"Nvidia Board to Probe Spying Case After CEO Admits Infidelity"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-11-08/nvidia-bo...

https://archive.is/VfRdl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin#Personal_life ("...after Brin had an extramarital affair with a Google Glass colleague")

Steve Jobs had a daughter he tried to pretend wasn't his,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs ("Jobs initially denied paternity for several years, which led to a legal case and various media reports...")

Andy Rubin was forced out for forcing blowjobs from many people at Google.

Eric Schmidt has always fucked/funded twenty year olds including Dario's own wife!!

> "Schmidt is married to Wendy Schmidt, whom he met in Berkley University [sic] in the late 1970s. The couple apparently has an open marriage, and Daily Mail described Schmidt’s private life “as colourful and complex as the ever-changing ‘Google doodle’ which pops up each time the search engine is launched.”"

https://www.ibtimes.com/eric-schmidts-love-life-has-seen-man...

https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3943024239344772

Would it be grounds for Zuckerberg to step down if he had an affair? Of course not.

Maybe the title should be changed?

Moreover, he's already been proven to be both unethical enough and stupid enough to cheat on his wife with a foreign agent. That's not the kind of person that the board would want to run a multi-billion dollar company.

if your country provides adequate legal protections, no you cannot be

presumption of innocence is general approach that morally must be applied everywhere

That's really not true, and I don't think you genuinely believe this or act according to this belief. Let's say you have kids, and another parent tells you "hey, that guy asked my kid to get in a car with him, you should be careful", do you respond with "innocent until proven guilty! I will do no such thing!"

No, you will update your priors and tell your kid to stay the fuck away from that guy.

  > and I don't think you ...  
  > No, you will  ..

In my long experience, as a parent and a grandparent, my first reaction when hearing another party running a third party down is to take any accusations with a grain of salt and first consider the motivations of the source of rumour, gossip, accusations.

A surprising number of people do like to talk shit about others <shrug>.

You realize that that's not at all what's happening here, right?

   Let's say you have kids, and another parent tells you "hey, that guy asked my kid to get in a car with him, you should be careful"

My observation over three decades is that not everybody with mud slung at them actually deserve that, sometimes it turns out that the accusers have some other beef and no filter on attempting to make others look bad.

Further, I can cite many examples of upstanding professional folks with zero accusations and solid reputations actually being revealed after many years to be actual child molesters. - Priests, Police, Sporting and Entertainment stars, Child Psychiatrists, etc.

But sure, you can rush to judgement on others as you choose, many do.

Nah. If a political candidate is accused by multiple credible sources of corruption, sexual assault, and embezzlement, would you withhold judgment until a court resolves the evidence (which will never happen) or just vote for someone else?

Even in countries with robust labor law, being bad at your job can lead to dismissal, and that strong deference about what constitutes being bad at your job is given to the employer.

It's a mostly anonymous public forum. The topics covered here aren't anywhere near "wealthy people hobbies" either. It's no porsche forum. It's not even a woodworking forum. Programming is an extremely affordable hobby.

> “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he said. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did.”

aigalaxiome: thanks for making me look like a jerk.

Nobody cares about affairs my brother, unless it was with a child.

If anything having an affair with an of-age consenting female would probably boost his stock in 2026.

The problem is he was close to a Chinese spy while advocating for increasing exports to China. Then, when public reports emerged about Alice Huang’s true identity, he tried to ignore it. As did the White House. All the way until electoral reality made it clear the cover-up was over.

He runs a graphics card firm. Surely he is allowed to do what he likes.

All of which distracts from the misinformation that Huang is not being investigated by his Board.

HN's title, as the top comment alleges, is extremely misleading as to what the board's goals are.

The top comment is correct to question the title, as it leads to more interesting HN comments than the CEO pugilism that so many bottom-barrel commentators participate in. Your response to the top comment is condescending and speculative instead of curious and informative. It seems to me like people are fulminating on both sides, and clearly Nvidia's board doesn't know the whole story either.

HN has a natural bias towards protecting the semiconductor president.

Why doesn’t it happen the other way around as much? Why don’t you see intelligence services using male agents to target powerful women in a similar way as much?

For politicians, it's quite rare they fall for it - men or women. I can't off the top of my head recall any American one in the last few decades.

For CEOs ... My question stands.

They targeted the CEO of the #1 GPU maker.

Patriarchal social structure makes this sort of an attack more common against men than women.

The audience who pays for porn is almost exclusively male for example. Male porn stars usually cater to a gay male audience even though straight women outnumber gay men by a huge margin.

If you look at literotica however, it flips and it's more of a female audience.

Or was the plan just to publicly humiliate him in hopes he'd get replaced by someone less capable?

Either he was going to admit it himself or the other side would have leaked it. Jensen ruined it for himself.

The plan was likely to leak this, and get Lori Huang to file a divorce to take 50% of Jensen's NVDA shares.

So it is all up to her now.

“U.S. officials last year concluded that Chinese citizen Alice Huang, then a top executive at Megaspeed International, was sharing information with the Chinese government while working with Nvidia to build data centers in Asia” [1].

It could be as simple as getting the CEO to override controls when signing a deal. It could be any of the perks one gets with physical access to a person and their devices.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/chinese-executive-close-to-nvidia-c...

Jensen is gonna be ok without you trolls. relax.

Suck information out of him with years of military academy training.

Just listen in on phone calls when you happen to be nearby.

The possibilities are endless.

Cute, but don't we already have a term for when lies are used to obtain sexual consent?

