Nvidia’s directors met Wednesday night to decide Huang’s future, after The Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to remove him. The scandal began with a New York Times report that Huang had a close relationship with Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed whom U.S. officials believe is a spy for China. Huang admitted the affair in a Nov. 8 email to staff, and on Wednesday the Times reported a second relationship, with Nvidia health care vice president Kimberly Powell, who reports directly to him.
Nvidia announced Huang would step down from his role Thursday morning. His interim replacement will be Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer.
If Musk is serious about bringing on Huang in some way, his day job gives his offer some extra weight. SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX), which absorbed his AI startup xAI in February and went public in June, has built its fastest-growing business on Nvidia hardware. Nvidia, in turn, owns a multibillion-dollar piece of SpaceX.
SpaceX has bet its AI business on Nvidia chips
Musk made his bet on Nvidia explicit during SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company in August.
“We’ve decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture,” he said, adding that “our understanding with Nvidia is that we will receive a very significant percent of their GPUs next year.” GPUs, or graphics processing units, are the chips that train and run AI models.
Nvidia has said each gigawatt of its Vera Rubin systems represents about $40 billion in revenue, which puts Musk’s 2027 target of 10 gigawatts in the range of $400 billion worth of Nvidia gear, Benzinga calculated. And SpaceX is already borrowing to pay for it: Musk said in late October that the company had closed $40 billion in debt to buy GPUs, after spending $19.6 billion on capex in the third quarter alone.
Those chips are now SpaceX’s biggest moneymaker. Its AI unit, which rents computing power to other AI companies, brought in $7.6 billion in third-quarter revenue, more than half the company’s total of $14.6 billion.
SpaceX also plans to launch Starmind, a network of data center satellites, with Nvidia Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs on board starting in 2027.
The money flows both ways. Nvidia disclosed in August that its SpaceX stake was worth about $21 billion at the end of the second quarter, making it the sixth-largest investor in the company.
