The key facts

  • David Reber, who served as Nvidia's chief security officer for four years, left in August, citing Parkinson's disease
  • In November, Jensen Huang left the company amid reports of extramarital affairs, including a relationship with a Megaspeed executive — a company suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips into China
  • Experts note that such connections create vulnerabilities that intelligence services could exploit, but it is unknown whether such information ever reached the security team

Two departures months apart

In August, Nvidia lost its longtime security chief David Reber, who had worked at the company for seven years, four of them as CSO. He explained his departure by health reasons: at the end of August he wrote on LinkedIn that he had been diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson's disease more than two years earlier, and that 'it was not a planned pivot,' but family and health come first. He was succeeded by Saša Zdjelar, who had previously spent 17 years at ExxonMobil in Houston, then a year at Salesforce and several years at ReversingLabs. Zdjelar did not answer questions about the transition or about what the security team knew.

Huang's resignation and the Megaspeed affair

Two and a half months after Reber's departure, CEO Jensen Huang himself left the company. The reason was questions about his extramarital affairs: first, with an executive at the Singapore-based company Megaspeed, which American investigators suspect of smuggling Nvidia chips into China, and then reports of two separate affairs with Nvidia employees. Megaspeed denies any wrongdoing. There is no direct link between the change of security leadership and the Megaspeed affair, but the question remains open as to what Nvidia's security specialists knew about the authorities' attention to Megaspeed and about Huang's connections. Reber and Zdjelar did not respond to questions, and Nvidia also did not comment on the situation.

What was known inside the company

Parts of the picture were known inside Nvidia. According to The New York Times, the company's top lawyer had been in contact with the authorities about Megaspeed more than a year earlier; Nvidia said it regularly communicates with officials. The Times, citing five employees, reported on Huang's relationship with a vice president who reported directly to him, and Reuters later, citing two people, reported a second relationship. It is unclear whether any of this information reached the security team: relationships with subordinates are usually the domain of HR, lawyers and the board of directors, but an affair with an executive of a company under federal investigation is a different situation.

Security experts' view

Experts point out that such connections can create vulnerabilities that foreign intelligence services look to exploit. Retired senior intelligence officer Nicholas Eftimiades, who says he has trained more than a thousand corporate security professionals, noted that intelligence services gather information largely through ordinary social contact rather than hacking, which makes risks harder to detect. He also said that security teams' budgets are often cut because they do not generate revenue, and quoted a typical response from CEOs: 'not a penny beyond compliance.' In a column in The Hill, Don Aviv, head of Interfor International, and Jeremy Hurewitz wrote that companies understand security too narrowly — as physical protection and cybersecurity — and should pay more attention to insider threats, including the recruitment of executives by foreign intelligence services and suspicious business ties.

What comes next

Eftimiades emphasized that part of what is happening is beyond the control of any security team: intelligence services, he said, are interested not so much in technology as in understanding policy — who drives changes to export rules and who the main adversary is. He added that the techniques used are not new, 'especially for China,' and that, unlike the Soviet era, cultivated connections now last for years. No one yet knows whether technical means such as IMSI catchers — devices that mimic a cell tower — were used against Huang; a basic version costs about $1,000 and fits in a suitcase. Clarity on what Nvidia's security team knew and whether it could have acted should emerge as the board's independent investigation and federal probes proceed. Eftimiades expressed hope that the whole story will serve as a 'wake-up call' for American industry, which, in his assessment, largely 'does not understand' China's methods.