If a country successfully compromises a foreign asset in such a major way they'd lean on that as hard as they can, and that'd mean carefully planning various strategies to extract information from the asset.

The purpose is just to cultivate a relationship that can be exploited if the opportunity to do so presents itself.

they’re setting in motion a plan to get a divorce judge to order the selling of their shares before the bubble bursts

making an otherwise prohibited transaction to be legal

I don’t think that was totally planned during the affair, but the opportunity arised with the election and created a reason for Jensen to admit it so decisively after everyone knows she was a spy

Or as Charlie Munger put it: There are only three ways a smart person can go broke: Liquor, ladies, and leverage.“

This is not just a lapse of judgement from some random encounter on a business trip.

Surely a whole team would be dedicated to this operation with whatever resources needed since it will be a tiny investment for the possible payoff.

https://www.saybrook.edu/unbound/fame-is-a-dangerous-drug/ https://www.ourmental.health/stars-struggles/fame-as-an-addi... https://www.psychalive.org/fame-is-a-dangerous-drug-a-phenom...

The attack isn't coming from China. It is coming from the NY Times, FT, and presumably some employees of the CIA who are committing felonies.

This is just blatantly false.

He wasn't impeached for infidelity, he was impeached for lying under oath and obstruction of justice[0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton

Case and point, caught at a coldplay? cheating? Both fired? Lives destroyed?

As for the actor, really? Totally dif industries and people do care. Execs make a company look bad and when actors do too, cheating or not, they also get smacked.

You may not care but most people do and if a tiny spark hits Patrick, his legacy will be destroyed. There are many actors that the public is well aware of how gross they are and are hated for it regardless of ability.

What? Nobody involved with Epstein has gone to prison yet. One of them was even re-elected president. If I had to list the terrible things you could do when you're rich and not face consequences, trafficking and raping children would sadly be high up on the list.

It is not just having an affair with some random person and using poor judgement. It is a person what was crafted with you as a target. The whole thing is weaponized.

I have never cheated in a relationship and it is not something I would ever consider. It is easy to say this though knowing I am not going to be the target of an intelligence agency honey pot.

I'm no expert on having affairs, but isn't secrecy key to the whole thing? At least secrecy from the spouse.

If you have no strong desire for secrecy, then is it even an affair at that point? Either the spouse tacitly supports the extramarital fornication, or the relationship is already in tatters.

I believe the actual larger concern here is "in case Jensen didn't want this to become public (whether it was due to the divorce potential or whatever other reason; that's not relevant), what lengths would he be willing to go to keep it under wraps?".

If it gets confirmed that Jensen simply had an affair (without a "shared/did things he wasn't supposed to share/do" component), then it is a nothingburger (for anyone except him and his family). But until we have that confirmed, the US government is concerned about what critical info he might have shared/done to avoid being blackmailed by an agent acting on behalf of PRC.

The punishment for the cover-up often exceeds that for the crime.

We don’t have evidence around whether Huang is compromised with China. We do have compelling evidence that he tried to minimize fall-out, or potentially even sweep under the rug the problem, after finding out the true identity of this woman. If he did it with Trump, that’s corruption in service of a national-security compromise.

You're right. The problem is how he involved Nvidia in covering up for him.

Huang had an affair with a customer. He then had spokespeople say "the company that employed Ms. Huang, Megaspeed, was like any other regional customer" [1]. Just this Friday he had Nvidia lie for him: "Mr. Huang’s interactions with Ms. Huang were 'not unusual' and consistent with the kinds of meetings he has with any of Nvidia’s many customers" [2]. If that were the whole story this would be a massive breach of fiduciary duty.

Then we learn Ms. Huang was a Chinese spy. While Jensen was advocating for looser restrictions on selling AI chips to China. While Jensen was selling chips to Megaspeed that were being publicly investigated for re-shipping to China.

And he decides to come clean about this after control of the Congress flips in a way that guarantees his secrets will come out.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/politics/nvidia-china-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/06/us/politics/chinese-spy-a...

With regards to whether others in the company helped hide it, though, that's on them. Your boss can tell you to do something, you still have to agree and then actually choose to do it.

Yes, but they aren't investing him because he was "targetted" in the abstract. They're investigating him because the operation was extremely successful.

Dude was literally fucking a spy. As it were.

That's what I meant with my earlier comment. You wrote, "Does his board investigate him for his many egregious acts.", his demotion resulted from the Board's and the SEC's investigation.

Nvidia is doing an investigation of Jensen Huang being targeted in an intelligence operation; ie, an investigation of something that happened to him.

The title implies that Jensen Huang is the target of Nvidia's investigation.

The Board has launched an investigation of its CEO. This is how it’s being branded.

If you’re just coöperating with law enforcement, all assuredly on one team, you don’t launch a Board investigation, you let your CEO and an outside law firm handle it.

This is the exact wording. Nowhere do they say they are investigating the CEO. They are investigating an incident, and the CEO is part of it.

They don’t have to. If you know anything about how Boards work, you know what this means.

Boards don’t independently investigate anything with outside counsel as a regular matter of course. They have their CEO do it.

To round this out, CEOs routinely survive independent Board investigations. But it points to a diminishment of their power and trust.

What are you basing this on?

> It is completely routine

This is bullshit. In a majority of cases where the Board independently investigates a public-company CEO, the CEO gets removed [1].

[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/s...

The headline is indeed misleading, but so is your reinterpretation. It's not like the guy got his phone hacked.

It's worse than that - his mistress was a spy. This carries additional concerns since it opens the possibility of blackmail or extortion.

Usually those body parts you share are quite sensitive. That's the point.

