Nvidia board opens inquiry into Jensen Huang after he admits affair with suspected Chinese agent

Trump says the chip maker’s chief told him he had no idea the Megaspeed executive was working for Beijing, as House Republicans seek his testimony next week.

Nvidia’s board has opened an independent investigation into its co-founder and chief executive, Jensen Huang, after reports that he was the target of a Chinese intelligence operation run through a woman with whom he has now acknowledged having an affair. In an email to staff on Sunday, Mr Huang disclosed the affair and told employees the board had begun its inquiry into the spying allegations.

The woman at the centre of the case is Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, an executive linked to Megaspeed, a Singapore-based buyer of Nvidia chips. US intelligence reportedly concluded that China’s Ministry of State Security recruited her to gather information on the Nvidia chief. The two are not related. She has not responded publicly to the allegations, her whereabouts are unknown, and no criminal charges against either of them have been reported.

The stakes are unusually high. Nvidia supplies most of the processors that power artificial intelligence, and Mr Huang has become one of the most influential business voices in Donald Trump’s Washington, lobbying for the right to sell advanced chips in China. Nvidia shares closed 4.27 per cent lower on Monday.

The board’s statement was measured. It said it had no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised, but that its inquiry would examine all available information. It added that it had confidence in Mr Huang and his leadership team. The affair itself was not mentioned in the board’s statement. In his email, Mr Huang said he had fallen short of his responsibilities to colleagues, the board, partners and shareholders, adding: “I am deeply sorry.”

Mr Trump, who has embraced Mr Huang as an adviser, moved quickly to defend him. At a press conference on Monday, the president said he had asked the executive directly. “I asked him that question: You have any idea that she was a spy?” Mr Trump said. “He said, I had no idea that she was a spy. And I really believe him.” A day earlier, asked whether Mr Huang should remain chief executive, he replied: “I think so, oh yeah, sure.”

The affair surfaced at the end of a story that began with chip exports. Megaspeed was created in 2023 as a spinoff of the Chinese company 7Road Holdings to build Nvidia-powered data centres in Southeast Asia and rent the capacity to customers. The Commerce Department opened an inquiry in late 2024 into whether it was diverting restricted chips to China; the Justice Department has since taken the lead. Singaporean police are separately investigating the company for alleged breaches of local law. According to trade data cited in reporting by The New York Times, a Malaysian sister company bought equipment containing Nvidia chips worth at least $4.8bn between June 2024 and February 2026.

Nvidia has consistently rejected the diversion claims. The company says the allegations against what it calls a regional cloud customer were investigated and debunked last year, and Mr Huang told Bloomberg that Nvidia had studied all of Megaspeed’s deployments and counted every chip.

The espionage dimension emerged on October 29, when the Times reported that American agencies had surveilled Alice Huang and concluded she was passing information to Beijing. According to that report, officials never gave Mr Huang a defensive briefing, and Mr Trump was briefed about a year ago but took no action. Officials judged that Mr Huang probably did not know of her role, though some senior figures in the administration questioned whether he could have been unaware. The Financial Times later reported that US officials believed the relationship was romantic. The Times and the Wall Street Journal have also reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio supervised the drafting of a classified memo on the relationship.

What Alice Huang may have obtained is unclear. The Times said it did not know which agency monitored her or what specific information she may have transmitted. Beijing denies the whole affair; a foreign ministry spokesman, Guo Jiakun, called the reports baseless smears against China.

The timeline sits awkwardly alongside Mr Huang’s rise in Washington. In October 2025 China hawks persuaded Mr Trump not to approve sales of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips to China, but in December he allowed exports of the less powerful H200, with 25 per cent of sales going to the federal government. Chinese regulators subsequently blocked those imports. Mr Huang joined the president’s trip to China in May and received the National Medal of Science from him last month.

Congressional scrutiny is now bipartisan, and arrives as power shifts on Capitol Hill. Last week’s midterm elections will hand Democrats control of Congress, and Republicans are also examining Mr Huang’s ties to the alleged spy. Three senior House Republicans asked Mr Huang last Thursday to appear voluntarily at a closed-door briefing on his dealings with Alice Huang, scheduled for November 18 and covering Nvidia’s security protocols against foreign espionage. Whether he attends, and what the board’s investigators find, will determine how long the question of his leadership stays open.