On Sunday, November 8, Jensen Huang sent Nvidia’s employees a letter no CEO ever wants to write: he admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife and had hurt her and their children. He didn’t name the other person. The next day Nvidia’s stock closed down more than 4%, after falling as much as 8% during the session.
Put like that it sounds like tabloid material, and Huang’s private life is none of my business. What I care about is the rest: according to US reports, the relationship was with an executive that American intelligence believes is an agent of China’s intelligence services. And the company she worked for is suspected of getting chips into China that aren’t allowed to go there.
What happened in the Nvidia scandal
In late October The New York Times reported that, according to US intelligence officials, Beijing had recruited a former executive of Megaspeed, a Singapore company, to gather information on Huang and possibly influence Nvidia’s chip sales in China (Al Jazeera). Huang told Bloomberg at the time that his dealings with her concerned her company and were completely normal.
Then, in a few days:
- November 5: the chairs of three House committees, Republicans Moolenaar, Mast and Crawford, ask Huang for a closed-door briefing on November 18.
- November 8: the letter to employees. The same day the board sets up a committee of independent directors, with outside counsel, to investigate whether Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence service (Bloomberg). Nvidia says it has no reason to believe national security or proprietary information was compromised.
- November 9: the stock drops at the open and closes down 4.37%. Some investors sue Nvidia, accusing it of hiding its CEO’s ties. China calls the story a smear.
President Trump, for his part, has defended Huang and said he should stay where he is.
Megaspeed: the $4.8 billion customer
The name that matters, in my view, isn’t the woman’s but the company’s.
Megaspeed sells computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence. According to The New York Times it became one of Nvidia’s biggest customers, buying about $4.8 billion worth of equipment. Since 2023 it has also been an official Nvidia cloud partner. And since 2024 US authorities have been investigating it on a specific suspicion: helping China get advanced Nvidia chips around export restrictions (Al Jazeera). Singapore police have also opened an investigation into Megaspeed over breaches of local law (Wikipedia).
To see why this matters you need the context. Nvidia’s most powerful chips, the Blackwell line, can’t be sold to China, and the ban also covers Chinese-owned companies operating outside China. I touched on this in June when I wrote about DeepSeek V4 and Huawei’s chips: Chinese labs have spent years working with less American hardware than they’d like. A middleman in Singapore buying billions’ worth of chips is exactly where a ban on paper can turn into a sieve.
What’s proven and what isn’t
It pays to be precise here, because the headlines aren’t:
- proven: Huang admitted an affair, without saying with whom; Nvidia opened an internal investigation; Megaspeed is under investigation in the US and in Singapore; the stock took a real hit;
- suspected: that the woman worked for Chinese intelligence, that she is the person in the letter, that Megaspeed diverted chips to China;
- unknown: what information was gathered, whether anything reached Beijing, how much Huang knew.
So far nobody has been charged.
Why this is not just gossip
In security we’ve been saying for thirty years that people are the weakest link. We spend on firewalls, encryption and access controls, then one convincing email is enough to get in. We see the small version of this every day as phishing. This story is the same thing at scale: if the allegation is true, the target wasn’t a server but the head of the company that makes the chips almost all of the world’s AI runs on. You don’t need to break into a system when you can get close to the person who runs it.
The second thing that strikes me is how much export controls rely on trust. Washington decides which chips can go where, but the chips travel through distributors, cloud partners and resellers in third countries. If one of Nvidia’s biggest customers has been under investigation for two years for getting them into China, the problem isn’t a distracted CEO: it’s a system that relies on middlemen who are hard to check.
The third is about the markets, and I report it without enthusiasm. Bernstein analysts say the real risk is political and that demand for Nvidia chips hasn’t changed (RisparmiOggi). They’re probably right: companies will keep buying GPUs because, outside China, there are no serious alternatives. But a company this important with a CEO under political scrutiny is a risk nobody had priced in before.
What happens next
Two dates to mark:
- November 17: Nvidia reports quarterly earnings. It will be the first chance to see whether the scandal weighs on sales or only on the stock.
- November 18: the closed-door briefing with the House committees, if Huang agrees.
Meanwhile the internal investigation, the probe into Megaspeed’s chips and the investor lawsuit move forward. We’ll likely learn more in the coming weeks, and some parts of this story may turn out differently from how they’ve been told so far.
How do you read it: a CEO’s personal problem or a national security issue? Let me know.
Sources: Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, CNN, SoldiOnline, RisparmiOggi, Wikipedia.