They should be investigating two and only two things: if he knowingly lied to the Board and if he corruptly colluded to suppress the evidence of any government’s investigation into Alice Huang.

If the answer to both is no, he is a man who got duped and compromised America and Taiwan’s national security in the process. Still, probably, a great founder and CEO.

If the answer to either is yes, he should resign, personally indemnify the company against shareholder lawsuits, and switch focus to defending himself against criminal charges.

It can be mitigated. Lying cannot.

I guess it depends on what your definition of "was no big deal" is.

https://archive.is/ljGPF

No lie here.

absurd claim with zero evidence to support it. if there was any evidence that he actually compromised US national security he would already be gone. there isn't even any evidence that the woman is a Chinese asset. that is just speculation from whatever felons leaked their illegal surveillance of a US citizen's private life.

It's likely the story coming out like this is the best mitigation they can come up with, if AI is a national security interest of the US and he's granting a Chinese asset access to said interests. He's already conspiring with a foreign government against the interests of the US.

That he's extremely visible in his role is probably the only reason he's still around, until next week or whenever. The US doesn't vanish prominent CEOs like that, that's more a China thing.

The stock is massively up under his leadership. Firing Jensen would cause a massive loss of personal wealth to everyone on that Board. You don't even want to announce an investigation like this unless you're personally scared of getting implicated in a potential cover-up.

okay that's a joke in this administration right, the sitting American president is a threat to American national security and they made a woman who took private trips to Assad the Director of National Intelligence

The admin definitely stinks but Tulsi is one of the cleaner ones.

https://2017-2021.state.gov/amendments-to-the-terrorist-desi...

Seriously? Our intelligence community and corporate governance is just operating in perfect shape right now?

> there isn't even any evidence that the woman is a Chinese asset

Lol got it.

They are 1) covering their butts 2) placating external influences (probably state dept) 3) trying to find out what happened, but not have it be exposed 4) Avoiding risk of their Goose laying Golden Eggs at all costs.

The man is bringing them gazillions, they are not going to flip him over like a cheezeburger.

He's replacable but it comes with gigantic risk.

Board's tend to enable thing that fill their coffers with money and protect that over everything else.

"XXX is being investigated" implies there's some kind of possible wrongdoing here.

There might be some of that, but this is not likely the focus of the investigation.

They're investigating a potential influence operation involving the CEO, which may overlap with investigating some kind of culpability on his part.

It's an unfair editorial headline.

Do you seriously think NVidia wants to have more eyeballs on this scandal?

Source:

"initiating an independent investigation in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort."

They are investigating a situation where their CEO was the target of an Op - that's totally reasonable and doesn't remotely hint that he has done something wrong.

This is the right thing for the board to do: "We are investigating the situation because we have been informed that foreign actors may have targeted our staff".

This is Jensen Huang we are talking about. One of the most significantly influential people on earth, one of the planet’s most obvious espionage and blackmail targets, someone who both companies and nations will be spying on, and he is shagging a foreign national in secret.

Even if he has enlisted no company employees in his deception of his wife, this is remarkably negligent behaviour on a professional level. Just enormous.

Be serious: this is a huge deal and they are for sure looking at his conduct.

If this was any other high value C suite employee, Nvidia would fire them for negligence.

A Board independently investigating its CEO with outside counsel absolutely communicates they think he may have fucked up. You don't do that in the normal course of affairs.

They are not 'investigating the CEO' - they are investigating the situation.

In the press release they are investigating the fat that Jensen 'was the target of an operation'.

I think the misrepresentative nature of your comment proves my point.

What experience or reporting are you basing this on?

> They are not 'investigating the CEO' - they are investigating the situation

This is how all independent investigations by a Board are phrased. Because half the time, you don't fire the CEO. Would you say walking into a meeting where you have a 50% chance of being fired is a nothing burger?

> the misrepresentative nature of your comment proves my point

I think I'm pretty clearly representing what a lot of folks on this thread are misunderstanding, willfully or ignorantly, about the nature of this sort of a Board action.

There clearly is some "possible wrongdoing here", hence the investigation which has been launched if for no other purpose than to rule that out.

> They're investigating a potential influence operation involving the CEO

They're not investigating what we already know. The presence of a spy leaves no doubt that Huang was the target of an influence operation, the primary concern now are the details of Huang's conduct with respect to being targeted.

This is false and basically slander.

The statement from Nvidia indicates no such thing.

They are investigating the fact that Jensen was the target of a Foreign Intelligence Operation - literally those are the words.

The target of the government's investigation is her (Alice Huang) not him.

They are not 'investigating Jensen', it's an unfair misrepresentation.

New York Time (paywalled). https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/08/technology/nvidia-investi...

If this was primarily an investigation of the external actors, this would be talking about what law enforcement are doing.

The wording of the announcement is pretty neutral but I think it's clear what is within and without their bailiwick. The title is a much more informative description than "Statement from the board".

They don't need to, but of course they can. You hire investigators and an outside law firm to dig stuff up.

The board can't remove him from the board. That would take a shareholder vote, but Jensen also doesn't own enough shares to block a vote.

> While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board's inquiry will examine all available information.

> Jensen fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.

> The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team and will provide further updates as appropriate.

My interpretation of this is simply this is what you do when you are the board of a public company and the U.S. government has accused your CEO of being the target of espionage. You need to get the facts, if only to cover your own asses. If it turns out the accusations are hogwash, then you have facts of your own that you can release to counter whatever hogwash the government puts out. If it turns out your CEO committed a crime or otherwise did something improper, then you need to dismiss the CEO to prevent your complicity in the crime. If it turns out there holes in your security protocols around top executives, you need to plug those holes.

