Huang Misled Nvidia's Top Executives About His Ties, Reuters Reports, as the Spy Case Goes Unproved

Jensen Huang, the ousted founder of Nvidia, gave the company's senior executives a false account of his relationship with the Chinese businesswoman at the centre of the scandal that ended his career, Reuters reported on Friday, citing internal company messages it had reviewed. In messages sent in October to the company's general counsel, Tim Teter, and its chief marketing officer, Alison Wagonfeld, Huang described his contact with Alice Huang, a former executive at the Singapore customer Megaspeed, as routine business dealings with a customer. Photographs verified by Reuters showed the two together in the United States, China and elsewhere as early as December 2023.

The report deepens a crisis that has already cost Nvidia its founder and hundreds of billions of dollars of market value. Huang resigned as president, chief executive and director on Wednesday, after the board opened an independent investigation into reports that he had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, and after he acknowledged in a letter to staff that he had been unfaithful to his wife. Reuters reported earlier in the week that he had also had a relationship with a second, unnamed Nvidia employee, and the New York Times reported a relationship with a third, Kimberly Powell, the company's vice-president of healthcare. Nvidia has declined to comment on the Reuters report.

At the same time, the espionage allegation at the heart of the affair is looking shakier than it did a week ago. CNN reported on Thursday, citing multiple sources, that the intelligence collected on Alice Huang to date does not prove she was acting as a spy for Beijing. Officials at the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including some close to its director, said intercepted communications and other intelligence gathered so far do not show she knowingly funnelled information to China's Ministry of State Security — though the intercepts did point to someone in Huang's inner circle passing information that reached Chinese intelligence, and it remains unclear whether she was that person. The FBI has been running a counterintelligence investigation for at least a year, and it is still open.

The uncertainty has reached the top of the American government. Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Thursday that neither the Justice Department nor the FBI had reached any conclusion about whether Alice Huang was an intelligence asset, and President Donald Trump, who defended Huang on Monday, said: "Well, the big thing is, was the woman a spy? And I don't know if that's been determined yet. But if the woman was a spy, yes. If the woman was not a spy, perhaps it would be different." The Wall Street Journal reported separately that Huang had been introduced to Alice Huang by her own husband, Kang Wei, a Chinese businessman who has known Huang for a decade, and that Taiwan has revoked her entry permit and is investigating her visits.

The market has continued to punish the uncertainty. Nvidia shares have fallen about 11 per cent this week and are on course for a sixth consecutive weekly loss, the longest such run since October 2012, with roughly $600 billion of market value erased since the scandal broke. The board's independent investigation, led by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, is still under way, and the Justice Department is now leading multiple investigations involving Alice Huang, with a congressional subpoena also a possibility. Megaspeed, the Singapore customer at the centre of the affair, is separately under federal investigation over allegations that it diverted advanced American chips to entities in China in violation of export controls.

Inside Nvidia, the mood is more divided than the share price suggests. A thread on r/technology reporting that thousands of employees had rallied for Huang's reinstatement on an internal forum, describing him as "broken and shattered" at the meeting where he surrendered the chief executive's job, drew more than 11,500 upvotes and 2,400 comments. What happens next turns on two dates: Nvidia reports third-quarter results on Tuesday 17 November, when interim chief executive Colette Kress faces investors for the first time, and the board's inquiry — and the question of whether any company or national security information was compromised — is still open, with no finding published.