NVIDIA's board of directors announced on Sunday that an independent investigation will be launched after CEO Jensen Huang admitted to being unfaithful to his wife to his employees. However, this is not just another case of an CEO embroiled in a scandal of extramarital affairs. The person involved with Jensen Huang is Megaspeed, a senior executive at Alice Huang. American officials believe she is a Chinese spy who has transmitted information back to Beijing. In short, the implications of this matter extend far beyond NVIDIA itself, as many technology and financial partners rely on NVIDIA's core position in the booming AI economy. Jensen Huang recently said in an interview with Bloomberg, "I am responsible for the entire industry."

At the end of October, a spokesman for China's embassy in Washington dismissed these accusations as "baseless slander and defamation," and to date, no one has been prosecuted. However, it is reported that U.S. intelligence officials expressed their concerns to President Donald Trump a year ago. Some unnamed senior officials within the Trump administration told The New York Times that they doubted it was possible for Jensen Huang to be unaware for such a long time of his role in collecting intelligence for China. The New York Times also reported that when Trump first learned of the situation, officials did not believe Jensen Huang was aware of it, and it is currently unclear whether their judgment has changed. Meanwhile, the board of directors stated that there are no signs of any leakage of national security or company secrets, and Jensen Huang will continue to hold his position.

The question now is whether Jensen Huang will be able to overcome this challenge. To speculate about what might happen next, this editor interviewed on Sunday Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Senior Associate Dean of Leadership Studies at Yale School of Management and the founder of the Executive Leadership Institute. The institute once invited Jensen Huang to participate in its CEO summit. Sonnenfeld said he likes Jensen Huang and believes there is still room for improvement in Jensen Huang's career, but he gave a probability of “about fifty-fifty.” He also raised several other points worth considering.

Firstly, there is the damage to reputation. Sonnenfeld pointed out that prior to this incident, Jensen Huang was "respected and trusted by everyone in the tech community." However, he described this event as an "extremely bad judgment." Even if Jensen Huang was simply naive, he said, "Any employee at NVIDIA other than him would be fired due to this incident," and such recklessness in itself means "an irreparable loss of trust."

Sonnenfeld believes that if Jensen Huang can prove that he has been deceived, then his lifeline might be what social psychology refers to as "exceptional credit" ( idiosyncrasy credits ). This term was coined by social psychologist Edwin Hollander, who proposed in a 1958 paper that people can gain some leeway within a group by demonstrating their abilities and adhering to group rules. Since co-founding NVIDIA in 1993, Jensen Huang has been accumulating this leeway. However, when a mistake appears to be for personal gain or violates the core norms of the group, all of this goodwill could be exhausted. The group referred to here includes NVIDIA's board of directors, approximately 42,000 employees subject to security regulations, and, in a broader sense, the U.S. government, which has imposed export restrictions on the company.

We also discussed precedents, but it turns out that there are hardly any truly comparable cases. Sonnenfeld pointed out that executives who manage to survive a personal scandal usually get a chance to start over at another company. The former HP CEO Mark Hurd is one such example. Between 2005 and 2010, he led HP to the top of the industry in terms of revenue, but later was forced to resign for submitting fraudulent expense reports and covering up a personal relationship with a contractor. A month later, Oracle hired him. Jensen Huang, however, had nowhere else to go, as NVIDIA is his current company.

As for NVIDIA's internal succession lineup, in fact, such a thing does not exist. Although companies of NVIDIA's scale and importance usually have a hierarchical structure, Jensen Huang has always tried to keep his organization as flat as possible. According to him, he has about 60 direct subordinates. This structure makes it difficult for outsiders to determine who might succeed him from within the company (even though both of his children work at NVIDIA, which sometimes leads to speculation about his succession). However, this will not stop speculation worldwide in the coming weeks. Sonnenfeld says that boards of directors in crisis often turn to external sources to find a "savior" solution, and one candidate he mentions is former Google employee CEO Eric Schmidt.

NVIDIA is located at the heart of a vast and complex circular financing network, which makes this situation particularly tricky. NVIDIA is not only the largest chip supplier driving the AI craze but also, to a large extent, the “bank” behind this wave of construction. In addition to holding shares in hundreds of small startups, NVIDIA has also invested in OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, CoreWeave, and Nebius. In August, NVIDIA also signed preliminary agreements with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR with the goal of mobilizing over $500 billion in funds in the future, and Jensen Huang stated that NVIDIA could provide support for up to a quarter of this amount. This move is widely interpreted as a way to diversify risks. However, a crisis in the leadership at the center often turns a single misstep into a chain reaction.

So, what might NVIDIA's board of directors be doing at this moment? Sonnenfeld points out that Jensen Huang's previous advocacy for selling advanced chips to China has already caused concern among many people. Dario Amodei – whose company has also received investment from NVIDIA – expressed many views on selling chips to China in Davos in January this year, comparing it to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”.

Now, the independent members of the board of directors—that is, everyone except Jensen Huang—must clarify which technologies have flowed to China, and if so, through what channels. This includes gaining a better understanding of the relationship between NVIDIA and Megaspeed. In October 2025, The New York Times reported that this Singapore-based cloud company originated from a Chinese gaming business and later became NVIDIA's largest buyer in Southeast Asia, purchasing approximately $2 billion worth of NVIDIA chips. This has raised broader questions: whether it is helping China circumvent U.S. export restrictions by re-exporting the chips to China or renting them out to Chinese customers for use. (After The New York Times' report, a NVIDIA spokesperson told The Hill that these allegations "were thoroughly investigated last year and proven to be false.")

Meanwhile, NVIDIA stated on Sunday that Jensen Huang will continue to manage the company. Even for a person who has spent a great deal of time promoting NVIDIA around the world, this will still be a daunting task. First of all, the chairmen of three House committees hope to hold a closed-door briefing with Jensen Huang on November 18th. NVIDIA will also release its latest financial report on November 17th. It is expected that even if Jensen Huang retains his position, he will have to cede some of the day-to-day decision-making powers.

There is only one thing that is certain for now: Jensen Huang does not hold those super-voting shares that would solidify his power at NVIDIA. Sonnenfeld often advocates for a dual-share structure that grants founders greater power, arguing that Jensen Huang's success without such a structure is in itself the best refutation of this viewpoint. However, if Jensen Huang did possess such a structure, Sonnenfeld continues, it would be even more difficult to remove him.

This incident may be remembered as a critical moment in how the tech industry protects its own secrets. Sonnenfeld believes that compared to defense contractors, which are subject to security clearance systems, the tech industry is “too lenient.” Last month, the arrest of an engineer from OpenAI also pointed to the same issue. The engineer was accused of hiding recording devices behind the televisions in executive meeting rooms. Although OpenAI stated that there were no signs that model weights, source code, or customer data were accessed, this case highlights how vulnerable tech companies can be when dealing with people who have close access to their core information.

Jensen Huang is very likely to come out of this investigation unscathed in the end (Sonnenfeld hopes that the board of directors will determine that he did not intentionally help anyone). The greater test lies with NVIDIA's employees, customers, and partners, as well as millions of Americans who are indirectly affected and have their NVIDIA holdings in 401(k) retirement accounts. They will ultimately have to decide whether an economy that relies to a large extent on Jensen Huang's judgment (AI) is still sound.