Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admits affair with alleged Chinese spy, board opens probe

The affair and Nvidia's response

Jensen Huang, the 63-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, acknowledged on Sunday, 8 November, that he had a relationship with Alice Huang. In a message to employees he wrote that he had been unfaithful to his wife and that his actions had hurt her and their children. The admission followed reporting by The New York Times in late October, which said US intelligence had concluded that Alice Huang passed information to China. Until then the company had described their contacts as unremarkable and tied to business. A committee of directors and outside lawyers is now examining whether Huang was the target of a foreign espionage operation. For now the board backs him and says it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised.

Markets and family

Nvidia shares fell more than 5% as the affair became public, a drop that came after Apple overtook Nvidia as the world's most valuable company on 30 October. The scandal has reached the family, as Huang's daughter, who also works at Nvidia, cancelled a trip to South Korea for a company event. Analyst Dan Ives, one of the stock's most enthusiastic backers, acknowledged a clear risk that Huang could be pushed out depending on what the inquiry finds, and pointed to the loss of credibility.

Who Alice Huang is

Alice Huang, who is not related to Jensen Huang, was a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data centre company that rents computing power built on Nvidia chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, she was photographed with Jensen Huang in Taipei in 2024 and 2025, and Taiwanese broadcaster CTI aired images of the two close together at a dinner in May 2025. A memo circulated among senior US officials this spring described her as an agent of China's Ministry of State Security, recruited to gather information on Jensen Huang and possibly to push Nvidia to lobby for sales of its best chips to China. Singapore and Taiwan authorities also suspected Chinese intelligence had recruited her, and her whereabouts are unknown.

The Megaspeed probe

Megaspeed bought roughly $2 billion of Nvidia products over the past few years, according to the New York Times, and Washington suspects it of helping move restricted AI chips into China. Agents at the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security had spent months on the case when Nvidia's general counsel, Tim Teter, emailed them in August 2025. He wrote that Jeff Kessler, a senior Commerce official reporting to Howard Lutnick, had cleared Nvidia to reach out. The agents declined a meeting and passed the emails to Kessler, who told them to keep working strictly by the book. Some officials saw the contact as a procedural breach that could taint the case. The Justice Department then asked Commerce to pause its work, and the case is now a criminal inquiry there. Other agencies have urged placing Megaspeed on the entity list, the trade blacklist, but Commerce has not done so and has added no company to it in over a year. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia's general counsel also questioned whether the Trump administration had a role in detaining a Megaspeed executive. A Commerce spokesperson said the department had followed the rules in this and other cases. Kessler did not respond to the newspaper, and the Justice Department declined to comment. Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo said the company contacts officials to answer their questions and share information gathered in the field.

Trade policy and the White House

Huang is one of Donald Trump's informal advisers on AI and one of the ten richest people in the world, and he has pressed Washington hardest to loosen chip sale limits to China. In December 2025 Trump authorized the sale to China of the H200, a chip about six times more powerful than the previous exportable model. Washington has restricted sales of the most advanced chips to China since 2022. According to the Wall Street Journal, intelligence suspected the affair while Huang was lobbying the White House to allow those exports. Nvidia controls roughly 90% of the chips used to train and run AI models, according to estimates. Trump stood by Huang, and Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun, speaking on Monday, rejected the spy account as baseless smears.