Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, told staff on 8 November that he had been unfaithful to Lori Huang, his wife of 41 years, after reports that the woman was a suspected Chinese intelligence asset.

U.S. officials concluded in 2025 that Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman also known as Huang Le, was passing information to the Chinese government, according to people briefed on classified surveillance. A U.S. government memo described her relationship with Jensen Huang as romantic. The two are not related. Jensen Huang told President Donald Trump on 9 November that he had no idea she was a spy, Trump said.

"I was unfaithful to my wife," Jensen Huang wrote in the email to Nvidia's roughly 42,000 employees. He wrote that there was no excuse for what he had done. On the intelligence reports he wrote only that the board had begun an independent investigation, which he supported. In a version of the email published in Chinese, he also wrote that he was committed to supporting U.S. national security.

Nvidia's board said the same day that it was investigating "recent reporting" that Jensen Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort and had no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised. Directors opened the inquiry after he told them he had been intimate with Alice Huang. The email names neither her nor any date. Jensen Huang, 63, co-founded Nvidia in 1993, has run it since and has been married since 1985.

China's foreign ministry has called the espionage reports groundless. Alice Huang has not spoken publicly. Megaspeed, the Singapore data centre company where she was an executive, said it was surprised that a former executive had been accused of acting as a foreign intelligence asset, and that its leadership had hired outside lawyers.

Lori Huang and their children

Lori Mills was 19 and studying electrical engineering at Oregon State University when she was paired as a lab partner with Jensen Huang, then 17, in an introductory class. He told the New Yorker that she was one of only about three women among roughly 250 students. She went on to design microchips at Silicon Graphics, and he has said she earned more than he did. She graduated in 1985 with a degree in electrical engineering, and they married that year.

A few years after the wedding she left engineering to raise their children. Spencer was two and Madison one when their father co-founded Nvidia in 1993.

In 2007 the couple set up the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation with 370,000 Nvidia shares. She is its president. Its assets grew to more than US$9.1 billion, making it one of the 15 largest private foundations in the U.S. Her name is on a research complex at Oregon State, built with a US$50 million gift in 2022, and on a college of art, architecture and design at Vanderbilt University, which the couple gave US$75 million in 2026.

Lori Huang kept a low public profile through four decades of marriage and has not spoken publicly since her husband's email. In it he wrote that his actions had hurt her and their children and that he hoped the family would heal.

Madison Huang, 34, trained as a chef at the Culinary Institute of America and Le Cordon Bleu and took an MBA at London Business School before joining Nvidia in 2020. She is senior director of product and technical marketing for physical AI and often travels with her father on business. Spencer Huang, 35, ran a cocktail bar in Taipei from 2014 to 2021 and took an MBA at New York University's Stern School before joining in 2022. He is a director of product management in robotics.

Madison's husband, Nico Caprez, also works at Nvidia. The email confessing the affair went to every employee of the company, the couple's two children and son-in-law among them.

The Huang living trust

Lori Huang is a co-trustee of the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Living Trust, set up on 1 May 1995, two years after Nvidia was founded. The trust held 528.5 million Nvidia shares in March 2026, about 61 per cent of the 870.6 million shares the proxy statement attributes to her husband. At the 9 November close of US$178.67 those shares were worth about US$94 billion. Nvidia's securities filings list the trust's shares as held by "Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Huang, as co-trustees".

California, where the couple live, treats property acquired during a marriage as community property and divides it equally on divorce under sections 760 and 2550 of its Family Code. The state's no-fault rules mean an affair does not change that split. The Huangs married eight years before Nvidia existed. Neither has announced a separation, and Lori Huang has made no claim to any sum.

Forbes put Jensen Huang's fortune at about US$162.2 billion on 8 November. Half of it, US$81.1 billion, is the figure several outlets have published as a hypothetical equal split. That sum assumes every asset is community property, which a court would test holding by holding. A narrower estimate counted only Nvidia shares and put her minimum entitlement at about US$62.5 billion.

