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By Lars Hanson
Associate News Editor
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Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with a second Nvidia employee, Reuters reported Thursday, citing two people familiar with the matter. It is the third extramarital relationship attributed to the 63-year-old, and it emerged only after Nvidia’s board had accepted his resignation from the company he had led for 33 years.
Reuters did not name the woman or describe her role at Nvidia, and said its attempts to reach her were unsuccessful. Nvidia declined to comment. Jensen Huang and a representative for the company's board did not respond to the news agency's requests. Newsweek has reached out to Nvidia for comment.
The disclosure lands on a figure who, until days ago, seemed less a chief executive than the artificial intelligence economy’s indispensable man. On Thursday morning, Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang had resigned as president, CEO and director, effective immediately. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while keeping her finance role, and longtime director Harvey C. Jones becomes the board's first-ever chair. The board said it would consider internal and external candidates for the permanent post.
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A Week of Unraveling
From confession to exit, the collapse took less than a week.
On Sunday, Jensen Huang sent employees a letter confessing he had been unfaithful to his wife. "Leading Nvidia is the privilege of my life," he wrote. "I have fallen short of that responsibility." He did not say with whom. The New York Times had already reported that U.S. intelligence officials suspected Alice Huang—a Chinese citizen, former television reporter and onetime executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, one of Nvidia's largest customers in Southeast Asia—was gathering information for Beijing and had grown close to him. The two are not related.
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That same day, Nvidia's board opened an independent investigation into reports that Jensen Huang had been "the target of a foreign intelligence effort," and declared its "confidence in Jensen and his leadership team." Company spokesperson John Rizzo was blunter: "Today's news will not slow Nvidia."
The confidence lasted days. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to push Jensen Huang out over two affairs. The second, the Times reported, citing five people who had worked at Nvidia, involved Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, who reported directly to him. Two sources told the paper the pair had been filmed being affectionate at a San Jose, California, hotel during the company's developer conference in March; three people briefed on the episode said Jensen Huang's security detail isolated the bystander who recorded it and offered a nondisclosure agreement. The Times said it had not seen the footage. When the paper called, Jensen Huang said, "I don't think you should be talking to me directly," and hung up. Powell did not respond to the Times. Both are married to other people.
The board accepted his resignation that night, according to a regulatory filing, and Nvidia announced it Thursday morning. The announcement did not address either relationship. It thanked Jensen Huang for his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry." Kress said she was "committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years."
The Market Blinks
Nvidia shares plunged 14 percent at the opening bell as investors confronted a widening thicket of lawsuits and investigations, and a market that leans heavily on a handful of tech giants. The stock quickly recovered half that loss and closed down 4.3 percent, extending a slide that had already erased 27 percent of its value from an October record through Wednesday. Nvidia reports quarterly earnings Tuesday—its first without its founder at the helm. The company also faces a shareholder class action alleging that it and Jensen Huang inflated the share price by failing to disclose the affair.
The founding story is Silicon Valley scripture: In 1993, Jensen Huang and two fellow engineers met at a Denny's in San Jose with an idea for a faster video-game graphics chip. What grew from that meeting became the engine of the AI boom, a multitrillion-dollar company jostling with Apple and Microsoft atop the S&P 500. Jensen Huang, whose fortune Forbes estimates at more than $150 billion, remains its largest individual shareholder. He had also pressed Washington to loosen limits on chip sales to China.
The Question Beneath the Scandal
That lobbying is how a story about infidelity became a matter of national security.
Megaspeed became Nvidia's largest Southeast Asian customer, buying $4.6 billion in advanced processors from 2023 to 2025, according to a September report by the research group C4ADS, which described an alleged operation to route the chips to blacklisted Chinese end users. Megaspeed has denied the allegations. Singapore authorities seized Alice Huang's passport after questioning her last year. They stopped short of finding a crime, but suspected she had given "inaccurate information" about her role, and barred her from returning. Taiwan's interior minister told lawmakers her right to enter had been revoked indefinitely. Beijing has called the spy allegation "nothing but smears against China."
Much remains unproven. Newsweek could not independently verify several details of Alice Huang’s background. In a post titled “Espionage, AI and the Risks of Strategic Overreaction,” William Hannas and Huey Meei-Chang of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology argued that any response must be grounded in evidence. And on Sunday, before the second and third relationships were reported, Nvidia’s board said it had “no reason to believe” that national security or company secrets had been compromised.
Even inside the U.S. government, the case against Alice Huang is not settled. Multiple sources told CNN on Thursday that the intelligence gathered so far does not prove she was spying for Beijing, and that officials disagree over how strong the evidence is that China’s Ministry of State Security recruited her. Yet the worry has not gone away. One person familiar with the investigation told the network that U.S. intelligence obtained communications suggesting someone with close access to Jensen Huang and Nvidia was the source of information that surfaced in Chinese intelligence channels. And a former Commerce Department official offered a sharper observation: Given Jensen Huang’s public push to sell more chips to China, “an intelligence operation wasn’t necessary to achieve that result.”
Washington Is Not Finished
President Donald Trump, who has hosted Jensen Huang at the White House and aboard Air Force One, said Monday that the executive told him he “had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy.” On Thursday, Trump said Jensen Huang had “done a fantastic job.” Asked by Stephen A. Smith in an interview for Smith’s Straight Shooter whether Jensen Huang should have stepped down, Trump said: “Was the woman a spy? I don’t know if that has been determined yet, but if the woman was a spy, yes; if the woman was not a spy, perhaps it would be different.”
Lawmakers were less forgiving. Representative John Moolenaar, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on China, pointedly called it a "firing" and "an unfortunate end that could have been avoided." Nvidia, he said, "must now change its corporate practices and appoint leadership that makes national security its top priority."
Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, said the resignation "does not absolve" Jensen Huang, other executives or the company of responsibility "for putting our national security at risk." Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Congress must still get answers from Jensen Huang and others at Nvidia. Representative Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said his panel had been in contact with Jensen Huang's team as recently as Wednesday night, and that a subpoena would follow if necessary. Senator Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, asked Jensen Huang and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to testify, writing on X that “the American people deserve answers.” In a letter dated Thursday, Scott invited Jensen Huang to a December 3 public hearing and warned that the committee could use subpoenas if he did not appear voluntarily.
Not everyone was keeping score. Hours before the resignation was announced, as reports of an ouster swirled, Elon Musk answered a post on X urging him to hire Jensen Huang: "That would be an honor."
In his Sunday letter, Jensen Huang told employees his responsibility was "to serve you and be worthy of your trust." Within days, he was gone—and the trust he wrote of had become a matter for investigators, lawmakers and a board searching for the company's first permanent chief executive since that meeting at Denny's.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Samantha Beech and Edward T. Cummins
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