The founder and CEO of the most valuable AI company in the world had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
On Sunday, chipmaker Nvidia posted an odd press release from its founder and CEO Jensen Huang on its website’s newsroom page.
The press release, titled “A Message to Our Company,” was also emailed to the company’s employees. “I owe my family and all of you an apology. I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”
Why did Huang, who leads one of the most valuable companies in the world, share this personal information through official corporate communications? It’s because the woman he had an affair with has been accused of working as a spy for China, according to reports from the New York Times and the Financial Times.
And this goes beyond just a public relations scandal. With Huang being a leading figure in the AI industry, Nvidia being the major supplier of computing power for the AI boom, and the AI arms race between the U.S. and China, Huang’s affair is also an issue of national security.
What we know
The New York Times and the Financial Times reported over the weekend that Jensen Huang had an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), a Chinese citizen and top executive at the Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, a major purchaser of Nvidia’s chips.
According to the outlets, U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Alice Huang had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security as a spy.
U.S. surveillance of Alice Huang found that she had been in regular communication with an American citizen, who was later identified as Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, according to the New York Times. The Megaspeed executive reportedly wanted the Nvidia CEO to lobby the Trump administration to loosen chip export controls. Huang reportedly did exactly that.
This discovery was treated as such a high-level national security risk that Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself helped draft a classified memo this spring warning the Trump administration of Huang’s relationship with a spy working for China’s top intelligence agency, the New York Times reported.
The company said it has “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised,” per a statement from the company’s board of directors posted to the Nvidia website on Sunday. The board also said that it had opened its own independent investigation into the relationship and what did and didn’t occur.
The Associated Press reported today that China has denied that Alice Huang works for its government as a spy, calling the accusations a “smear campaign.”
What we don’t know
Aside from the affair being confirmed by Huang himself, and U.S. intelligence reportedly believing that Alice Huang is a spy for the Chinese government, there’s a lot that we don’t know.
We still don’t know what Jensen Huang knew about Alice Huang, or to what degree he was or was not influenced. We don’t know what Nvidia’s CEO may have told Alice Huang and what information, if any, was compromised. If information was exchanged, we don’t know what was passed to the Chinese government.
In addition, Alice Huang’s current whereabouts are completely unknown, according to the Wall Street Journal. She was last confirmed to have been in China in 2024, right around the time U.S. intelligence agencies began investigating her. Pictures from 2025 of the two together surfaced recently, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It’s unclear how wide the potential fallout of this international incident will be. Will Jensen Huang be indicted? Will he be forced to step down as CEO of Nvidia? If so, who is next in line to lead the California-based company, which has a current market cap of over $4.2 trillion?
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