MacKenzie Scott left her 25-year marriage to Jeff Bezos in 2019 with 4 per cent of Amazon, then worth about US$38 billion, under Washington state's community property law and with no prenuptial agreement. Sue Ann Arnall received US$974.8 million from the oil billionaire Harold Hamm in 2015 after a court fight over a fortune made during their marriage.

Elaine Wynn married Steve Wynn in 1963, divorced him in 1986 and remarried him in 1991. When they divorced again in 2010, he transferred more than 11 million Wynn Resorts shares to her, valued at about US$741 million in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. By 2012, when she sued over an agreement that let him control any sale of those shares, her 9.4 per cent stake was worth nearly US$900 million.

The surveillance and the memo

U.S. counterintelligence agencies first became interested in Megaspeed because of its purchases of Nvidia chips. Electronic surveillance of Alice Huang showed her in contact with a U.S. citizen. Officials with a need to know used unmasking, the procedure that reveals the names of U.S. citizens caught in foreign surveillance, to identify him as Jensen Huang. The surveillance has continued. The White House, the CIA and the National Security Agency declined to comment.

Officials briefed Trump on the intelligence in October 2025, and he chose not to act. They did not believe Jensen Huang knew what she was doing. Taiwan had begun monitoring Alice Huang's trips in 2024 at the U.S. government's suggestion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Policymakers received a memo in spring 2026 identifying Alice Huang as having been recruited by the Ministry of State Security, China's main civilian intelligence agency, to collect intelligence on the Nvidia chief. The memo said the aim was to learn more about U.S. AI chips and possibly to influence the company to push for sales of its most advanced chips in China. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, oversaw its drafting before Trump's state visit to China from 13 to 15 May. Rubio told reporters on 8 November that he could not discuss the matter.

Officials in the U.S., Singapore and Taiwan had grown concerned about Alice Huang, and Singapore's intelligence agency suspected her of being an asset of the ministry who had been recruited because of her existing relationship with Jensen Huang. Singapore's police and Ministry of Home Affairs rejected that account on 30 and 31 October and said there had been "no such investigations conducted in respect of Alice Huang".

A person familiar with the matter said on 8 November that U.S. intelligence had determined she was a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Jensen Huang. A Taiwanese daily reported on 10 November that the ministry had set up a chip unit within a Chinese government AI group with Alice Huang as a member, citing U.S. sources. Overseas Chinese-language outlets opposed to the Chinese Communist Party added a further claim, attributed to unnamed U.S. sources, that she answered to Chen Yixin, the minister of state security.

Singapore, Taipei and the CTI footage

Jensen Huang and a small group of colleagues met Alice Huang at an Italian restaurant in Singapore in December 2023, shortly after she restructured Megaspeed. Nvidia named Megaspeed an official cloud partner four days after the ownership change. A South Korean newspaper summarising U.S. reporting put their first meeting at an Nvidia event in California in early 2024.

Photographs posted on LinkedIn during Computex, the Taipei computer trade show, in June 2024 show Jensen Huang at a bar with Alice Huang and executives of other Nvidia customers. NetThunder, an AI computing company, captioned a woman in one group photograph "Megaspeed Chairwoman Alice Wong", and she has since been identified as Alice Huang. At a party held by the Taiwanese hardware maker Gigabyte the same week, the two sat next to each other. Megaspeed began buying Nvidia equipment weeks later.

CTI, a Taiwanese broadcaster, filmed the two after a dinner with AI suppliers in Taipei in May 2025. The footage shows Alice Huang waiting behind Jensen Huang as he spoke to journalists, then following him back into the restaurant and touching his lower back. The two left in the same car. The woman in the footage was identified as Alice Huang by comparison with a separately obtained photograph. Taiwanese media released the footage after the first espionage reports on 29 October.

