Nvidia’s board of directors is reportedly preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang after he admitted to having an extramarital affair with a woman whom US intelligence agencies believe was a Chinese spy.
Nvidia’s board of directors is reportedly preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang after he admitted to having an extramarital affair with a woman whom US intelligence agencies believe was a Chinese spy. Two sources familiar with the matter made the revalation to The Wall Street Journal and noted that US President Donald Trump is also aware of the matter.
Nvidia’s share price slid down more than 8 per cent in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the WSJ report was published. This extended a multi-day sell-off for one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies. The company has been facing major turmoil after reports that American intelligence agencies believed Huang was the target of a Chinese spying plot.
The authorities were concerned since Nvidia designs the powerful semiconductors that fuel many of the world’s leading AI firms, making its technology highly sensitive and subject to export controls limiting sales to China. Last week, The New York Times reported that Huang had a close relationship with Alice Huang, who previously led a Singapore-based firm called Megaspeed International that bought billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips and hardware.
For months, the US intelligence agencies believed that Alice was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security, NYT reported. Soon after the report was published, Huang released a message to Nvidia employees, in which he wrote that he was “unfaithful to my wife” and apologised for hurting her and their children. He did not name the woman involved.
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On Sunday, Nvidia’s board said that it had launched an independent investigation into allegations that the CEO “has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.” In its statement, the board said that it had no reason to believe the company’s secrets or national security were compromised. Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo said, “We trust that if we were the target of a genuine threat, the US government would have notified us.”
Meanwhile, two law enforcement sources told CBS News that the US Department of Justice is also investigating Megaspeed over potential violations of US export restrictions on advanced AI chips. In the midst of this, some analysts raised questions about whether the saga resulted in China gaining access to Nvidia chips, though Megaspeed has denied any involvement in illegal chip transfers.
China, on the other hand, has denied all allegations. The country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters on Monday that the “so-called Chinese spy narrative is entirely baseless and constitutes slander and smear.” It is pertinent to note that Jensen Huang is known to have a close relationship with the Trump administration.
In the past, the American president has given Nvidia permission to sell its advanced H200 computer chips to “approved customers” in China late last year, with the federal government taking a 25 per cent cut of chip sales. The deal did not include Nvidia’s more advanced Blackwell or Rubin systems. The Nvidia CEO and other US tech executives travelled to China with Trump earlier this year.
After the scandal broke out, Trump, on Monday, called Jensen Huang a “very high-quality person,” saying during a White House briefing that “the FBI is looking into it in terms of something else, and I think that he’ll be in good shape.” The president also noted that he spoke to Jensen Huang to see how he was doing, and the executive “said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy.”
