Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admits affair with executive US identified as Chinese spy

Huang, 63, revealed the affair in a message to Nvidia employees, apologising to his wife and their two children, both of whom work at Nvidia, the sources reported. The crisis deepened on Thursday amid allegations of a second affair and reports the company’s board is considering ousting its chief executive and founder. China has rejected the espionage claims, and the Chinese executive accused of spying, Alice Huang, has not responded to requests for comment. Nvidia declined to comment, and Lori Huang did not respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia’s role as the main supplier of chips for the artificial intelligence industry makes Huang a central figure in a sector that has come to dominate the stock market. This week’s news also had implications for US national security and the economy, the sources said.

Lori Huang, 64, has been by Jensen Huang’s side for more than 40 years as he built his fledgling chip start-up into one of the world’s most valuable companies, the sources reported. Unlike her husband, whose net worth has soared to nearly $US150 billion, Lori Huang stayed far from the spotlight. She is president of the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, which had $US9 billion in assets as of 2024, including $US6 billion in fresh funding that year. Financial filings show that of Jensen Huang’s 922 million Nvidia shares, more than half belong to a trust where the couple are co-trustees. She is also the sole controller of a trust that owns about $US5 billion worth of Nvidia shares.

The couple met as engineering students at Oregon State University in the early 1980s, where Jensen Huang was her lab partner, the sources said. After graduating and marrying, they moved to Silicon Valley to work as microchip designers. Lori Huang gave up her career to raise their children just before he co-founded Nvidia in 1993. Jensen Huang has frequently spoken warmly of his wife in interviews over the years. In a 2023 profile in The New Yorker, he said Lori Huang’s salary at Silicon Graphics was higher than his at LSI Logic. On a podcast in May, he recalled that he missed their children’s karate tournaments while building the company and that Lori never complained, saying, “That’s the gift that she gave me.”

Lori Huang joined a small group of tech titan spouses who have had to grapple with public infidelity, including MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Melinda French Gates, ex-wife of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the sources reported. George Rush, who formerly co-authored a gossip column at The New York Daily News, was quoted as saying Lori Huang is “unusually modest by the standards of billionaire couples”. Rush said this added further intrigue to the affair’s political and economic consequences: “Bezos and Gates didn’t have this dynamic, where the relationship could move markets and have this global fallout”.

Jensen Huang ended his message to Nvidia employees about the affair with a request: “My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.”