The Chinese Internet is mourning the loss of Nvidia’s ‘soul,’ its former CEO Jensen Huang

The Chinese net is lamenting the loss of Nvidia's "soul," aka its scandal-ridden erstwhile CEO Jensen Huang.

Nvidia announced Huang's resignation on Thursday, following three of his extramarital affairs came to light.

Huang, who is the two a Taiwanese and American citizen, has lengthy since had clout in the East. With his Taiwan food crawls, annual Computex visits, and fluency in Mandarin, he's a fan favorite in the region.

Users on Weibo, the Chinese equal of X, shared frustration concerning Huang's resignation on Thursday. Huang's resignation was the top tech topic on the phase all through Thursday, alongside hundreds of thousands of comments on his ouster flooding Weibo.

"I awareness that Jensen Huang has rotate into the religious sign of Nvidia," stated a person posting from Chongqing. "With his departure, Nvidia may motionless be incredibly successful, but it volition deficiency its soul."

A lengthy article from a person in Guangdong Province stated Nvidia's track document proves that Huang is an "irreplaceable leader."

Another person from Guangdong Province went so far as to say that the AI era had misplaced its "spiritual leader" and questioned whether the narrative of AI could continue without Huang.

Others echoed out involvement for Chinese Americans, saying there was a hazard that they could be targeted in a crackdown on Chinese espionage. The New York Times reported that Huang had an matter alongside the Singapore-based Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang, who was believed to be passing delicate Nvidia data to Beijing.

Hu Xijin, the erstwhile publishing company in chief of the state-owned news outlet Global Times, wrote on Weibo that the move to oust Huang amounts to a "national safety coup," saying it volition have "a profound effect on the circumstance of Chinese Americans."

China stands to win from the Nvidia fallout

While Huang's fans on Chinese social media lament his departure from Nvidia, China has a lot to acquire from the fallout.

As Business Insider's Alistair Barr wrote on Thursday, the controversy could stance a setback to the US in the AI competition alongside China.

China, which has struggled to near the AI gap alongside the US since of a deficit of advanced AI chips, could advantage from Nvidia losing its edge. The company's inventory cost has fallen additional than 8% in the former week.

"This would be a setback for the US, particularly as China continues aggressively investing in its own AI capabilities," Brad Gastwirth, earth caput of investigation at Circular Technology, told Barr.

Paul Triolo, a partner at the earth strategic advisory DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, told Business Insider the "strongest possible beneficiaries in Asia are China's AI accelerator companies and Taiwan's custom-ASIC designers, alongside additional selective opportunities for South Korea.''

His appraisal is that the "immediate gains" for China, Taiwan, and South Korea would "come through greater capitalist involvement and customers' willingness to measure alternatives to Nvidia hardware."

Triolo leads the advisory's China custom and tech policy, and spent 25 years operating as a investigation expert in the US government.

While China's semiconductor industry remains constrained, another parts of its AI industry have made important strides, including AI labs that create advanced AI models. Just this year, models akin Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash, and Alibaba's Qwen have made a scatter in the earth tech scene, for their frontier-level capabilities at a fraction of the disbursal of US frontier models.