But until you have the facts, coming from an independent investigation, neither they nor us have any clue what the right response is.

No, it's not. In a majority of cases where a public-company Board independently investigates its CEO, the CEO gets removed [1]. (And they're all announced like this. If you're in that 40% where you don't remove the CEO, you don't want to have burned them.)

If the Board still unconditionally trusted Jensen, they'd have him hire outside counsel to conduct an independent investigation of NVIDIA's security apparatus.

[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/s...

It's very low for a CYA exercise.

Boards don't independently investigate their CEOs as a matter of routine or to cover their asses. That's what an independent investigation by outside counsel is for. The Board taking the reins on this is absolutely substantial to anyone who understands how corporate Boards work.

Another way to put this is "Do you feel comfortable shorting NVDA tomorrow morning based on this news?" Because if Huang is removed it's very likely they will face challenges finding and reacting the next big use-case for GPUs, not to mention capitalizing on AI (which already is seeming shaky for other reasons). If you're completely confident that this will result in his removal, it seems like there's easy money to be made here.

Personally I don't feel comfortable enough to put my money where my mouth is. I'd give it even odds, but even odds, to me, is not enough to say it'll go one way or another.

This is a silly way to read corporate governance. There finer levers for tuning up and down exposure than going long or shorting.

> If you're completely confident that this will result in his removal

Straw man. Nobody argued this. What's being argued is the top comment's implication that this is par for the course is bullshit. The Board is signaling a partial loss of confidence in their CEO. There is also substantial risk–though no assurance–that Jensen will step down.

Huang has done a fine job managing NVidia, but he's also the poster child for "better lucky than good."

It's not like he led NVidia out of dire straits to pivot into the cryptocurrency/blockchain, and then AI, bubbles. They were making hardware for computer graphics, and that just so happened to be the same foundational hardware for the two biggest technology bubbles of the 21st century, twice in a row.

I find it hard to believe NVidia's incredible success can be attributed exclusively to him. Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#History

If you look at the evolution of GPGPU computing, at least from an HPC perspective, CUDA is almost an obvious step. What’s perplexing is that AMD and Intel let it get so far ahead in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

It’s a bit like when you watch a fantastic FPS player play, they just always seem to be in the right place to catch the other guy off guard.

Huang didn’t know exactly what was coming - but he knew enough and managed to put NV into a position where it could quickly exploit whatever did emerge.

If I ever hit a home run in baseball, it would be blind luck. If I did it twice, nah, that would be incredibly unlikely, as I have zero talent at any ball sports.

Gates, Jobs, and Musk - each had a home run 3 times. That is so unlikely to be happenstance, ya gotta admit they had talent.

I image a large portion of those investigations start with the board or shareholders seriously displeased with the CEO and wanting to mount a case for removal.

Yes, 40% is pretty high in the abstract. But a 60% chance of getting removed is insanely high compared to the base rate for this concrete case! Before this news broke, what were the odds of Huang not being a CEO of Nvidia a year from now for any reason. I'd definitely have taken the under at 1%, and the over maybe at 0.1%?

Like, what other risks were on the horizon? Him getting bored or tired? Not that man. A terminal illness that was diagnosed too late to treat? That happens very rarely for the ultra rich with their access to infinite high quality health care. A freak accident, e.g. airplane crash? Possible, but the rates are <<1%. Targeted violence? Unlikely, Nvidia is too far removed to be hated that strongly by anyone. The board firing him for some other reason? Seems unlikely there's something even more serious in the wings. A hostile takeover or similar that leads to him being ousted? Logistically and financially impossible.

Going from so rare it's not worth planning for to even odds is a pretty darn big shift from a single event!

What I am extra curious about is why is Alice Huang not being rigorously investigated prior to or alongside all of this? If these allegations are true then what she did amounts to treason and a variety of other things. Failing to register as a foreign agent is another. She, at the very least, should be held by the US the same way we hold other foreign nationals charged with treason.

It is bad for business. Thats all. Him doing this is bad for Nvidia and bad for shareholders.

Cheating shareholders, esp large ones is a big no no since there are real consequences for CEOs engaging in such behaviour.

Using steroids in a professional bodybuilding is not cheating.

Someone selling secrets (for example) I would generally assume to be motivated by pure greed coupled with a fairly blatant disregard for both criminal and financial risk.

In contrast, I understand affairs to commonly be motivated by any number of things ranging from lust, various relationship problems, the thrill of something taboo, etc. The risk is also typically more social than financial and certainly not criminal in nature (at least in the west).

This is actually a pretty challenging standard, because the moment the CEO tries to gaslight their spouse/partner that it's not an affair, they are already bringing the company into a deception.

This might seem a silly place to draw the line, but consider what the escalations are — the CEO's PA being asked to mislead the spouse, inventing a meeting he was at, inventing an away trip, etc. etc.; they always mount up. There is no executive who has an affair who doesn't pretend they are at work, and there's no pretence that doesn't ultimately put an employee in a difficult position.

It's entirely reasonable for a board to say that if the CEO or the chairman is having an affair it is their business.

And this is before you even consider that the affair is likely to be an employee.

Now, if a CEO at Huang's level of geopolitical importance is having an affair, it's the government's business, because it makes him a blackmail and espionage target.

So yeah, it matters.

There are 100 different ways that the CEO falling victim to an espionage plot could impact the business.

> I, as a shareholder, do not care if the CEO is having an affair so long as the business is not affected. If you can establish the latter, then his personal conduct is between him and his partner.

