A plaque honoring the Silicon Valley Denny’s where Jensen Huang famously founded Nvidia in 1993 is now gone – just a day after the chip titan resigned as CEO following reports he had multiple affairs.
The plaque sat above the booth that Huang and two of his co-founders – Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem – occupied when they conjured up what would become the key driver of today’s artificial intelligence boom.
“The booth that launched a $1 trillion company,” the inscription read in all-caps.
Now, only an empty patch of brick wall and chipped paint are left, according to an NBC News report, which noted two employees said the plaque had been removed.
When asked over the phone if Denny’s or someone else had removed the plaque, an employee at the San Jose, Calif. diner told The Post that she couldn’t provide any details.
The plaque was installed during a 2023 ceremony in which Huang – who said he washed dishes and waited tables in a Portland, Ore., Denny’s when he was 15 years old – met with Denny’s CEO at the time, Kelli Valade. They reminisced about Nvidia’s founding story during their confab.
Huang said he and his co-founders met at a booth near the back of the Denny’s to discuss creating a chip that would enable realistic 3-D graphics on personal computers. The Denny’s is roughly 8 miles from Nvidia’s headquarters.
“It had all the coffee you could drink and no one could chase you out,” Huang told Valade, according to an Nvidia blog post about the ceremony.
In the wake of Huang’s exit, passersby left flowers and bags of potato chips — a nod to the semiconductor chips that Nvidia builds – outside the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, according to reports. Getty Images depicted a man placing a candle in front of an Nvidia sign.
Huang was forced to resign following a torrent of allegations in recent weeks over his conduct while at the helm of Nvidia.
The tech titan fessed last week to an affair with alleged Chinese spy Alice Huang, no relation.
Huang also faced allegations that he had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care — an exec who reports to him, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
Reuters reported Thursday that Huang had an intimate relationship with a second Nvidia employee, citing unnamed sources. Her name and other details were not known.
Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, is serving as interim CEO. Kress has been with the company for 13 years and will also continue to serve in her current roles during the search for a permanent replacement, which will consider both internal and external candidates.
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