00:00NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on Sunday admitted to having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy
00:05after his company launched an investigation into their relationship, and after he has repeatedly
00:10and steadfastly denied any unusual ties with Alice Huang of no relation, saying their interactions
00:17were all business and completely normal. NVIDIA launched the probe following reports from the
00:21New York Times and the Financial Times that a secret US memo overseen by Secretary of State
00:27Marco Rubio warned months ago that Alice was recruited by China's Ministry of State Security to
00:33spy on NVIDIA. Huang's ex-mistress Alice is an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company
00:40that bought billions of dollars worth of chips from NVIDIA. It's unclear how long the affair lasted,
00:45though the pair was pictured together in a Taipei bar back in 2024. It's a pretty big scandal for the
00:51company, which is one of the world's largest firms by market cap. They have a roughly $4.5 trillion
00:57market value that that has gone down slightly today. They are a leader in the semiconductor
01:02business, developing some of the most complex AI chips before their industry rivals, which helped
01:08them gain a lead in the global AI race. The surprising thing here is when you have an executive, whether
01:13it's
01:13a CEO or anyone else at that level with this kind of organization central to national security, it's one
01:21of the board's purview to make sure they're managing risk for that level of individual asking the questions
01:28and making sure the controls are in place and the security apparatus is there to try and head off
01:35operations like these. You know, the hard part is when someone's up against a nation state actor,
01:40there's a lot of wheels that are already in motion. I imagine this has been months, if not years, in
01:46the planning. And the first step of any of these operations is reconnaissance, right? Learning about
01:51the individual, learning about the organization and creating a plan. And look, this is one of the oldest
01:56plays in tradecraft. It's not surprising that this happened at all. Shares of the company have fallen
02:02nearly 5% so far today and as much as 8% earlier this morning, as investors are panicking over
02:08the
02:09possibility that Huang might be removed from the company. Though the investigation may find that
02:14he misled investors considering the company repeatedly defended his relationship with Alice,
02:19it's pretty unimaginable for him to be removed from Nvidia. He co-founded the business when he was 30
02:25years old and he's been leading it ever since, with about 60 direct reports today. He's also cultivated
02:31a pretty close relationship with President Trump over time, which is another key concern. Huang has
02:37repeatedly been invited to the White House as a guest. Most recently, he was sitting at the
02:41head table with his wife at a recent state dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping in September.
02:46Back in December 2025, President Trump approved the sale of advanced Nvidia chips to China after Huang
02:53attended a Mar-a-Lago dinner for top dollar donors, according to the New York Times. Nvidia later
02:59reportedly donated at least $20 million to Trump's White House ballroom project. But the export of these
03:05chips has been a key concern among lawmakers. Under the Biden administration, such sales were paused over
03:12national security fears, as some policymakers argued that China could use the chips to break ahead in
03:17the global AI race and possibly supercharge their military powers. It's going to be really hard to tell
03:23just how big this is until the congressional inquiries take place, right, the independent board investigation
03:29takes place. But it's pretty bad on the surface, right? And for a lot of people who are looking at
03:35this news, they're not surprised at all this happened. You have someone who is central to national
03:41security, central to what's happening in artificial intelligence. In a lot of ways, this is predictable,
03:47but the details have yet to come out. We're still going to all, I think, be staying tuned to see
03:51what really may have been put at risk. But even the most innocuous information in the wrong hands
03:57can put an organization or a country at a substantial disadvantage. Think about negotiations,
04:03think about access to restricted chips in particular, which has been one of the stated objectives of a
04:09number of nation state actors that can very much be at risk with this kind of incident. On Sunday,
04:14Huang sent an email to Nvidia employees, but he started it by apologizing to his family for his marital
04:20infidelity. He's been married to his wife, Lori, for over 40 years. They first met as teenagers in a
04:26freshman engineering class at Oregon State University, and his two children and son-in-law are
04:31currently employed at Nvidia.
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