDIA’s board has maintained meaningful oversight of the company’s leadership, whether employees can challenge decisions without retaliation, and whether engineering judgment still takes precedence over personal influence.
Because NVIDIA is no longer just another Silicon Valley company. Its technology is becoming foundational to the global economy.
That makes the quality of its leadership, culture and governance everyone’s business.