Nvidia's board investigates whether Jensen Huang was targeted by Chinese intelligence after he admits an affair

Nvidia's board has opened an independent investigation into whether chief executive Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence operation. The board acted after Huang told it he had been having an affair with a business executive whom US intelligence assessed was gathering information for Beijing, The Hindu reported, carrying Reuters copy. A committee of independent directors, working with outside counsel, will run the inquiry. The board said it has no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised, and Huang remains in his post.

The woman is Alice Huang, a former executive of Megaspeed International, according to InfoMoney. Megaspeed is a Singapore-based company that buys Nvidia's artificial-intelligence chips. Citing The New York Times, CNBC reported that Megaspeed bought more than $4.8 billion of Nvidia chips over the past two years. Commerce Department officials are investigating whether the company helps Chinese firms get around US export restrictions. Lawmakers from both parties have called for congressional investigations.

A Russian business channel summarized Huang's letter to employees: he admitted to having an affair, apologized to his family and said he had failed in his duty as head of Nvidia. President Donald Trump defended Huang publicly, calling him "an honorable guy." Mainland Chinese outlets such as The Paper reported the admission and the board statement without comment. A Sina video summary attributed a statement to China's Foreign Ministry under the line "do not treat normal business as espionage". The desk could not find a transcript of the ministry briefing to confirm the wording. The same Chinese coverage reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio declined to comment and called the matter internal to the company.

The first clean read on how investors value the scandal came once US markets reopened on Monday. Nvidia shares fell roughly 4% to 5% in Monday trading, a decline CNBC and Bloomberg tied directly to the investigation, erasing on the order of $225 billion in market value from a company Bloomberg had valued at about $4.5 trillion at Friday's close. The broader Nasdaq Composite did not follow Nvidia lower, a divergence CNBC described as the index "defying" the Nvidia-specific hit. Dan Ives, an analyst at Yorkville Ives, said he expects Huang to remain chief executive in the near term but called the episode a reputational setback that could draw sustained congressional scrutiny; a person close to Huang told CNBC he could take a leave of absence if the investigation interferes with his work.

That split mirrors what happened in Asia a day earlier, when US exchanges were still closed and the only price signal came from Nvidia perpetual futures on crypto exchanges, which slid over the weekend. Despite warnings that Asian markets could come under pressure, Taiwan's Taiex rose 5.72% and Japan's Nikkei 225 rose 3.45% by 04:00 GMT on Monday, Al Jazeera reported, as chip suppliers recovered part of last week's losses. Monday's US trading now reinforces that pattern: investors in Nvidia's supply chain and in the broader technology sector appear to be treating the scandal as a governance problem specific to the company and its chief executive, not as a sign of weaker underlying demand for artificial-intelligence chips.