Then-CEO Jensen Huang at the APEC CEO Summit held in Gyeongju last year [AFP]
Then-CEO Jensen Huang at the APEC CEO Summit held in Gyeongju last year [AFP]

A letter purportedly signed by Nvidia executives threatening mass resignations unless former CEO Jensen Huang was reinstated has been exposed as a fabricated document.

The letter turned out to be a near-verbatim copy of a letter OpenAI employees sent to their board in 2023 when CEO Sam Altman was ousted.

The letter, which called for Huang's return, circulated on X, formerly Twitter.

Addressed to the board, it claimed: "The process by which you removed Jensen Huang has not only jeopardized all of our work but has also undermined our mission and the company."

The letter listed several senior Nvidia figures as signatories, including Vice President Ian Buck, Chief Scientist Bill Dally, Chief Technology Officer Michael Kagan and co-founder Chris Malachowsky.

The signatories also stated they would resign en masse and join Elon Musk's space company SpaceX if their demands were not met.

The document was later found to be a fake modeled on the protest letter OpenAI employees sent to their board in November 2023, when Altman was fired.

The fabricated letter was essentially identical to the original, with "OpenAI" replaced by "Nvidia," "Sam Altman" by "Jensen Huang," and "Microsoft" by "Elon Musk."

X has also added a community note to posts containing the document, stating: "There are no reports of such a signed letter existing."

Meanwhile, Huang stepped down Thursday (local time) — four days after acknowledging an affair with Alice Huang, a businesswoman suspected of being a Chinese spy. Although framed as a resignation, the move is widely seen as in effect a dismissal, coming after additional allegations emerged of an affair with a subordinate.


sjpark@heraldcorp.com