The Financial Times reviewed photographs of the two in Shanghai, Hong Kong and California and wrote that none established an inappropriate relationship and that several showed group gatherings. Alice Huang posted photographs of herself with Jensen Huang on social media, according to a person who saw them. The LinkedIn posts and the CTI footage were published within days of the events they show. The Singapore dinner and the California meeting rest on anonymous accounts.

Culper Research, a New York short seller, called the relationship "uncomfortably close" in a report on 13 May 2026 that included the May 2025 restaurant footage. Culper's account of what Nvidia employees thought rested on anonymous interviews, and the firm was betting against Nvidia's shares.

From Shanghai Hexi to Megaspeed

Alice Huang, who is about 42, worked in Chinese finance before moving into AI data centres. WeChat posts from 2016 and 2017 list her as deputy general manager, executive director and a member of the investment committee of Shanghai Hexi Investment Management, a private equity firm. The posts say she had worked at HSBC's private bank in Hong Kong and at Citic Securities. The address on a Hexi business card, in Shanghai's Lujiazui financial district, was under renovation with no sign of the firm.

Simuwang, a Chinese fund database, lists a Huang Le at Shanghai Hexi as a former reporter for Hunan Television and China Central Television. An official Hexi post from 2016 lists her as a director, and the Asset Management Association of China lists a Huang Le as an executive director of the firm. Until August 2025 a holding company she founded owned 48 per cent of a data centre project that Chinese state media called the country's largest.

Alice Huang became the controlling shareholder of Megaspeed International, then the Singapore subsidiary of the Chinese games company 7Road, in March 2023, according to C4ADS, a Washington research group. The shares passed in late 2023 to a Singapore company whose ultimate owner C4ADS could not identify. Megaspeed listed her as managing director for eight months before dropping her from its corporate paperwork, although she has described herself as its chief executive.

Alice Huang, her sister and her husband, Kang Wei, built a network of companies in China and Singapore to buy Nvidia chips, people who know her said. At its centre was Shanghai Century Litong Data Services, an Nvidia preferred cloud partner by October 2023 whose ownership filings do not mention her. Century Litong said it had no dealings with her. One acquaintance recalled Kang saying he met Jensen Huang in the 2010s, when Kang was buying video game companies.

The companies and investors around Alice Huang, based mainly in Shanghai and Zhejiang province, used ties to Shanghai officials to move from mobile games into data centres. They invested in a cybersecurity subsidiary of China Electronics Technology Group, a state-owned defence electronics conglomerate.

Alice Huang and Kang sought investment in early 2025 for a Southeast Asian data centre project worth several hundred million dollars, according to two people who received the pitch. They said they would have "no problem securing GPUs" and named Alibaba as a customer. They did not mention a close relationship with Jensen Huang. Kang sits on the board of Guilin Bank, a state-controlled lender in Guangxi, according to corporate records.

Singapore's questioning

Singapore police questioned Alice Huang in 2025 over false import declarations and barred her from leaving the country, people familiar with the matter said. The investigations into her were closed for lack of evidence, and she flew to Shanghai. Singapore's investigation of Megaspeed continues.

Tim Teter, Nvidia's general counsel, asked the Commerce Department in 2025 whether it had played a part in her detention. Nvidia said he did not then know of the affair, and has not said when he learned of it.

Nvidia's account before 8 November

An Nvidia spokesman said in October 2025, when the Computex photographs were first published, that customers sometimes asked Jensen Huang to visit and brief them on the market. John Rizzo, who runs public policy communications at Nvidia, called the meetings "not unusual or unexpected" on 29 October 2026. He said Jensen Huang talked with thousands of customer executives a year and that Megaspeed received ordinary business information and no trade secrets.

On 29 October, ten days before he admitted the affair, Jensen Huang described his dealings with Alice Huang as normal and typical of his dealings with Chinese customers. He said she no longer worked at Megaspeed and that the U.S. government had never told him of any suspicion about her.

