Don't Let Beijing Win Twice: Jensen Huang Built America's AI Lead, and He Deserves Due Process, Not a Pile-On

Jensen Huang stepped down Thursday as chief executive of Nvidia, the company he co-founded in 1993 and turned into the backbone of the artificial intelligence economy. The board accepted his resignation effective immediately and named chief financial officer Colette Kress interim CEO.

The headlines this week have been brutal. Huang admitted on Sunday to an extramarital affair with a woman U.S. intelligence agencies suspect of spying for China. A New York Times report on Wednesday alleged a second relationship inside the company. Lawmakers demanded that he go. By Thursday morning he was gone.

A man's private failings are real, and Huang has owned the one he admitted. But a rush to judgment is not justice, and Americans should be careful about what they are cheering.

Start with the facts. Jensen Huang has not been charged with any crime. The FBI is looking into the relationship, and President Trump said Monday that he believed Huang's account that he did not know about the woman's alleged ties to Beijing. The President, who understands the stakes of the chip fight with China as well as anyone in Washington, called Huang an "honorable guy".

That distinction matters. If the allegations are true, Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence operation, not its agent. Beijing has spent decades trying to get inside America's most valuable companies. Treating the target of a Chinese influence campaign as a traitor before investigators have said a word hands the Chinese Communist Party a second victory: first the intrusion, then the fall of the American company it was aimed at.

Under Huang, Nvidia became the company whose chips power the AI revolution. By the mid-2000s he and his team had built CUDA, the software platform that let programmers use Nvidia chips for far more than video game graphics. That decision laid the foundation for the AI boom now driving American investment, research and jobs. Nvidia's own board called his contributions "profound".

That record belongs to American workers and savers, too. Nvidia shares fell nearly 10 percent on Thursday, pushing the company below $4 trillion in market value. Those losses land in the retirement accounts and index funds of millions of ordinary Americans who never met Jensen Huang.

Conservatives believe in accountability. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Huang "did the right thing" by stepping aside, and on that narrow point the Speaker is right: a chief executive under this kind of cloud owed his company a clean break, and Huang made that choice himself.

But we also believe in grace, due process and the presumption of innocence. Scripture is full of flawed men who confessed their failures and went on to serve. Huang deserves the chance to make things right with his family, to cooperate fully with investigators and, if he is cleared, to have his name restored.

Washington's job now is not to pile on. It is to finish the investigation quickly and openly, to keep America's most advanced chips out of Beijing's hands, and to make sure Nvidia remains an American-led company with an American mission. Kress, the company's chief financial officer, should be given room to steady the ship.

Much of the press has spent the week turning a personal scandal into a morality play. The bigger story is China's long campaign against American technology. Jensen Huang may have been its latest target. He should not become its trophy.