Ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang carried a secret for more than a year. It led to his downfall

Detailed summary

Revelations about Huang have set off a cascade of events that have reverberated from Silicon Valley to Washington to Beijing

Revelations about Huang have set off a cascade of events that have reverberated from Silicon Valley to Washington to Beijing

It was September 2025, and The New York Times had just called his company about a Singaporean data centre firm called Megaspeed that had been led by a Chinese woman named Alice Huang, or Huang Le. The Times was reporting that Jensen Huang, CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia, had a close relationship with her.

Jensen Huang, who Nvidia employees say could have a volcanic temper, wanted to know what the Times was insinuating. Though he didn’t deny that he knew the woman, he was bothered by the suggestion that they might be close, people familiar with the discussion said.

Nvidia mounted an aggressive defence. Madison Huang, Jensen Huang’s daughter who acted as her father’s chief of staff, pressed the company’s communications team to push back forcefully. They also had reinforcements, a crisis communications firm called Heller.

They insisted that Jensen Huang and the woman from Megaspeed just had a business relationship.

Over the next 13 months, Huang stuck with his story, even after the Times reported in October that the US had gathered intelligence showing that Alice Huang was secretly working with China’s top spy agency.

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But this month, facing new revelations about the relationship, Jensen Huang finally came clean to Nvidia’s general counsel. He had been having an affair with the woman, after all, said the people familiar with the discussions.

The relationship with the Megaspeed executive wasn’t Huang’s only secret.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Business Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.