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Nvidia’s board is investigating CEO Jensen Huang after he admitted to having an affair with a tech executive US intelligence officials believe was spying for China.
Getting into it: Nvidia’s board said Sunday that independent directors, working with an outside law firm, will look into whether Huang was the target of a foreign spying effort, though it said it has “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised.”
Huang, 63, who co-founded the company in 1993, will stay on as CEO during the review, and the board said it still has confidence in him. The woman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is an executive at Megaspeed, a data center firm based in Singapore that has spent over $4.8 billion on Nvidia chips since June 2024. The Commerce Department has also looked into whether the company helped get banned chips into China.
The New York Times reported that US intelligence had been surveilling her for more than a year, and that a classified memo drafted under Secretary of State Marco Rubio this spring concluded that China’s Ministry of State Security had recruited her specifically to get close to Huang. Nvidia and Huang had previously described their interactions as normal business dealings, and China’s embassy has denied any spying.
Despite this, Huang has now acknowledged that he had an affair in an email to Nvidia staff, apologizing to his wife and children and saying he takes “full responsibility” for his actions, though he didn’t name the woman. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry,” Huang wrote.
The scandal lands on one of the biggest names in AI, a CEO who has lobbied Trump to ease restrictions on advanced chip sales to China. The Republican chairs of three House committees want Huang to answer lawmakers’ questions in a private briefing on Nov. 18, the day after Nvidia reports earnings, and Rep. Michael McCaul called for pausing shipments of advanced AI chips to China until the matter is resolved.
Trump defended Huang on Sunday, saying he would “certainly take him” when he travels to China. “I haven’t heard he’s done anything wrong. He dealt with somebody, but so does everybody else,” Trump told reporters.
