NVIDIA BOARD OPENS A SPY INVESTIGATION INTO CEO JENSEN HUANG

Nvidia's board did two incompatible things in one Sunday statement. It announced an independent investigation into reports that its founder and CEO was the target of a foreign intelligence effort, and it announced that it "has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team." Both sentences, same press release, no visible shame. The reason the probe exists is Jensen Huang's own memo to staff, where he admitted an affair with Alice Huang, no relation, a former executive at Nvidia customer Megaspeed. "I owe my family and all of you an apology," he wrote. U.S. intelligence believes China's Ministry of State Security recruited her to gather information on him, according to New York Times and Financial Times reporting on a classified memo that circulated through the administration last spring. None of it is proven. The board's statement skipped the affair entirely, which is a bold editorial choice when your CEO already confessed it in writing. Megaspeed is a Singapore data center outfit spun out of a Chinese gaming company in 2023, lined up to buy roughly $2 billion of Nvidia gear, renting compute to Alibaba. Last month Jensen told Bloomberg the relationship was "related to Megaspeed, and it was all completely normal and not unusual." Sunday's memo revised that. Congress smells blood from both directions. House Republicans want answers by November 18. Democrats want testimony and want to know what the Trump administration knew, since Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the memo.

Why you should give a shit: One company makes the chips the entire AI boom runs on, which means "did our CEO get worked by a foreign service" is now a supply chain question, and the board is investigating it with the same breath it used to say everything's fine.