Nvidia's board launches independent investigation: Jensen Huang's fate hangs in the balance

The investigation and the allegations

Nvidia's board of directors announced on Sunday the launch of an independent investigation after CEO Jensen Huang admitted to employees that he had cheated on his wife. The matter, however, extends far beyond his personal life: the subject of the affair was Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, whom US officials consider a Chinese spy who passed information to Beijing. This is reported by TechCrunch, noting that the stakes are high because countless technology and financial partners depend on Nvidia's position amid the AI boom. Huang himself recently said in a Bloomberg interview: “I am responsible for an entire industry”.

The parties' positions and what is known about the Chinese trail

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington called the allegations “baseless slander and defamation”at the end of October; no charges have been brought against anyone. According to The New York Times, US intelligence agencies reported their concerns to President Donald Trump as early as a year ago. At that time, according to the outlet, officials believed Huang did not know about Alice Huang's intelligence role, and it is unclear whether their assessment has changed: unnamed senior administration officials doubt that he could have remained in the dark all this time. The board itself, according to TechCrunch, states that it sees no signs that national security or company secrets were compromised, and that Huang remains in his post.

Expert assessment: odds of “roughly 50-50”

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management and founder of the CEO Leadership Institute, told TechCrunch that Huang's career is salvageable, but put his odds of keeping his post at “roughly 50-50.” According to him, the episode demonstrates “exceptionally poor judgment”: “any Nvidia employee other than him would have been fired for this.” Huang's salvation may lie in what social psychologists call “idiosyncrasy credits” — the reserve of trust he has earned since founding Nvidia in 1993 — but only if he proves he was deceived. There is no precedent for getting out of such a situation: executives who survived personal scandals usually continue their careers at another company (like former HP CEO Mark Hurd, who moved to Oracle), but Nvidia is Huang's own company. An internal successor is not obvious either: according to Huang himself, he has about 60 direct reports and the structure is as flat as possible; his children, who work at Nvidia, are sometimes the subject of succession speculation . Sonnenfeld suggested that the board, in a crisis, might seek a “messianic solution” from outside, mentioning former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The China question and the financial web

The investigation comes against the backdrop of long-standing questions about Nvidia's chip supplies to China. According to Sonnenfeld, the board must determine what technology, if any, ended up in China and by what routes, including the relationship with Megaspeed. This Singaporean cloud company, which grew out of a Chinese gaming business and became Nvidia's largest customer in Southeast Asia, bought roughly $2 billion worth of its chips, The New York Times reported in October 2025, raising questions about whether it helped China circumvent US export restrictions. An Nvidia representative told The Hill at the time that the allegations had been “thoroughly investigated and refuted as early as last year.” Criticism of Nvidia was also voiced by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: back in January, at the Davos forum, he compared selling advanced chips to China to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”. The situation is made especially acute by Nvidia's role at the center of a massive circular AI financing scheme: in addition to stakes in hundreds of startups, the company has invested in OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, CoreWeave and Nebius, and in August signed preliminary agreements with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilize more than $500 billion, of which, according to Huang, Nvidia could support up to a quarter.

What comes next

While the investigation is ongoing, Huang continues to run the company, Nvidia said on Sunday. Two key events lie ahead: on November 17 Nvidia will publish its latest earnings report, and on November 18 three House committee chairmen want a closed-door briefing from Huang. Sonnenfeld expects that even if Huang keeps his title, he will have to delegate part of the day-to-day decision-making. An important structural fact: Huang holds no super-voting shares that would entrench his power — if he did, removing him would be harder. Sonnenfeld also sees the episode as a turning point for how the tech industry safeguards its secrets: in his view, technology companies are 'too relaxed' compared with defense contractors and their clearance regimes. A similar vulnerability was exposed by the arrest of an OpenAI employee last month — he was accused of concealing a recording device in a conference room; OpenAI stated that there were no signs of access to model weights, source code, or customer data.