To me this is not about $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with Chinese executive Alice Huang. It’s about whet…

To me this is not about $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with Chinese executive Alice Huang. It’s about whether he misled NVDA’s board about his involvement and potential conflict of interest with a major and geopolitically sensitive customer? And did he use his stature as NVDA’s CEO to circumvent the U.S. ban on selling chips to China?

There’s no question that Jensen Huang is one of the greatest CEOs of our time, and $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) is worth far more with him than without him. When it comes to the board of directors’ decision to remove or not remove him to preserve the long term value of the firm, that is unfortunately not relevant.

NVDA’s Nvidia’s Dilemma: Will Jensen Huang Remain as CEO of $NVIDIA(NVDA.US)? Should He?

Financial Times - 11/10/2026

There is a lot the world is still to discover about the affair Huang has admitted to having. US officials suspect him of a relationship with Alice Huang, who they believe was spying for China. She was a Chinese executive at Megaspeed International. The Singapore-based cloud computing provider is a customer of Nvidia and, according to Megaspeed’s company documents, has been the recipient of loans from the US chip group in 2024.

It has also been the subject of a US investigation over concerns it was smuggling Nvidia’s chips into China. The company has denied allegations of any illicit activity involving chips.

Given just these basic facts, and given the acute geopolitical sensitivity of the advanced semiconductor industry, we know for certain that Mr Huang has demonstrated bad judgment on an epic scale — even before the allegation that Ms Huang is a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security is considered. What happens next is very important for Nvidia’s investors, customers and competitors. It is also a referendum on the accountability of leaders of the megacap tech companies whose influence on the world stage is greater than that of most nations.

Here are the key facts we know:

Nvidia is the indispensable supplier and, increasingly, financier of the infrastructure powering the entire AI boom;


Huang is the boom’s chief salesperson and its most influential figure who is not running one of the AI labs;
Huang is a trusted adviser to Donald Trump on the US-China AI race and AI regulation;


US intelligence has believed for months that Huang had a romantic relationship with Alice Huang.

Here’s some of what we don’t know:

Did Huang mislead Nvidia’s board? Did he disclose that he had a conflict of interest with a major and geopolitically sensitive customer?
Did the board know US intelligence suspected Alice Huang of being linked to Chinese intelligence?


Did the company know about the affair when it told The New York Times two weeks ago that the relationship was “not unusual or unexpected” for the executive of an important commercial partner?


How strong is the evidence that has led US intelligence to conclude that Alice Huang is a spy?

We’ll leave the political story to others. Our turf is whether Huang can continue in his role and what that means for investors.

The argument that he should go starts with his failure of judgment. The problem is not infidelity, but rather gross disregard for security and political risk at a pivotal moment for the industry. On our count, there are barely a handful of CEOs who could make such disclosures and still be in post the next day — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and, perhaps soon, Dario Amodei. One cannot help but wonder whether the identification of Jensen Huang with his company, and his aura of indispensability, contributed to the collapse of his judgment.

Certainly it highlights the risks associated with imperial CEOs. Allowing Huang to remain in his job, even with a more rigorous management and governance structure around him, compounds the original sin — impunity.