Nvidia Board Weighs Jensen Huang’s Future as Affair Scandal Deepens

Nvidia’s board is reportedly preparing to oust co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, according to the Wall Street Journal, as a widening scandal over his personal relationships raises national security questions for the world’s leading maker of AI chips. Sources told the newspaper that the board would meet as soon as Wednesday to decide the future of Huang, who co-founded the company in 1993 and has led it for 33 years. Nvidia shares fell about 8% in after-hours trading on Wednesday and are down roughly 11% over five days.

The crisis escalated on Sunday, when Huang admitted in a letter to employees, also published as a press release, that he had been unfaithful to his wife of 40 years. He apologised to his family and staff, linked the matter to national security concerns raised in news reports, and said he supported and would fully cooperate with an independent investigation launched by the board. The letter did not name the woman involved. The board said in a statement that it had no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised, and it has hired law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct the internal investigation.

US officials believe Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based AI infrastructure company Megaspeed and a Chinese citizen unrelated to the Nvidia CEO, has been spying for China. A secret memo circulated among Trump administration policymakers in spring 2026, drafted under the supervision of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, warned that she worked for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump was briefed in late 2025 on her relationship with Huang but did not act.

The AI chip trade sits at the centre of the case. Megaspeed reportedly bought $4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips over two years and has been investigated by the US and Singapore since October 2025 over suspicions it helped Chinese companies circumvent US export controls, including by renting computing power to Alibaba. The Justice Department has since taken over the federal probe. The Information reported that Alice Huang’s family built a network of companies in China and Singapore to acquire Nvidia chips, including Shanghai Century Litong, which became an Nvidia-preferred cloud partner and facilitated purchases of $7.5 billion of chips, including banned ones. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter contacted Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler during a 2025 smuggling probe to ask whether the administration had played a role in detaining Alice Huang. The episode carries weight because Nvidia’s chips are essential to the US-China race to build advanced AI infrastructure, and the company faces restrictions on selling its most powerful products to Chinese entities.

On Wednesday, the New York Times, citing five employees, reported that Huang also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, who reports directly to him and is also married. The sources said the pair were filmed being affectionate at a San Jose hotel during a conference earlier this year. Nvidia, like many companies, has rules discouraging relationships between superiors and subordinates. Nvidia, Huang and Powell have not confirmed the report, and Huang reportedly told a Times reporter he should not be contacted directly before hanging up. It remains unclear which relationship his Sunday admission referred to.

Political pressure is also building. On November 5, three Republican committee chairmen, John Moolenaar of the House Select Committee on China, Brian Mast of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Rick Crawford of the House Intelligence Committee, requested a closed-door briefing with Huang, citing concerns about China’s access to sensitive US technology. Moolenaar said Huang would likely be subpoenaed if he did not agree. Huang has also withdrawn from speaking engagements at the ElevenLabs Summit and the Anthropic CEO Forum. Trump, by contrast, described Huang as a fine person on Sunday and said he believed he should remain CEO.

Corporate governance professors Ann Lipton of the University of Colorado and Todd Henderson of the University of Chicago said there is no real precedent for a CEO caught up in a suspected espionage case. Lipton identified three lines of inquiry: whether laws were broken, whether Huang violated internal policies and whether the board was misled. Henderson said the critical question is what Huang knew and when, noting that withholding a relationship with a suspected Chinese spy from the board would, in his view, be a fireable offence. Wired reported that Huang hired a crisis PR firm a year ago. Lipton expects shareholder lawsuits, and Nvidia already faces a proposed class action alleging that the company and Huang misled investors by concealing the relationship while describing dealings with Alice Huang’s former employer as routine.

Succession has become a pressing concern. Huang has about 60 direct reports, and the company has no obvious successor or succession plan, which Lipton described as a danger for any company. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia is working with an outside firm to identify potential replacements. Because Nvidia has no dual-class shares and Huang reportedly owns about 3.6%, Lipton said he would be easier to remove than many founders. Prediction market Kalshi put his odds of surviving the week at 30%.

Names in circulation include AMD CEO Lisa Su, floated by The Information, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, suggested by Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. Analysts and former employees have pointed to Ian Buck, the Nvidia vice president who helped develop CUDA, the software central to the company’s AI dominance, while CFO Colette Kress is the insider most often named.