After Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang admitted to an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, his board and the president of the United States had his back.
Nvidia’s board said Sunday that it was investigating its CEO but “has confidence in Jensen.” Trump told journalists Monday that he had spoken with Huang by phone and trusted he was unaware of being an espionage target. “He said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy … I really believe him,” the president said.
Late Wednesday, Huang’s position as one of the world’s most influential tech leaders hung in the balance and his presidential and corporate backing looked shakier.
Nvidia’s board met to weigh his future at the company after the New York Times reported that Huang also had an affair with an executive who reports to him. The White House did not plan to intervene in any decision, two people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
As of early Thursday, the company had not made announcements about Huang’s future. Its shares were down almost 6 percent in pre-market trading.
Huang’s rapid fall from grace has rocked Washington and Silicon Valley, triggering concern that Nvidia, whose powerful chips have fueled the artificial intelligence era, could threaten a U.S. stock market boom it helped fuel.
An AI slump would affect the investment and retirement accounts of millions of Americans because Nvidia and other tech companies make up a huge proportion of the overall stock market. The company also acted as a crucial financial backer for major companies that use its chips, investing billions into firms such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Claude chatbot provider Anthropic. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Nvidia and Huang’s moment of reckoning has raised questions from investment analysts and corporate governance experts about the conduct of the chief executive and his board as they built a business that became the first in the world to reach a valuation of $4 trillion last year — and in the weeks since allegations first surfaced against the CEO. He and the company could face consequences in Congress, in court and on financial markets.
Huang and his investors reaped huge benefits from selling chips seen in Washington as crucial to the future of U.S. economic growth and national security. Greg Allen, founder of technology analysis firm Decision Tree Research, who previously worked on AI at the Pentagon, said Nvidia’s board appeared to have limited experience in national security matters.
“This is a huge gap in Nvidia’s corporate governance, and one that needs to be rectified immediately,” Allen said. Several members of the company’s 11-person board, including Huang, were first appointed during the company’s earliest years.
Congressional Democrats skeptical of the AI boom and Trump’s close relationship with tech CEOs have said they plan to require Huang to testify under oath about his relationship to the alleged spy and his dealings with the Trump administration. Nvidia donated $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom, one of only four donations of that size to the project.
John Rizzo, an Nvidia spokesperson, declined to comment for this article.
The New York Times reported in late October that Nvidia’s CEO had a relationship with an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed International named Alice Huang, who the U.S. government believed was a Chinese spy. The fast-growing tech company said in marketing materials that it bought chips from Nvidia to install in data centers it rented to other companies.
Nvidia and its CEO both initially dismissed suggestions of an inappropriate relationship. But Jensen Huang on Sunday appeared to confirm his relationship with Alice Huang, admitting to an affair in a public letter to his staff that referred to “national security concerns raised in news reports.”
The apparent reversal may have legal consequences. Huang could potentially be prosecuted for fraud for misleading investors about the nature of the affair, said Ann Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado.
“Lying publicly about the company and about risks to the company is securities fraud,” she said. “Technically it’s a federal crime.”
Huang and Nvidia were sued in a California this week on behalf of shareholders who allege that they were harmed by misleading statements from the CEO and the company about Huang’s affair. More shareholder suits are likely, and lawyers will scrutinize the company’s public statements for evidence that Huang wasn’t honest with investors, Lipton said.
The key questions are “how bad the underlying facts are and particularly, what he knew,” Lipton said.
Huang, who has tightly controlled Nvidia since he co-founded it 33 years ago, was photographed with Alice Huang at a bar in Taipei in 2024, according to a photo obtained by Reuters. Megaspeed, originally part of a Chinese company, had been spun off as an independent Singapore-based firm the year before.
At the time, President Joe Biden had levied aggressive U.S. export controls on computer chips and other technology needed to build cutting-edge AI, blocking shipments of Nvidia hardware to China.
Megaspeed’s base in Singapore allowed it to keep buying U.S. chips and it soon became a major Nvidia customer, spending billions of dollars with Huang’s firm, according to customs records compiled by Big Trade Data, a global trade analysis firm.
National security experts have warned for years that China could sidestep U.S. restrictions by buying chips and other hardware through intermediary companies in Asia.
Rizzo, the Nvidia spokesperson, acknowledged last year that the company had “engaged with” the U.S. government about Megaspeed but said Nvidia found no evidence chips were being smuggled to China. His statement was a response to a New York Times report that said a Commerce Department official visited a Megaspeed site and found boxes of Nvidia chips unopened, suggesting they were not being used on-site.
Jensen Huang was photographed again with Alice Huang, at a restaurant in Taipei, in May 2025, according to footage from a Taiwanese TV network. Around the same time, Trump began to loosen some restrictions on Nvidia’s chip sales to China, a policy publicly praised by its CEO, but left some export controls in place.
On Sunday, when Nvidia’s board announced it would investigate the affair, it stated that it had “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised” and said Huang would continue to lead the company while he was being investigated.
The decision to initially keep Huang on was unusual, said Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. Nvidia’s 11-member board includes venture capitalists who invested in the company in the 1990s, as well as outside corporate executives who joined more recently, including a former president of Taco Bell.
Investors may also sue the company if it is found to lack proper controls to ensure that its leaders didn’t get caught up with foreign agents, he said.
And companies should always be prepared to replace their CEO, Elson said. “Everyone, like it or not, is replaceable at some point. It’s either through retirement, illness, death or scandal,” he said.
Ian Duncan contributed to this report.
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