Jensen Huang and his leather-clad likeness had become synonymous with the technological giant he co-founded, Nvidia. They were so entwined that, this year, the company sold $178 sweaters with a pixel-art version of Mr. Huang on the front.
Now, in the wake of Mr. Huang’s resignation on Thursday after back-to-back cheating scandals, including an extramarital affair with a woman the U.S. government believes is a Chinese spy, the internet has taken ahold of his image to unleash a flood of memes.
In many cases, they are being made by A.I. enthusiasts who revered Mr. Huang.
Images of Mr. Huang have appeared in online parodies of music videos, Bollywood movies, American sitcoms and kiss-cams at Coldplay concerts — many generated using artificial intelligence, the technology that became widely available through the chips Nvidia produces.
The revelations about Mr. Huang, 63, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. boom, are part of a long list of infidelity scandals that became memes.
Last year, the married chief executive of a tech start-up was caught on a kiss-cam at a Coldplay concert embracing the married but separated head of his company’s human resources department.
Mr. Huang’s image was superimposed on that viral moment by Peter Dedene, a Belgian software engineer. He said in a phone interview on Thursday that he was up late this week on his phone, scrolling the headlines about Nvidia.
Without leaving his bed, Mr. Dedene, 43, used an open-source generative A.I. tool to substitute the couple from the Coldplay concert with images of Mr. Huang and Alice Huang, the Chinese businesswoman with whom Mr. Huang has admitted having an affair.
“I didn’t think a lot of it,” Mr. Dedene said of his meme.
When he woke up on Sunday morning, he said, the post had over a million impressions. As of Thursday afternoon, it had nearly seven million.
“I really looked up to this guy,” Mr. Dedene said of Mr. Huang, adding, “It’s sort of hilarious that, in the end, the technology he cocreated is now enabling these kinds of jokes.”
Social media users have used A.I. to place Mr. Huang in iconic music videos about cheating.
In one post, Mr. Huang, donning his signature black leather jacket, takes Usher’s place in his music video for “Confessions, Pt. II.” (The lip-syncing is better in the original version.)
Thomas Unise, an A.I. consultant in Minneapolis who made the video, said it took him five minutes to find four images of Mr. Huang on Google and feed them into an A.I. tool to substitute Mr. Huang’s image for Usher’s in the video.
Mr. Unise, 40, said the proliferation of memes using Mr. Huang’s image illustrated how rapidly the technology had advanced.
“A year and a half ago, Will Smith eating spaghetti looked like a bunch of smears all over the screen,” he said of the actor and musician. “You can watch a video now and be like, ‘Wow, this actually looks pretty dang real.’”
In another video, Mr. Huang plays the character Neo in a scene from the movie “The Matrix.” President Trump, as the character Morpheus, lectures him on the importance of maintaining strategic competition with China and not falling for the woman in the red dress.
Mr. Huang’s avatar turns around to realize that the woman, replaced with an image of Ms. Huang, has become Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, brandishing a gun.
Elon Musk also makes a cameo in the meme, which as of Thursday had more than six million views on X.
On the theme of high-stakes deceit in Silicon Valley, some users placed Mr. Huang into “You Can See Everything,” the documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder who went to prison for defrauding investors.
With the help of generative A.I., users recast a montage from the documentary’s trailer in which Ms. Huang — as Ms. Holmes — unblinkingly insists, “Of course I’m not deceiving you.”
Many of the videos have labels identifying them as artificially generated.
But it’s “still surprising,” Mr. Dedene said of his video, how many people asked: “‘Is this real?’”
Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.