If you read the second sentence then you and I agree. I care if the business is affected, I don't if it is not and then the rest of this is a personal matter that doesn't need to be a news story because it is gossip.

People care because the cheating puts him in a potentially compromising situation, especially in the context of corporate espionage. It's not that complicated.

I, as a shareholder, do not care if the CEO is having an affair so long as the business is not affected

The CEO had an extramarital affair with a major client/customer's executive staff. The business is affected, until it's not.

This is really naive. And I bet other people could do other questionable things that you'd consider to color their entire character and render them untrustworthy.

This isn't some hypothetical situation. The woman Huang admitted having an affair with was an executive at a data center company that bought billions of dollars of Nvidia chips and is suspected of having smuggled them to China.

She was allegedly recruited by China's Ministry of State Security to not only gather intelligence from Huang but to try to influence him to lobby for relaxed chip exports to China. We don't know how "influential" she was but pushing for less stringent export controls on Nvidia's chips is exactly what Huang has been doing.

Let's be clear, again: Huang has admitted an affair with a woman who was an executive at a company that bought billions of dollars of Nvidia chips that may have been smuggled to China, and it turns out she was allegedly a Chinese spy. Her apparent mission: gather intelligence and influence Huang, who has a close relationship with the US president, to lobby for relaxed chip exports to China. Which is what he has been doing.

Huang admitted the affair in an email to company employees, and the Nvidia board of directors has launched an investigation.

By any reasonable definition, the business is clearly affected.

So you going from the other country being fully dependent upon you (putting you at an economic/geopolitical edge) to urgently incentivizing them to make their own advances in the restricted industry, which may eventually surpass your own achievements. For instance the Wolf Amendment [1] is the reason China was never allowed on the 'international' ISS. [1] The idea is that they'd just steal all of our tech or something. So it simply led to the Chinese creating their own space station while the ISS continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight.

Same thing with chips. Come back to this post in ~15 years.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

You're missing the point, which is that once you've been compromised by a foreign intelligence service, it doesn't matter whether or not what you were lobbying for was logical or "right". What matters is that your relevant actions have been tainted and motivations can no longer be fully trusted, so you lose your credibility.

Nvidia's board is probably going to try to do what it can to look like it's taking this matter seriously without terminating Huang, but that's because there's no succession plan at Nvidia.

Huang's political clout is gone, and he may never get it back.

He has lost all credibility. He might remain as CEO of Nvidia, especially because the company doesn't have a succession plan, but this is going to be the end of his political cloud for a good long time, perhaps forever.

> ...which would also mean it was likely a bad play by China.

I don't really think this is the case. China will continue to smuggle chips and work on its own technology regardless.

The bottom line is China's MSS successfully compromised one of the world's most powerful executives and the price that will be paid is mostly on the US side. Given that this was disclosed to Trump a while back and he sat on it, don't be surprised if this becomes another big problem for Trump, who is in a horribly vulnerable spot right now after the midterms.

I don't agree this will harm the US in any way, shape, or fashion. It'll be used to justify even more stringent efforts at tech control and greater surveillance efforts of key technological players. All of this fits into US desires to a t. And while none of this will directly harm China, and may even paradoxically benefit them (for reasons mentioned previously), I can't imagine this is something they would directly aim for relative to a more favorable prior status quo.

Putting aside how strategically important Nvidia is as a company, and the access and influence Huang has on policymakers including the president of the US, he had an affair with an executive at a customer that has purchased billions of dollars of Nvidia chips and may have been smuggling them to China.

The minute you mix your infidelity with the business you run, it's no longer "personal".

> I don't agree this will harm the US in any way, shape, or fashion. It'll be used to justify even more stringent efforts at tech control and greater surveillance efforts of key technological players.

No country is a monolith. The US isn't. China isn't. This is a real mess for the Trump administration and his allies/sycophants, ammunition for Democrats, a potential boon for China hawks, a setback for China doves, etc.

As for "even more stringent efforts at tech control and greater surveillance efforts of key technological players", I don't think this is a simple subject but let's be honest: the oversize influence and power of tech companies today is probably something that does need oversight and regulation. Nothing about the billionaires running these companies suggests they are interested in what's best for average working-class Americans.

> ...I can't imagine this is something they would directly aim for relative to a more favorable prior status quo.

As I stated, China will continue to smuggle Nvidia chips and work on its own technology. This won't affect that. This woman is not the only honeypot in corporate America (or Washington DC) and the Chinese espionage apparatus is very well established and won't be dismantled by this one discovery.

As for the status quo, what status quo are you referring to? The one where China was under peak effective bilateral tariffs of ~150%?

China is biding its time and preparing for conflict, which it knows could very well be kinetic. It has been working very hard to sanctions-proof its supply chain and, more importantly, financial system. It is expanding its nuclear arsenal at the fastest rate globally. And so on.

The status quo I'm referring to is the one China continues to rapidly outpace the US by most of every imaginable metric and the US' growth is not only stuttering but continues to face growing internal (and external) issues. China has absolutely zero reason to rock the boat and has historically always played the long game.

"If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them in the morning, you've got no business being up here."

Jesse M. Unruh, a powerful former Speaker of the California State Assembly.

CEOs should be at least as resistant to influence as politicians.

Oh no, not again, I just cheated on my wife with a chinese spy, it just "happened to me"

Whether he abused his executive powers is a different problem.

That is different from the allegation a malicious actor targeted him.

Those aren’t mutually exclusive things.

They need to complete the investigation to decide whether he was an active participant.

They better check the firmware on his laptops.

