Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted in a message to company employees that he had an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence believes is a Chinese spy, prompting the company’s board to open an independent investigation on Sunday.
Axios reports that Huang’s admission came in a draft email to Nvidia staff obtained by the outlet. “I owe my family and all of you an apology,” he wrote. “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did.”
The woman has been identified as Alice Huang a tech executive turned alleged Chinese spy who was recruited to gather information from Jensen Huang and potentially press him to support making Nvidia’s advanced chips available in China, despite existing export restrictions.
Breitbart News previously reported that Nvidia denied an improper relationship between its CEO and the Chinese woman:
Authorities were already investigating whether Alice Huang was helping China obtain restricted advanced Nvidia AI chips before surveillance revealed she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, according to a report by the New York Times. The discovery raised alarms due to Huang’s central role in the global AI race as the CEO of Nvidia, which produces the most powerful AI chips in the world.
Nvidia, meanwhile, said Megaspeed is an ordinary regional customer and that Jensen Huang’s meetings with Alice Huang are routine CEO interactions with customers.
“Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year,” Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo told the Times.
Rizzo added that Nvidia is “confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know,” and that customers like Megaspeed “receive ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security.”
The timing is awkward: Huang has been a vocal advocate for loosening restrictions on selling advanced AI chips to China, a position he held even as the relationship was unfolding.
Nvidia’s board announced Sunday that an independent committee, assisted by outside counsel, would investigate the matter. The board said it has no reason to believe that national security or company secrets were compromised, and it backed Huang to keep running the company.
