Jensen Huang ran Nvidia for 33 years. A spy file ended it in two weeks

Two weeks ago Jensen Huang was the leather jacket on every AI keynote stage, the founder of a chip company worth more than $4 trillion and a regular visitor to the White House. On Thursday he was out. Nvidia announced that its board had accepted his resignation as chief executive, effective immediately, ending a run that began when he co-founded the company in 1993 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

The reasons are spread across a confession email, a stack of New York Times reporting and an intelligence memo nobody outside government has seen. The short version: US officials believe a woman Huang grew close to was passing information to China's Ministry of State Security, and the company she worked for bought billions of dollars of Nvidia chips.

How a chip deal turned into a spy story

The woman is Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le. She is no relation. According to TechCrunch's timeline of the scandal, she was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore AI infrastructure company that reportedly bought $4.8 billion of Nvidia hardware over two years. Al Jazeera describes Megaspeed as Nvidia's main partner in Southeast Asia, and says investigators wanted to know whether that stockpile was finding its way to Chinese companies.

The Times first reported on October 29 that US officials had been looking at Alice Huang and Megaspeed for more than a year, and that she and the Nvidia chief were close. Nvidia's answer at the time came from spokesperson John Rizzo: "Jensen's interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected." That line aged badly.

Follow-up Times stories on November 6 and 8 described a secret memo, drafted under Secretary of State Marco Rubio's supervision, warning that Alice Huang worked for the Ministry of State Security. The Information reported that she and her family had built a web of companies in China and Singapore to buy Nvidia chips, including a firm called Shanghai Century Litong that, by The Information's count, helped move $7.5 billion of Nvidia purchases, banned chips among them. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia's top lawyer, Tim Teter, stepped into a 2025 federal smuggling probe of Megaspeed and asked a Commerce Department official whether the administration had a hand in detaining her.

Singapore had already acted. According to the Associated Press, authorities there questioned Alice Huang last year and took her passport. They found too little evidence to charge her, suspected she had given "inaccurate information," and barred her from coming back. Megaspeed said in December that there was "no evidence" it had shipped Nvidia chips into China, and on Thursday said it takes export-control compliance "extremely seriously." China's Foreign Ministry called the spying claims unsubstantiated and a smear.

None of this has been tested in court. Nobody has been charged. The memo has not been published. What is public is how fast the story moved once it started.

Fourteen days

On November 5 the chairs of three House committees (John Moolenaar of the China select committee, Brian Mast of Foreign Affairs and Rick Crawford of Intelligence) wrote to Huang asking for a closed-door briefing. "It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk," they wrote.

Three days later, on Sunday, November 8, Nvidia published an email Huang had sent to staff. It is short, and it does not mention Alice Huang. "I owe my family and all of you an apology," it begins. "I was unfaithful to my wife." He said the board had opened an independent investigation into the national security concerns and that he would cooperate. "My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy." The last line was a promise: "I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence."

That promise lasted four days. The company's internal review said it had "no reason to believe" national security or Nvidia's secrets had been compromised, according to AP, but it was also examining whether Huang had been "the target of a foreign intelligence effort." That is a strange sentence for a board to write about its own CEO.

Then the story stopped being only about China. On November 11 the Times, citing five people who had worked at Nvidia, reported that Huang had also had a relationship with a vice president who reports directly to him. Nvidia and Huang did not confirm it. When a Times reporter reached him, Huang said "I don't think you should be talking to me directly" and hung up. The board met that night, according to Al Jazeera. On Thursday Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, reported a relationship with another Nvidia employee as well.

A CEO's affair with a direct report is a governance problem with a paper trail. A suspected foreign agent close to the man who runs the world's AI chip supply is a problem of a different size. Together they left the board very little room.

Who runs Nvidia now

Colette Kress, chief financial officer since 2013, is interim CEO and keeps the CFO job too. In a statement quoted by AP, she said Nvidia's "strength has always come from its people" and that she is "committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years." The board says it will look at internal and external candidates. It also created a job Nvidia had never had: chair of the board. Harvey C. Jones, a former Synopsys CEO who has sat on Nvidia's board since 1993, gets it.

Huang still owns about 3.6% of the company, according to Al Jazeera. Whatever happens next, he will watch it as one of Nvidia's biggest shareholders.

The market flinched without panicking. Shares fell about 8% in after-hours trading on Wednesday as word of the board meeting spread, TechCrunch reported, then closed down more than 4% on Thursday after a steeper drop earlier in the day, according to AP. Nvidia's market value slipped under $4 trillion for the first time since July 2025, Al Jazeera reported, and Reuters noted the stock now trades at its lowest multiple of expected earnings in 14 years. Boston College economist Aleksandar Tomic called the exit a "speed bump." Forrester's Stephanie Balaouras framed it as a test: "If Nvidia stabilizes quickly under new leadership, the AI infrastructure boom will have demonstrated resilience." Nvidia reports quarterly earnings on Tuesday, which is a lot sooner than anyone in Santa Clara would like.

The White House problem

The awkward part for Washington is its own timeline. The Times reported that President Trump was briefed on the intelligence about Alice Huang in late 2025 and did not act. On November 8, asked if Huang should stay on as CEO, Trump said: "I think so. Oh yeah, sure." Asked whether he wished he had moved sooner, he said "I don't think so," AP reported, and called Huang an "honorable guy." He also said Huang had told him he had "absolutely no idea" he was involved with an intelligence operative.

By Thursday Trump had moved on to casting. On Truth Social he said Huang had "done a fantastic job" and pitched former Apple CEO Tim Cook as the replacement. "There is only one man to take his place," he wrote, adding: "Legend replaces a Legend!"

Democrats are not letting the timing go. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries criticized Trump's comments, and Democrats in both chambers are opening a probe into the administration's plans to approve AI chip sales to Chinese companies, according to Al Jazeera. Trump has said the FBI is looking into the affair. Where that inquiry stands is unclear.

Mast told reporters on Thursday that Huang would testify before Thanksgiving, behind closed doors, and that he expects the session to be recorded and transcribed. "I don't want to see anything hurt in Nvidia, but he has some very serious questions to answer," he said. Nvidia and Huang also face a shareholder class action alleging investors were misled about the affair.

The questions Mast wants answered are the same ones the board's investigators are chasing: whether anything Huang told Alice Huang reached Beijing, and whether Megaspeed's chips ended up where Washington had banned them from going. Huang spent three decades making sure every AI lab on earth had to talk to Nvidia. Now he has to talk to Congress.

Sources: NVIDIA: A Message to Our Company, TechCrunch, Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, Al Jazeera.