Yes, Huang was targeted, as obviously he knew he would be. But "ie, an investigation of something that happened to him." Are you for real with that one? Perhaps Huang should try that with his wife: "You see honey, the fact that my penis ended up in the vagina of a Chinese spy was just something that happened to me."

Good grief.

I understand your portfolio is probably having a bad day soon, so you have an interest in playing this down, but let’s look at the facts.

He cheated on his wife for a longer time. That was no ONS, which does not just speak about the character of this man. If you cheat on the person you love for a year without letting her know, you have zero loyalty, which means also zero loyalty to your country.

It also potentially means he is fully compromised. There are also indicators for that.

If his mistress was a spy, and they had sex, the Chinese will have plenty of sex tapes with him doing god knows what weird billionaire sex stuff, to blackmail the guy into oblivion.

Spies are trained to compromise their targets, going to extreme measures if they have to. If you have to dress up as Snow White and get gangbanged by Jensen Huang and the other six dwarfs to get your country military-grade hardware, that’s an easy choice for any spy.

These people (billionaires, not huang specifically) used to pay someone to have sex with children on a remote, private island. That’s the kind of stuff they are into, because everything they need to do needs to be a special, special experience.

Giant yachts, private jets, flying into orbit with a rocket, Epstein Island, offering horse money to flight attendants for handjobs, fucking furniture (hey JD), and that’s just the stuff we know of for sure from the past few years. If you have so much money, the only joy you have is spending it on things barely anyone else can afford or experience.

I say there even is a chance he is already an enemy of the state.

He tried to take direct influence into the president’s decision about export regulation of chips that have the ability to put China, one of the key adversaries of the United States, into a more competitive position than they would be without those chips.

He himself says AI will be a key technology from military weapons systems to medicine. So basically he was willing and trying to hand the enemies of the United States the equivalent of a digital nuclear warhead.

The president and his family, being deeply involved financially in Huang’s company, according to the press, knew about this relationship and kept silent about it, because he knew this could potentially be extremely damaging to his family’s personal finances and his whole AI portfolio because Huang is the lead salesman of AI worldwide.

Which is something the CIA and Pentagon would immediately look into usually if they weren’t run by greedy idiots loyal to Trump and the dollar sign, and not to their country and its safety.

The only sane way to deal with this as Nvidia and also being a company in the interest of national security is to transition Huang out of an operating role into more of an ambassador or PR mascot role as discreetly as possible.

Do not give him access to technology he could sell to foreign adversaries for blowjobs and some strap-on action.

Do no longer allow him access to the president or senators, put him under 24/7 surveillance and then tell him you will give us anything for the past ten years, every financial transaction you made, all your contacts, where you stayed on your trips to Asia, whom you stayed with and who those people met, you will give us access to all of your private and business mails or you trade that leather jacket against an orange one in Guantanamo while listening 24/7 to Metallica.

The board would be more concerned with his conduct as a CEO and whether he's still best to lead the company.

Having an affair didn't happen to him, he presumably was fully aware of what he was doing there.

That's not accurate either, and it isn't that simple. Both him and the spy consciously made the decisions that led to this ordeal.

Title is not incorrect, at least by 2026 standards where engagement bait is accepted as long as it's not a complete fabrication.

What's with this passive language, as if he didn't have agency in cheating on his wife with a spy? Oopsie-daisy, it just happened TO him, like an unexpected rainstorm. Come on.

They do if they want to avoid looking like criminals in front of the Congress!

Them leaking this isn't surprising, they have to show the public after those midterm results that they're going to start holding the trumpian technocrats accountable.

Said no politician ever.

Polticians say what makes them popular, most Americans are not concerned about AI fueled gains in the markets atm. Politicians are already reversing course this week in droves. Have you paid attention to the last few days? Polticians are absolutely switching up on everything.

AI doesn't provide companies economic value either, other than through speculation on stock prices. Its just cost companies a lot of money and contributes nothing to actual revenue. You'll see a lot of people playing musical chairs around this issue, nobody wants to be the person who rides that sinking ship to the bottom.

The smart money in the markets also seem to recognize this. Theres no point in continuing to die on a hill for AI for the sake of stock market gains, when its clear that its not going to continue to fuel those gains for much longer.. The mean reversion has already begun, these AI stocks are down 50% this month...

Politicans will chase that trend in either direction, its not about if number goes up, you dont want to be the person screaming about how great something is after its clearly started to die/rejected by the public.

The AI gravy train is over.

Are you going to be using more or less AI in five or ten years time?

Tickets for the train are on sale.

People wake up and realize LLMs are a dead end and a year from now we plateau, and people start to understand its not worth paying for unless it cost the equivalent of a jetbrains subscription (yearly).

People are out here spending 50k a year on employee AI usage, those same employees are destprying the product, making their offerings mediocre compared to the competition, and off shoring their job to agents in such a way that its basically fraudulent.

Imagine spending 50k a year on tools ypur employees use to lose you a 100k, imagine soending 50k a year on tools that your employees use to work 2hrs a day and then watch youtube/pretend work the remainder od the day.

Llms are a massive net negative contribution to 90% of businesses.

Compromising Jensen like this, again if she was a spy, would be extremely difficult to pull off. If I were the CCP, I'd much rather use that leverage and access to try to extract information and have a spy close to him to push Nvidia's future decisions, whether he knows he's being manipulated or not at that point would come down to whether they believed they had sufficient leverage to keep him compliant.

With all that going on, Chinas actions will not face sanction. Keep in mind that the new friendship with Russia also has them aiding in the destruction of U.S. bases in the Middle East.

