Nvidia's Board Opened an Independent Probe After Jensen Huang Admitted an Affair With a Woman US Intelligence Says Spied for China. He Has No Successor, Sixty People Report to Him, and He Spent the Year Lobbying to Sell More Chips to Beijing
About This Episode
On Sunday November 8 Nvidia's board announced an independent investigation, overseen by a committee of independent directors and outside counsel, into whether CEO Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort, after Huang told staff in a memo that he had been unfaithful to his wife. The New York Times and Financial Times reported the relationship was with Alice Huang (no relation), a former executive at Singapore data-center company Megaspeed, whom US intelligence believes China's Ministry of State Security recruited and which US authorities have investigated since 2024 over suspected smuggling of restricted Nvidia chips into China. Nvidia shares fell 4.3% on Monday, erasing about $193 billion; analysts note Nvidia has no public succession plan, and lawmakers in both parties are pushing for stricter chip export controls that Huang has lobbied against.
Our Take
The entire AI buildout runs through one company's chips and, by its own analysts' account, one unreplaceable man; a foreign intelligence service targeted the man, not the company, and Washington is now discovering that the chokepoint it relied on has no backup.
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