Briefs
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admits affair amid spy allegations
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, whom US officials believe is a Chinese spy, prompting a board investigation.
Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang admitted on Sunday to cheating on his wife of 40 years, in a letter to employees that also addressed what he called national-security concerns raised in recent news reports. Nvidia’s board of directors has opened an independent investigation, which Huang said he would support fully. “I owe my family and all of you an apology,” Huang wrote, adding that there was no excuse for what he did. Nvidia’s shares fell more than 5% the following trading day.
US officials believe Huang’s likely romantic interest, Megaspeed executive Alice Huang — a Chinese citizen unrelated to Jensen Huang — is a Chinese spy who has been feeding information to Beijing. Megaspeed, a Singapore-based AI infrastructure company, reportedly bought $4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips over the past two years; both the US and Singapore have investigated the firm over suspicions it illegally funneled chips to China. The New York Times reported in late October that Huang and Alice Huang had developed a close personal relationship, which an Nvidia spokesperson described as an unremarkable part of meeting customer executives.
According to reports since then, Alice Huang and her family built a network of China- and Singapore-based companies to secure Nvidia chips, including a Chinese firm founded in 2023 that became an Nvidia-preferred cloud partner and reportedly helped buy $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips, among them banned models, The Information reported. A secret memo that circulated last spring among Trump administration officials, drafted under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s supervision, warned that Alice Huang was a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security; Trump had separately been briefed on surveillance of her in late 2025 but did not act on it.
The Megaspeed scrutiny predates the personal-relationship story: investigators have examined the Singapore neocloud since October 2025 over suspicions it was renting Nvidia-powered capacity to Chinese firms, including Alibaba, in violation of US export rules, and a Commerce Department official who visited one of its Malaysia data centers in 2024 found Nvidia equipment still boxed. Nvidia has repeatedly said it had no reason to believe its products had been diverted. Three Republican committee chairs have since asked Huang for a closed-door briefing, citing national-security concerns about China’s access to sensitive US technology, and Huang has withdrawn from planned appearances at the ElevenLabs Summit and the Anthropic CEO Forum. Trump, who said he has not discussed the matter with Huang directly, said on Sunday that he believes Huang is trustworthy and should remain Nvidia’s chief executive.
Why it matters
The affair entangles Huang’s personal conduct with questions about how closely Nvidia tracks where its most powerful AI chips end up, at the center of the technological race between the US and China that both countries see as shaping their economic and military future.