One CEO with a chinese spy and another CEO with an obvious Mossad asset.

Would be sad indeed.

AI will be fine.

I'm seeing this as a final moral failing of society. If Jensen gets through this, as he will, it means that character doesn't matter.

Character is admitting you stole from the cookie jar before mom and dad discover the cookie crumbs all over your hands, not after.

Jensen Huang has cultural ties to China and it made it that much easier for him to decide to have an affair with a Chinese woman.

Wasnt this family from Taiwan?

...guys?

Suck Boris’ Johnson.

Everything to gain and nothing to lose.

1. Too many overlook the plain economic explanation for Jensen to cooperate with China.

2. Too many assume this is bad for america.

3. There seems to be a presumption that he crossed a line, other than in his marriage.

Seems like the anti-AI movement is very hungry for a scalp to me.

Proverbs 16:18 "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall."

A little surprised the govt found out so late. They are supposed to be on top of high profile spy targets.

Does anyone believe the Chinese government really wants to "strictly limit" imports of Nvidia chips? Of course they want the chips. No one is buying the act. We are smart enough to see through China's attempt to portray these purchases as favors to the US. Except Nvidia, apparently--though playing along conveniently serves its business interests.

The fact that Trump was briefed a year ago and did not say a word. The fact that the story erupts in the weekend and not during a trade day.

We are missing big part of the story.

> The fact that Trump was briefed a year ago and did not say a word.

Easiest thing in the world to believe.

Why would Trump comment on it?

The very last thing Trump wants people to spend any time thinking about is wealthy and powerful people engaging in sexual impropriety.

I don’t see who wins by orchestrating the release these news. It was not a random leak.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/nvidia-ceo-...

https://www.facebook.com/Benzinga/posts/nvidia-ceo-jensen-hu...

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-says-us-export-co...

https://archive.ph/TkBwb (Nvidia chief Jensen Huang condemns US chip curbs on China as ‘a failure’)

But so far the only criminal act and threat to national security that has been proven to have occurred is the leaking of this information.

[1] - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-charged-conspiring-unla...

Going to repeat the words of another commenter here: "Crazy how naive HN is about foreign intelligence. "

Which makes it a far more stable counterparty than the United States.

The US is not friend of anyone. Just ask Denmark, Canada or Mexico. Or ask Nato countries, who are suppose to be official allies of the USA. Heck, ask kurds how their alliance with the USA and their sacrifices against ISIS went.

China is a way more of a fair and peaceful trading partner for the EU/World than the USA is.

Under the settlement:

- Chairmanship: Musk was required to resign and was prohibited from serving as chairman for three years.

- CEO position: He was allowed to remain CEO.

- Financial penalty: Musk personally paid a $20 million penalty, and Tesla paid another $20 million.

- Corporate oversight: Tesla was required to strengthen its board oversight and controls over Musk's public communications.

NVIDIA does not have a board chair but an independent lead director. Not sure how this incident will affect the future structure.

An "exposure" of affair could very well be the best coverup: "couldn't control my dick" is the ultimate plausible deniability. Timing also makes sense. Better open an investigation and get it closed while this Congress is still in power, as the next one is going to be more in bed in LLM companies than hardware.

If Jensen knew this Singapore company was really a Chinese front then he's complicit in evading US export controls which is jail time.

Sleeping with their executive causes lots of questions to be asked. Did he override company due diligence on export controls to China, etc.

At the very least it gives the US government a reason to look into nvidia's export controls processes which are probably severely lacking.

If you are one of the most powerful man on earth you are going to be the target of all the secret services of all powerful countries. Period.

It is their job. You take decisions that are worth billions, you influence people that take decisions that are worth billions, and affect their countries.

They are going to study you for years. Your personality type and that of the people around you. Your weaknesses. Your problems and that of your family.

They will employ the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world to create the perfect Honey trap.

Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.

It is not just a woman wanting to have sex with you. It will be the woman in your dreams.

The comment's posted date link is the url for the comment (thread):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418704

How is not theft?

There's no way that Nvidia pulled off the smuggling of chips for so long without US knowing and condoning, but this timing is weird.

Jensen isn't dumb, and in his position, nearly everyone he meets wants something from him; whether info, insight or a favor. Many of them dutifully report back to someone, whether an employer, government or just their social media friends, their impressions of which way Nvidia might be leaning, when the next product allocations might be released, etc. So it's unlikely Jensen ever fully trusted her, because it's been well over a decade since he could fully trust anyone not in his immediate family or an old friend. It's hard to appreciate just how much daily life is different for someone like Jensen but I once got a peek. For several years I was a skip level below the CEO of a high-profile F500 valley tech company. I've been part of the core team on the jet with the CEO during an Asia trip packed with keynotes, key customer/govt mtgs, media and analyst interviews. Everyone wants something from the CEO (including every employee on his team). And Jensen is CEO of the most valuable company on earth, so all that's on steroids. He's learned to be guarded to some extent with everyone outside his immediate family and old friends.

And I had a first-hand experience which makes me think Jensen suspected her almost immediately. Over a decade ago, back when I had a C-level title at a well-known F500 valley company. We had operations in China then and before going there the first time, I got a mandatory in-person briefing from actual FBI MiBs all about the incredibly subtle long-games that intelligence agencies run on foreign execs, not just in China but in other countries too. They had concrete case studies of real execs like me getting played (and not just by honeypots). It was very persuasive. On my trips to China I took all the common sense precautions they recommended but, sadly, I never detected Mata Hari making a play for me. :-) Probably not quite a big enough fish to warrant my own heat-seeking hottie.

