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Nvidia Board Opens Probe Into CEO Jensen Huang
Nvidia's board opened an independent investigation on November 8 into whether CEO Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort.
Nvidia's board said on Sunday, November 8, that a committee of independent directors, assisted by outside counsel, will investigate reports that chief executive Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The board said it has "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that it has confidence in Huang and his leadership team. A company spokesperson said Huang remains committed to continuing as CEO without interruption.
The statement followed reports in The New York Times and the Financial Times that US intelligence agencies believe Alice Huang, a former executive of the Singapore-based cloud company Megaspeed, has been passing information to Beijing. In an email to staff the same day, Jensen Huang acknowledged an affair with her, wrote "I was unfaithful to my wife" and apologised to his family and employees, adding that he supports the review and will cooperate fully. TechCrunch reported that Nvidia had earlier described the pair's interactions as "not unusual" and said it does not share classified information with customers.
Megaspeed is an Nvidia customer that has been accused of helping restricted Chinese companies obtain Nvidia AI chips, and Nvidia has said it was already investigated for evading export controls, CNBC reported. That puts the probe next to the most sensitive issue in Nvidia's business. On Wednesday, November 5, three Republican House committee chairs asked Huang to attend a closed-door briefing with lawmakers on November 18, the day after the company reports its third-quarter results.
The weekend's first price signals came from crypto venues, which trade tokenised versions of US shares around the clock. Nvidia closed Friday at $186.64, up 2.8% after Thursday's 9.3% fall to $181.60. On Binance, the tokenised share slid from about $187.80 to $180.54 in the hour after 20:00 UTC on Sunday and touched $177.61 early on Monday, 4.8% below Friday's close. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said there is a risk Huang could be removed depending on what the investigation finds, but expected him to stay in the role in the near term.
The question for shareholders is not the affair itself but whether anything left the company, and how long it takes the board to say so. Until the committee reports, every Nvidia headline about China, export licences or Washington will be read through this probe, and the November 17 results will arrive with a governance question attached that no sales figure can answer.