Nvidia CEO’s Secret Affair Sends Markets Tumbling

Nvidia’s board has launched an independent investigation after a New York Times report that CEO Jensen Huang cheated on his wife with Alice Huang, a senior executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed. US intelligence believes she worked for China’s Ministry of State Security and passed data to Beijing.

What Happened

Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, worked at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company that buys Nvidia chips and rents out computing power, including to Chinese AI labs. US intelligence was already monitoring her on suspicion of circumventing export restrictions on advanced chips. The surveillance revealed that she had formed a close relationship with Jensen Huang.

Trump knew and did nothing. A year ago, he had already received intelligence that a woman in Huang’s inner circle was working for Chinese intelligence and could influence both Huang and US chip policy.

According to sources cited in media reports, the Trump administration feared that acting would tank Nvidia’s stock and derail the fragile trade truce with China. On top of that, Huang had by then become Trump’s key figure on AI.

While Trump stayed silent, Huang kept lobbying for looser restrictions. Eventually, the administration approved H200 chip sales to China on terms that give the US 25% of the revenue.

In a letter to employees, Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife, apologized to his family and colleagues, and took responsibility for what happened. As of publication, he had not commented on questions about a possible leak of confidential information or knowingly helping to circumvent export restrictions.

The Fallout

The market reacted instantly. After Huang’s admission and the announcement of the investigation, Nvidia shares fell 3–6% in over-the-counter trading and futures. On Hyperliquid, perpetual futures slipped almost 4%, and on European trading venues they fell as much as 6%.

The scandal hit crypto on Sunday evening, while US exchanges were closed. Bitcoin briefly dipped below $74,000, its lowest level since August. Ethereum fell harder, dropping below $2,100.

Liquidations of leveraged positions topped $1B over the past 24 hours. The market read the scandal as a risk-off signal for the entire AI trade.

US lawmakers have already demanded that Huang appear before Congress to explain himself.

Editor-in-Chief’s Take

Lately, bitcoin and the crypto market as a whole seem wildly correlated with everything under the sun. And now there’s a murky story about Huang, spiced up with racy details about his Chinese lover supposedly being a spy. It’s like a Netflix script unfolding live.

On the charts, bitcoin was already trending down, and the news arrived at just the right moment. Geopolitics is clearly in play, along with China’s attempts, in all sorts of ways, to get chipmakers to sidestep US restrictions. It all starts to look like a tabloid storyline.

Given the lengths China goes to in pursuit of its goals, Anthropic’s report on credit spending from Chinese IP addresses comes straight to mind. Among other things, the report describes how Chinese companies use Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s models to train their own. Essentially, they siphon off others’ work: they query American models at scale and try to package the models’ logic and answers into datasets for training their own systems.

We’re talking about millions of such requests. In effect, companies built a significant share of Chinese models this way: instead of developing from scratch, they replicated what had already been done in the US.

There’s another conclusion to draw here: for all its ambitions, China’s AI infrastructure is not yet fully self-sufficient and still depends heavily on external developments and ideas.