BUT... a few years later, I did a fair number of high-profile keynote speeches at major business conferences. Unlike pure tech conferences, these often had audiences of a couple thousand people, big 50 foot screens, etc. The company started sending me to these because, unlike our CEO, I was unusually good at public speaking, despite actually being an introvert off-stage. After one such conference for C-level execs of public corps held in a major European capital, I ended up hanging out overnight before meetings elsewhere in Europe the next day. That evening there was an off-site banquet dinner and magic show. I went since I had no plans and dig magic. It was open seating and I grabbed seat at a table for 8 filling with random attendees, a VP from Unilever, a C-something from Airbus, etc. When I finished chatting with the Airbus guy about the A300, I turned to see the open seat next to me now had a rather tall and attractive early 30s blonde. She introduced herself as the marketing director for a St. Petersburg tech company, raved about how much she loved my keynote and proceeded to ask a lot of pretty insightful questions about it (note: this was before the Ukraine war).

Over dinner she continued to inquire about my work, background, etc and was overall quite charming. I didn't mind as I'm partial to blondes anyway and if someone who looks like Margot Robbie's sister has interesting questions about my area of expertise, who am I to complain? As dinner progressed to the show, she grew increasingly friendly, asking a long question just as we adjourned to the hotel buses, so ended up taking the seat next to mine. Back in the hotel lobby she asked if I wanted to grab a drink in the bar but I was already starting to think this level of attention was a bit much. Sure, I was 'stage famous' that day due to being the center of attention at the conference for an hour but... yeah, women as good looking as her aren't exactly common at 2,000 euro business conferences and the ones who are there tend to get a fair amount of unwanted attention, so they've learned how to project a professional demeanor that keeps things focused on business. I understand this dynamic from my wife - who's a tech executive with an MBA (at another valley company), a decade younger than me and also a quite attractive blonde. So, I very politely told my new Russian friend I had an early flight and was going upstairs to call my wife back in the US before my daughter left for school.

When I told my wife this amusing story, including my suspicion that my lovely new friend may have been a Russian honeypot on a random troll for relationships with C-level execs in global tech companies making widely used tech products - either for access, info or blackmail leverage - my wife dutifully disagreed insisting that I'm "totally hot enough to still 'pull'." I replied "Please never stop believing that... but when I first introduced you to my friends they all agreed you were 'way out of my league', so I'm under no illusions." :-)

Sadly, I'll never know the truth about my Soviet Sweetie (the nickname my wife kidded me with for weeks after). I'm sure she wasn't a high-end call girl, since you can't get into that conference without company creds and 2K euro. Bottom line, if I immediately suspected that maybe her interest wasn't purely in slammin' the sheets with my hot self", that thought surely occurred to Jensen because he's certainly had much more extensive counter-intelligence briefings and has had a far bigger target on his back every single day. Even if she wasn't a Chinese government spy, he knew part of her interest in their relationship was power, access and business advantage for her company. But Jensen bleeds green. I can totally imagine him privately telling a friend, "Bro, hot side-pussy's one thing, but business is business." Like many of Jensen's transactions lately, I'm pretty sure he got a lot more than he gave. :-)

> I wonder what the criteria are as a private (if publicly-traded) enterpise to merit the security training treatment.

We had a large and growing operation in China which included development, not just sales. Even before Trump 1, there were signs our operations there were being targeted by Chinese intelligence, so we already were in contact with US intelligence. I wasn't in that loop in detail, just aware it was happening and considered a serious problem (most employees never even heard about it). We did later wind down most development in China. While there were several reasons, that was a major (though publicized) one.

AFAICT, my briefing wasn't 'mandatory' from the govt. It was coordinated through our IT dept but was definitely considered high-priority from a company perspective. I hadn't heard about the mtg request initially, probably because my admin team was doing the usual schedule filtering and prioritization. But I got a direct call from the IT VP on my cell in the evening to bring it to my attention so I could get it prioritized to happen before I went to China.

The company isn't FAANG / Mag 7 but definitely in the next tier down. You've almost certainly used more than one of the products and several of the technologies. With user bases in the tens of millions, we were definitely a top tier target and I had a C-level title even though I never had (or would want) access to root keys or anything like that.

In big public companies there's a group of a few dozen execs who have special stock trading restrictions above employees, managers and even directors and I was in that group, so I was used to getting some special extra security precautions. Stuff like IT coming to my house to install a special hardware VPN gateway (back before they were more commonplace). And those precautions were just insider trading and general IP concerns. So the call about the FBI mtg wasn't totally out of the blue.

> American technical economy as a valuable asset to the state

My sense is it was really from that kind of mindset. They consider securing American technological and economic leadership a crucial mission. In general, I think the public under-appreciates just are large a priority the 'economic mission' is for intelligence agencies of all countries - and the US was probably late to scaling that game behind the Russians, Chinese and even some European allies.

While it's fun to hear about the cool 'state secret' and 'spy vs spy' stuff like stealing weapons system designs, a lot of intelligence is pretty boring stuff about economic competitiveness and advantage in non-defense related industries like finance, consumer packaged goods, heavy machinery etc.

The Saudis tried to blackmail Bezos with his affair similarly over WaPo’s coverage of the Khasshogi assassination

What's interesting to me is how the chineese got so close to him, because this is all about knowing exactly his soft spots and how he kicks when someone tickles him in different ways. No pun intended.

On a spy level this is great story.

On a personal level, I hope the chineese spy will come forward and tell us if Jensen also sleeps with that leather jacket.