Nvidia’s board said Tuesday that it has tapped an elite Wall Street law firm to head a probe into CEO Jensen Huang amid scrutiny of his relationship to a suspected Chinese spy.
The independent members of the AI chipmaker’s board said in a statement that they hired former top Manhattan federal prosecutor Joon H. Kim and his New York firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to conduct a “thorough and independent investigation.”
The board announced Sunday that it would launch an independent investigation into whether Huang was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort” after he admitted to having an extramarital affair.
At the center of the saga is Alice Huang, whom The New York Times reported last month was believed by US intelligence officials to be acting as a spy for the Chinese government.
Wachtell, a corporate law powerhouse founded in 1965, is known for advising major companies and their boards on mergers, corporate governance, shareholder fights, and other high-stakes issues.
“We handle some of the largest, most complex and demanding transactions in the United States and around the world,” the firm says on its website.
One of the firm’s founding partners, Martin Lipton, famously developed the “poison pill” defense, a strategy used by corporate boards to fend off a hostile takeover.
More recently, the firm represented Twitter when it sued Elon Musk in 2022, forcing him to complete his $44 billion acquisition of the company. The NBA also hired Wachtell in 2021 to investigate workplace misconduct allegations against the Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver. Sarver was suspended for a year following the investigation and fined $10 million.
The NBA again hired Wachtell to investigate whether the LA Clippers and player Kawhi Leonard violated salary cap circumvention rules. In September, the NBA fined the Clippers $30 million and suspended owner Steve Ballmer for one year, citing the investigation.
A former US attorney whose focus includes internal investigations
Kim joined the firm last month as a partner in Wachtell’s litigation department after nearly a decade at the white-shoe firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.
According to his biography on Wachtell’s website, Kim focuses on “high-stakes litigation and enforcement, including internal investigations, white-collar criminal and regulatory defense, commercial litigation, arbitration, and crisis management.”
Kim regularly counsels companies, boards, government agencies, and executives in their “most significant litigation, enforcement, and investigative matters,” the bio says.
He previously served as acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2017 to 2018. In that role, he oversaw the work of more than 220 assistant US attorneys handling criminal and civil cases across a range of matters, including fraud, public and private corruption, money laundering, and economic espionage.
Years earlier, from 2000 to 2006, Kim served as an assistant US attorney in the Southern District, investigating and prosecuting an array of crimes.
During that time, he helped secure convictions against several high-ranking organized crime figures, including Peter Gotti, the brother of the notorious mob boss John Gotti.
More recently, in 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James appointed Kim to co-lead an independent investigation into sexual harassment allegations against then-governor Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo announced his resignation after the investigation concluded that he sexually harassed multiple women.
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