Nvidia's CEO has admitted an affair with a Megaspeed executive that US intelligence reportedly believes worked for China. The board is investigating, Congress wants a briefing, Beijing calls it a smear, and the share price is next.
Jensen Huang emailed Nvidia staff on 8 November admitting he was unfaithful to his wife, and says he is staying on as CEO.
Reports say US intelligence believes the woman, a senior executive at chip buyer Megaspeed, was working for China. That part is alleged, not proven.
Nvidia's board has opened an independent investigation and says it has no reason to think secrets were compromised.
Three House committee chairs want Huang at a closed-door briefing on 18 November, the day after Nvidia's earnings.
Beijing calls it a smear, but Huang's push to sell more chips to China just lost a lot of credibility.
Nvidia is the most valuable company on the planet, worth about US$5.4 trillion, and its boss just had to email every single employee to say he cheated on his wife. That would be messy enough. The bit that turns it into a full-blown scandal is who with: a senior executive at an Nvidia customer that US intelligence reportedly believes was working for China.
Nvidia’s board has launched an independent investigation, three House committee chairs want Jensen Huang in a closed-door briefing, Beijing says the whole thing is made up, and the stock is about to trade on it for the first time. Here is what is actually known, what is only alleged, and what happens next.
On Sunday 8 November, Huang sent staff an email, first reported by Axios and also obtained by CNBC and Reuters. In it he says plainly “I was unfaithful to my wife”, apologises, takes full responsibility, says his family carries none of the blame, and says he will cooperate fully with the board’s investigation.
He is not going anywhere, at least for now. Nvidia says Huang is committed to leading the company as CEO without interruption, and the board says it has confidence in him and his leadership team.
That is a big change of tune. When The New York Times first reported the relationship on 29 October, Nvidia’s line was that his contact with the woman was normal business with a regional cloud customer and nothing unusual. Ten days later, the CEO is apologising to the whole company.
Here is where you need to keep your wits about you, because the affair is admitted and the spy part is not.
Megaspeed is not some random company. It spun out of a Chinese gaming company in 2023, according to the Times, and reportedly bought nearly US$2 billion of Nvidia’s most advanced hardware through a Malaysian subsidiary. In October 2025 Singapore police confirmed they were investigating it for suspected breaches of local law, the US Commerce Department was reported to be looking at it over export controls, and Senator Tom Cotton asked Commerce to dig into its ownership.
Nvidia ran its own inquiry back then and said it found no reason to believe any chips had been diverted to China. No charges or findings against Megaspeed have been reported. But you can see why Washington is twitchy: the company accused of helping restricted Chinese buyers get Nvidia chips is the same one whose executive was in a relationship with Nvidia’s CEO.
Before Huang admitted anything, three Republican House committee chairs had already written to him: Brian Mast of Foreign Affairs, John Moolenaar of the China select committee and Rick Crawford of the Intelligence committee. They want him at a closed-door joint briefing on 18 November to explain his dealings with the Megaspeed executive and what Nvidia does to stop foreign spies. Nvidia has not said whether he will turn up.
Huang has also become one of the White House’s go-to people on AI, and the person who has argued loudest for letting Nvidia sell more chips to China. Reports say Trump has left open whether that advisory role continues. So far there is no public move from the FBI, the Justice Department, the SEC or the Commerce Department over the affair itself.
Nvidia shares fell around 3% the day after the first report in late October, when Nvidia was still calling it routine business. Monday 9 November, US time, is the first trading day since Huang’s admission, so expect a wobble.
This is where it really bites. Huang has spent the last couple of years telling Washington that blocking Nvidia’s chips from China only speeds up China’s own chip industry. That argument now comes with a giant asterisk, because critics can ask whether the person making it was being worked on by Chinese intelligence, even if the board finds he wasn’t.
The likely fallout is less room for Nvidia to win looser export rules, more pressure for checks like location tracking on chips after they are sold, which Cotton has already pushed, and more scrutiny of Asian middlemen like Megaspeed. On the other side, Beijing denies everything and has frozen imports of Nvidia’s China-specific chips before, so Nvidia risks getting squeezed from both directions.
Nvidia makes the GeForce card in most gaming PCs, even if gaming is now a sideshow next to its AI business. We already wrote about how AI is eating the money that used to go to gaming hardware. A rattled Nvidia, fighting Congress and China at the same time, is not going to suddenly start caring more about cheap graphics cards.
Let’s be fair about it. The affair is between Huang and his family, and it is admitted. The spy stuff is not proven, Beijing denies it, and Nvidia’s board says nothing leaked. Nobody should be treating the allegation as fact yet.
But the cover story did not hold up. For ten days Nvidia told everyone it was just ordinary business with a customer, and then the CEO had to email the whole company to say it wasn’t. When the head of a company at the centre of a US and China chip fight gets caught out like that, the questions are going to be brutal, and he has earned every one of them. If the board’s investigation is anything short of thorough and public, this does not go away.
Should Huang stay or go? Come argue about it in the GetRekt Discord.
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