Nvidia's board of directors is preparing to remove longtime chief executive Jensen Huang following an investigation into his extramarital affair with a Chinese business executive, CBS News reported. Nvidia shares tumbled more than 8%, to $159.51, in after-hours trading on Wednesday. The stock decline extended losses that began after the company announced the probe on November 8, with Nvidia's market value sinking more than $450 billion since then.
U.S. intelligence agencies have linked Huang to Alice Huang, a senior executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed International, who is suspected of being an asset of China's Ministry of State Security. Megaspeed is one of Nvidia's largest foreign customers, having purchased nearly $5 billion in AI chips and other advanced hardware. The Trump administration is aware of the board's plans to remove Huang. President Trump said this week that the FBI is also investigating romantic and business ties between the two.
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and is widely regarded as the face of the artificial intelligence sector, with the company's advanced chips providing essential computing resources for frontier AI models. In a message to employees on Sunday, Huang admitted to the affair and apologised to his wife and their two children, both of whom work at Nvidia. Corporate governance experts said his alleged relationship with Alice Huang appears to violate Nvidia's code of conduct, which states that personal relationships could create conflicts of interest and instructs employees to maintain high ethical standards.
Huang's potential departure would be a significant setback for Nvidia, which lacks obvious successors to the role, according to Wall Street analysts. Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge said Huang is arguably the most prominent executive at the most prominent company in the world's most important industry, someone who foresaw the rise of artificial intelligence years before ChatGPT and prepared the company to capitalise on it. Nvidia's 11-person board includes Huang, though the other members are designated as independent. The turmoil is also drawing scrutiny in Congress, with lawmakers expected to question company executives about whether its chips are being diverted to China through other countries.