Cryptopolitan Report: Will The Huang Scandal Matter For Nvidia? Our Readers Were Split

The recent scandal around Jensen Huang has rocked Nvidia, its board and investor confidence in the matter of a few days. When we put out this newsletter poll on how much the investigation would matter, the board was still publicly backing him. Fast forward 48 hours, news of a second affair has come out, Nvidia’s stock fell sharply after hours, and reports of the board planning to replace the man who co-founded the company 33 years ago are circulating.  

How This Started

The news of the scandal broke out on October 29, when the New York Times reported that US intelligence agencies had found that a Singapore-based businesswoman, Alice Huang, was passing sensitive information to Beijing. According to the Times, she worked as an executive at Megaspeed, a company that bought over $4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips over the span of two years. Authorities in the US have been looking into whether Megaspeed helped move advanced AI chips into China, which export rules are meant to prevent. Both Megaspeed and Nvidia have denied any sort of wrongdoing while Beijing has dismissed the spying allegations as unsubstantiated. 

The Times also reported that she had a very close relationship with Jensen Huang. At the time, Huang told Bloomberg that his interactions with her were only related to Megaspeed and were “completely normal and not unusual.” 

That stance did not hold for very long. On Friday, November 6, the news of their romantic relationship came to be known to the public through a Financial Times report. Two days later, on Sunday, Huang wrote to Nvidia employees: “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.” His letter did not mention Alice Huang. 

On the same day, Nvidia’s board opened an investigation into reports that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The board even said that it had “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised,” and that Huang would stay on as CEO during the review. 

Why This is Bigger Than A Personal Scandal 

The reason why this is such a massive scandal comes down to what Nvidia is and who Huang is to it. Most of the AI models that exist today run on Nvidia chips and these chips sit right at the centre of the US-China technology race. Washington continues to restrict what Nvidia products can be shipped to China and Huang has spent the past two years trying to negotiate those rules with Trump’s administration. A CEO in that sort of position becoming close to someone US intelligence believes worked for Beijing raises questions no ordinary personal scandal does. 

Then The Story Moved Again

The question of credibility took another massive hit on Wednesday, November 11, when the New York Times reported that Huang had another extramarital relationship with Nvidia’s Vice President of healthcare, Kimberly Powell, who directly reports to him. The Times reported that it was told of the alleged affair by five employees at the company. While Nvidia, Huang and Powell have not confirmed anything from the report, things have begun to escalate quickly over the past 24 hours. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that the board was preparing to oust Huang. Bloomberg then reported that the company was working with an outside firm to identify a potential replacement and was weighing whether to name a temporary CEO before finding a permanent one. Odds on whether Huang resigns or is removed by end of the year on prediction markets like Polymarket have skyrocketed to 88%. 

The biggest complication at the moment is that the company has no obvious successor. Huang has been leading the company since he co-founded it in 1993. CFO Colette Kress is being seen as a possible interim choice by analysts and on Polymarket, Ian Buck, who runs the data centre business, has been the favourite to take over permanently. 

This week’s poll ran in Cryptopolitan’s daily newsletter. If you’d like to vote in the next one, you can subscribe to our free newsletter here.

Reading The Result

The first thing to keep in mind is what readers knew when they voted. Huang had admitted the affair, the board had opened an investigation but said it trusted him, and the stock was down about 4%. Nobody had yet reported a second relationship, and nobody was talking about a replacement.

Given that, a near-perfect three-way split is a fair reflection of how uncertain the situation looked on November 10.

The people who read our newsletter have a particular lens on this kind of story. Crypto is full of companies and protocols built around a single founder, and readers here have watched that risk play out before. When Changpeng Zhao stepped down as Binance CEO in late 2023 as part of a settlement with US authorities, plenty of people expected the exchange to suffer badly. It didn’t, at least not in the way many predicted. It’s still the largest exchange in the world. That history probably shaped how a lot of readers weighed Huang’s situation.

A little (35.29%): The narrow winner, and on the facts available at the time, a defensible read. The board had backed Huang publicly and said it saw no sign that secrets were compromised. Demand for Nvidia’s chips has never depended on the CEO’s personal life. A dip in the stock and an awkward few weeks of headlines looked like the most likely outcome. What this group couldn’t price in was what came next. 

A lot (~32.4%): This group saw the risk most clearly, and events since the poll have largely backed them up. Their instinct was probably about concentration. Huang isn’t simply Nvidia’s CEO. He’s its chief strategist, its main voice in Washington and the person most investors picture when they think about the company. A scandal touching national security, at a company whose biggest problem is getting export approval, was always going to be hard to contain.

Not at all (~32.4%): A third of readers thought the business would carry on regardless, and that view hasn’t been disproven yet. There’s a real distinction between what happens to Huang, what happens to Nvidia’s share price and what happens to Nvidia as a business. Data centres still need chips, and Nvidia still sells the ones most of them want. If this group was answering about the business rather than the stock or the CEO, they may still turn out to be right.

That distinction is probably the most useful way to read the poll. Readers weren’t really disagreeing about the facts. They were answering slightly different questions, about Huang, about the stock and about the company, and each answer was reasonable for the question they had in mind.

What Comes Next

The immediate question is whether Huang keeps his job. Whatever the board decides, Nvidia has already shown it was thinking about a future without him, and that alone changes how investors will price the company. A business that had treated its founder as permanent now has to explain who leads it next and how quickly.

Earnings land next week, and they’ll arrive in an odd position. The numbers will probably still be strong, since AI spending hasn’t slowed because of any of this. But for perhaps the first time in years, analysts on the call will care more about governance and succession than about guidance.

The longer-running thread is China. The board’s investigation and the US scrutiny of Megaspeed are both still open, and anything they find about chips reaching China would matter far more to Nvidia’s future than any personal revelation. At the moment our poll ran, a third of readers thought this wouldn’t matter at all. The answer to that question now depends less on Huang’s personal life than on what those investigations turn up.