Nvidia's communications staff rejected any suggestion on 6 November that he had passed sensitive information to a Chinese spy. On 7 November the company declined to comment on the memo or on whether he had been intimate with Alice Huang. The Wall Street Journal wrote on 9 November that Nvidia had denied the relationship before he acknowledged it.

Trump said on 9 November that he had asked Jensen Huang directly whether he knew she was a spy, and believed his answer that he had no idea. Some of Trump's senior officials, who were not named, have since doubted that he could have been unaware.

No warning for Huang

Jensen Huang never received a defensive briefing, the warning U.S. counterintelligence agencies sometimes give people a foreign intelligence service is targeting. The decision rests with the FBI and the intelligence agencies. Rizzo said on 8 November that Nvidia trusted the government would have told the company of a genuine threat.

FBI agents gave such a briefing in 2015 to Eric Swalwell, then a Democratic congressman from California, about Christine Fang, a Chinese national they suspected of working for the Ministry of State Security. Interview summaries released in August 2026 record that Swalwell told agents he had had physical relations with her and cut off contact after the briefing. The FBI found no evidence that he had committed federal corruption offences.

Trump said on 9 November that he had been reading about the matter over a period of time, but not for long. The officials' account dates his briefing to October 2025. He said the FBI was looking into it "in terms of something else" and did not explain. Nvidia declined to comment on any FBI inquiry.

Access to Trump

Unnamed officials worried that Jensen Huang, who meets the president regularly, could learn Trump's thinking on China before his visits there. He attended the state banquet in Beijing during Trump's May 2026 visit and sat at the head table of the White House state dinner for Xi Jinping, China's president, on 24 September.

Jensen Huang argued through 2025 and 2026 for permission to sell more powerful chips in China, and the administration approved sales of the H200 processor to approved Chinese customers in December 2025. Before meeting Xi in May 2026, Trump considered and rejected his request to sell China still more advanced chips, the Times reported.

Elly Rostoum, a former U.S. intelligence analyst, told Bloomberg the episode was "quite careless" and said technology competition between the U.S. and China was now being fought through private companies and their chief executives. A 2022 bulletin from the National Counterintelligence and Security Center told business leaders that Chinese intelligence cultivates targets through personal and business relationships. Another, in April 2025, said its officers posed as consultants, headhunters and think tanks.

The board, Congress and disclosure

U.S. securities rules do not specifically require a company to disclose an executive's personal relationship. Item 404 of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Regulation S-K covers transactions in which a director or executive has a material interest, and the Supreme Court in Basic v. Levinson tied materiality to what a reasonable investor would consider important. A shareholder suit filed on 9 November argues that the relationship and Nvidia's statements about Megaspeed were material.

Nvidia has not said whether its code of conduct required Jensen Huang to disclose the relationship or when he told directors. The board retained Joon H. Kim, a former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, on 10 November and has published no terms of reference.

Jensen Huang withdrew on 9 November from a chief executives' forum hosted by Anthropic and a summit held by ElevenLabs, an AI audio company. He had retained Heller, a crisis communications firm, from at least October 2025.

Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry, called the first report "groundless speculation" on 30 October and on 10 November repeated that the claims were smears. Liu Chang, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said the U.S. was running a smear campaign against China. The Global Times, published by the Chinese Communist Party's People's Daily, asked in a 9 November headline how Jensen Huang's infidelity could be linked to China.

Three Republican House committee chairs asked Jensen Huang on 4 November to brief them in closed session on 18 November about his interactions with Alice Huang and Nvidia's "security protocols against foreign adversary espionage". The letter gave him until the end of 11 November to accept or offer another date. Brian Mast, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, said on 10 November that he would "absolutely" consider a subpoena if Jensen Huang did not respond.

John Moolenaar, chairman of the House China committee, said on 11 November that Jensen Huang would likely be subpoenaed if he did not agree to the briefing that day, and Mast said his committee was preparing one. Senator Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican on the Banking Committee, called for him to resign as chief executive, saying his position was a security risk.