Jensen Huang fell for lying to Nvidia’s lawyer, Times says; Korea’s etnews reports investors pressing for his return

Full analysis

What happened Why it matters How each country tells it Where accounts conflict Room for disagreement Our assessment Sources and evidence

What happened

Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, is no longer its chief executive. He resigned on Thursday morning, November 12, less than a day after a New York Times reporter called him about a second extramarital affair. The board named chief financial officer Colette Kress interim CEO, according to the Times account carried by Singapore’s Business Times. TIB reported on November 12 that Nvidia’s announcement gave no reason. The Times reconstruction, which it says draws on a year of reporting and more than 100 people, supplies one: Huang misled his own general counsel.

The secret concerned Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese executive who is no relation to him. The Daily Beast, relaying Bloomberg, reports that she ran the data center firm Megaspeed until November 2023. The company was then sold to a Singapore shell company, became an official Nvidia partner and has since imported more than $4.6 billion in Nvidia chips, a figure more than a thousand times its 2023 cash balance. The Times uses different boundaries. It reports more than $2 billion of Nvidia technology bought by Megaspeed in a single year, and at least $4.8 billion of equipment containing Nvidia chips bought by a Malaysian sister company between June 2024 and February 2026, according to ImportGenius trade records. These figures cover different entities and periods, so they should not be added together. US officials suspected Megaspeed of funneling chips to China. Nvidia says it investigated those claims and debunked them.

When the Times first asked about the relationship in September 2025, Huang did not deny knowing her, but he objected to the suggestion they were close. His daughter Madison, who served as his chief of staff, pressed Nvidia’s communications team to push back, backed by the crisis firm Heller. For 13 months the line held: it was a business relationship. Etnews, citing Reuters, reports that Huang twice described her as an "ordinary customer relationship," last fall and again this October, to general counsel Tim Teter and chief marketing officer Liz Wagenfeld. After the Times’s October 2025 Megaspeed story, Nvidia stopped listing Singapore in its geographic sales disclosures. Singapore had accounted for 22 percent of quarterly sales, or $10 billion.

According to the Times, Trump was briefed roughly a year ago that US agencies had determined Alice Huang was passing information to Chinese intelligence, and he chose not to act. The Daily Beast dates that identification to October 2025. Officials never gave Huang a defensive briefing. This year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio circulated a classified memo describing her contacts with the Ministry of State Security. Huang was left off the CEO list for Trump’s May summit in Beijing, but Trump then invited him aboard at a refueling stop in Alaska, after Rubio had briefed the president on the intelligence while en route. China rejects the espionage claims, the Times reports, and Alice Huang has not commented.

The end came quickly. On November 6 the Times reported on Rubio’s memo, and that night the Financial Times reported that the US government believed the relationship was romantic. Teter went to Huang’s home in Woodside, California, where Huang confessed. The board publicly expressed "full confidence" in him. Etnews reports that it hired the law firm Wachtell on November 10 to investigate. Huang apologized to staff, writing, "I was unfaithful to my wife." Privately, he assured Teter there were no other infidelities. Trump called him on Tuesday with one word of advice: fight. The Times then asked about Kimberly Powell, 48, who led Nvidia’s health division and reported directly to Huang. "I don’t think you should be talking to me directly," Huang told the reporter, and hung up. The 10-member board met remotely, and Huang resigned the next morning.

Etnews, citing CNBC, reports that Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management wrote to the board asking it not to rush a successor and to keep Huang’s return among its options. Citing TechCrunch, etnews reports that a "Stand with Jensen" petition has drawn roughly 80,000 to more than 110,000 signatures, including those of Elon Musk, Tim Sweeney and Garry Tan. China Tech News headlined a similar investor push.

Why it matters

The scandal has reopened the question of how US chips reach China. Huang was the leading advocate for selling them there. In December 2025 he agreed to give the US government a 25 percent cut of H200 sales to China. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that his department had pushed Commerce for months to stem the flow of technology. The Times reports that officials are now reconsidering AI export rules. The Daily Beast puts Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a close friend of Huang’s, at the center, citing his department’s failure to blacklist Megaspeed and his January remark that he had promised Huang "really easy access to the president." Etnews reports that Congress will call both Huang and Lutnick in early December. It also reports a push to attach the MATCH Act, which would align allied chip-equipment export controls with US rules, to the defense authorization bill. That would land directly on Korean equipment suppliers.

Taiwan stands to lose more than a celebrity. The Taipei Times reports that Huang planned to invest about $150 billion a year in Taiwan. It reports that the Mainland Affairs Council says the government must check its export controls for loopholes, and that the interior minister has revoked Alice Huang’s entry permit.

How each country tells it

• 🇹🇼
  Taipei Times · Taiwan · original reporting

  Treats Huang’s exit as a national loss for Taiwan. It quotes analysts who call him the embodiment of how Taiwanese wish to be seen, and a Sercomm founder who warns that supplier ties built over ‘trillion-dollar dinners’ ‘will have to be built again.’
• 🇰🇷
  Electronic Times (etnews) · South Korea · carries Reuters

  Frames the aftermath as unsettled: an accountability fight over whether Nvidia executives knew of the affair and played it down, set against a campaign by investors and Silicon Valley figures to bring Huang back.
• 🇺🇸
  The Daily Beast · United States · carries Bloomberg

  Leads with Reuters photos of Huang embracing Alice Huang at Computex on June 2, 2024, and turns the story toward the Trump administration, especially Lutnick’s failure to blacklist Megaspeed.
• 🇸🇬
  The Business Times · Singapore · wire copy

  A long narrative drawn from more than 100 sources on how Huang hid the affair for 13 months. It argues he fell because he lied: he assured general counsel Tim Teter there were no other infidelities, just days before the Powell affair surfaced.
• 🌐
  China Tech News · China (English-language site)

  Judging from its headline only, it leads with investors urging Nvidia’s board to consider Huang’s return and with Musk saying Nvidia will lose critical deals without its founder.

Where accounts conflict

The accounts differ on how many affairs there were. The Daily Beast reports that Huang allegedly had two further affairs, both with Nvidia employees, without saying where that claim comes from. The Times account, which is based on named-document reporting and dozens of interviews, identifies only one, with Powell. The difference matters: one undisclosed relationship with a subordinate is a code-of-conduct breach, while two would suggest a pattern the board would have had to weigh.

Room for disagreement

The case for Huang’s return rests on dependence, and the reporting supports it. Musk wrote on X that much of Nvidia’s supply chain runs on handshakes with Huang rather than contracts. Paul Wang, founder of Sercomm, told the Taipei Times that the relationships with Taiwanese suppliers "will have to be built again." The board voiced full confidence in Huang only days before he resigned. The president urged him to fight, and his largest investors are now asking in writing that the door stay open.