Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang has been forced out as chief executive after a rapid cascade of revelations that began with a reported Chinese espionage plot and widened into admissions of multiple extramarital affairs, including one with a direct report. The collapse unfolded over roughly two weeks at a company long seen as the engine of America's artificial intelligence boom.
The saga began on October 29, when The New York Times reported that Huang appeared to be the target of a Chinese spy plot through his close relationship with Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based data center firm Megaspeed. The two are not related. Megaspeed had been investigated by the US Commerce Department over suspicions it illegally smuggled Nvidia chips into China, and Singapore authorities confiscated her passport in June 2025 before barring her from the country for allegedly giving inaccurate information to police. Some US officials believed she passed information, possibly about Nvidia's designs or White House trade deliberations, to Beijing.
The stakes were unusually high. Nvidia's chips are treated as a national security matter by the White House, which has restricted sales of its most advanced products to China since the Biden administration, even as Huang pushed to loosen those rules and cultivated ties with President Trump. "If you could draw the diagram of the entire Nvidia ecosystem, a single man is standing at the heart of all of that," Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution previously told The Verge.
Events accelerated this month. On November 6, the Times reported that China's Ministry of State Security had specifically recruited Alice Huang to spy on the Nvidia chief, though US intelligence officials disagreed over the strength of the evidence. Two days later, Huang admitted to an extramarital affair without naming anyone, and Nvidia's board opened an investigation. On November 11, the Times reported a second affair, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care and one of his roughly 60 direct reports. By that evening the board was ready to remove him, and Bloomberg reported he appeared "broken and shattered" and told people, "I'm a piece of shit."
CFO Colette Kress was named interim CEO, telling employees the company was in an "extraordinarily difficult period," while Harvey Jones became the first board chair in Nvidia's history. In a memo, Jones said the company would "search for a permanent successor looking at both internal and external candidates." The financial damage was swift: the stock, which hit an all-time high of $239.24 on October 6, closed at $162.85 on November 13.
The company was already facing a shareholder lawsuit claiming it deceived investors, after Huang and spokespeople insisted his relationship with Alice Huang and Megaspeed was "completely normal and not unusual." According to Reuters, Huang misled senior Nvidia leaders, including general counsel Tim Teter and chief marketing officer Alison Wagonfeld, about the nature of that relationship. On Thursday night, Reuters reported a third affair, also with an Nvidia employee.
Silicon Valley reaction was divided. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney called it a "sad day for NVIDIA, developers, America, and all humanity," Elon Musk wrote on X that it would "be an honor" to hire Huang, and some employees posted internally that the company should "bring back THE boss." Others speculated Huang was the victim of a conspiracy, whether an internal coup or a Chinese operation designed to remove him.
Nvidia now faces deep uncertainty. It has invested $99 billion in AI labs, startups and cloud providers and announced plans to mobilize more than $500 billion in financing for data centers. The board's investigation continues, congressional testimony is possible, and an incoming Democratic majority is expected to take a harder line on the tech industry. If Nvidia is found to have ignored partners suspected of funneling chips to China, it could face civil or criminal penalties and stricter export rules.
Huang himself could face criminal exposure. In May he claimed Nvidia had "zero percent" market share in China, but Culper Research later alleged more than 20 percent of the company's 2026 compute revenue came from China through illegal GPU diversion and Southeast Asian intermediaries, a figure that has not been independently verified. As The Verge's Elizabeth Lopatto wrote, "under a functioning legal system, [he] could actually go to jail."
