Oleh Onopriienko Історії 13 November 2026, 09:00

The Fall of the Leather-clad AI King: How Jensen Huang Lost Nvidia's $4 Trillion Empire

Artificial intelligence proved powerless against natural instinct when 63-year-old Jensen Huang went "left" to two women at once and lost his Nvidia CEO seat in less than a week. While Jensen Huang was talking about the new industrial revolution from the stage of global conferences, behind the scenes he was trading 41 years of married life for secret dates with an alleged Chinese spy and the vice president of his own company.

We tell you how Huang's greed gave China access to American chips and sparked the biggest scandal in Silicon Valley.

A privilege that exploded in four days

"Leading Nvidia has been the privilege of my life. My duty is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have failed in that responsibility," — from Jensen Huang's letter to Nvidia.

It all began in late October, when The New York Times published an investigation that U.S. intelligence agencies considered Huang a target of Chinese intelligence because of his close relationship with businesswoman Alice Huang. The company initially tried to extinguish the fire by assuring that these were purely business contacts, but under pressure from the evidence, Jensen publicly admitted to adultery on November 8. The board of directors announced an independent investigation and hired the elite law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

Nvidia shares fell 4.27% on Monday, November 9, wiping about $190 billion off its market capitalization. Shareholders rushed to file class-action lawsuits in California federal court, accusing management of covering up national security threats.

Alice Huang and Jensen Huang (no relation), 2025

November 11. The New York Times came out with a new sensation - it turned out that the affair with the Chinese businesswoman was not the only secret of the boss. For years, Huang had been having a second office affair with 48-year-old Nvidia vice president of healthcare Kimberly Powell , who reported directly to him. Moreover, in March, during the GTC conference in San Jose, a passerby filmed on his phone how the 63-year-old billionaire and his subordinate were making out in a hotel room while business meetings were going on nearby. Huang's security guards intercepted the witness and forced him to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

At the evening meeting , the board of directors decided to show the founder the door , and Nvidia shares in over-the-counter trading fell another 10% after the official announcement of his resignation. And the icing on the cake was the information made public after his resignation that Huang had another mistress (God grant him health) in the ranks of Nvidia.

Singapore deal. Who is Alice Huang?

"When we met in college, I didn't have any money of my own, and my parents wouldn't give me any. And Lori's parents gave money to their daughter. That's why I decided to date her," Jensen Huang jokingly (or not) says about his wife.

Back in September 2026, Jensen Huang sweetly told CBS reporters that he owns 41 black leather jackets that his wife Lori buys for him so that he doesn't have to waste time choosing clothes. As US counterintelligence officers found out, Huang appeared in his jackets during regular dinners and car rides in Taipei with a woman whom American intelligence agencies identified as an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

Her name is Alice Huang. Despite sharing the same last name, she has no family ties to Jensen; she is a native of Hunan Province, a former TV journalist for China's state broadcaster, who later made a career in private banking at HSBC in Hong Kong, investment bank CITIC Securities, and Shanghai-based fund Hexi Investment Management. And the most interesting detail of this triangle is that Alice is also officially married.

Her legal husband is 51-year-old Chinese investor Kang Wei, founder of private investment group Hexi Capital, who has known Jensen Huang since 2010. According to The Wall Street Journal, it was the legal husband who introduced Alice to the head of Nvidia. Then the married couple launched a brilliant operation to circumvent American sanctions, which analysts dubbed the “Singapore money laundering.”

We don’t have enough symbols to tell the whole story, but in short, the story goes like this: in March 2023, Alice Huang bought out the Singaporean “subsidiary” of a Chinese gaming company through an offshore company and renamed it Megaspeed International. Within four days, this structure received the status of a privileged cloud partner of Nvidia, which opened priority access to scarce chips for artificial intelligence. While Alice maintained a warm relationship with Jensen, her husband Kang Wei built a network of gaskets in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and mainland China, attracting investment with promises of uninterrupted supplies of American “hardware”.

According to investigators, over three years, about 240,000 sanctioned Nvidia H100 and H200 processors worth at least $7.5 billion were shipped to China through this scheme.

Nvidia shares continue to plummet after Huang's resignation

Nvidia as a Huang family business

“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. My family has given me love and support throughout my life, and they deserve my honesty and loyalty, but I have failed them,” — from Jensen Huang’s letter to Nvidia.

In the 1980s, Jensen and Lori Mills were partners in the electrical engineering lab at Oregon State University. At the time, he was 17, she was 19. In 1985, they got married, and the young, ambitious engineer made a big promise to his wife: by the time he was thirty, he would be CEO of his own company. Huang kept his word in business: in April 1993, shortly after his 30th birthday, he founded Nvidia in a Denny's in San Jose. Lori, on the other hand, retreated into the shadows, raising her children and heading their $9 billion-plus charitable foundation, through which the couple gave tens of millions to universities. Huang fulfilled his business promise brilliantly, but he failed in his marital vows of fidelity, which no one measured in teraflops.

The second generation of the family has become firmly established in Nvidia's corporate structure. Daughter Madison and son Spencer initially had no interest in semiconductors and built careers in the restaurant business. Madison graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu school, worked as a chef in restaurants in New York and San Francisco, and then spent four years in marketing at the French luxury conglomerate LVMH. Spencer went to Taiwan, where he studied Chinese and owned the trendy cocktail bar R&D Cocktail Lab in Taipei for seven years. However, both later graduated from business schools and came to work under their father's roof.

Madison became senior director of marketing for physical AI and the Omniverse platform with an annual compensation of $1.23 million, and Spencer became director of product management in the robotics division with a package of $1.32 million. Jensen's son-in-law is former Swiss Olympic alpine skier Nico Capresa, who holds the position of vice president of global growth for AI infrastructure.

Madison, Lori, Jensen (before the jackets period) and Spencer Huang, 2007

Because the couple lives in California and married eight years before Nvidia was founded, they are subject to the state’s community property law, which divides marital assets in half. Financial analysts estimate that if they file for divorce , Lori could be looking for about $80 billion . That would automatically make her divorce the most expensive in human history, far surpassing even the record-breaking settlement between Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott.

Taylor Swift from the world of technology

Even after the devastating stock market crash, Huang's personal fortune is estimated at an astronomical $145 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index , keeping him in 13th place on the list of the richest people on the planet.

The path to this peak has been truly impressive. In the 1990s, Nvidia was a manufacturer of video cards for teenagers who played Quake and Doom. The breakthrough was Huang's 2006 bet on the CUDA software platform, which allowed GPUs to be used for complex mathematical calculations (previously, this role was performed by the central processor). Over the course of a decade and a half, this architecture turned Nvidia into the sole "shovel merchant" during the gold rush of artificial intelligence.

In October 2025, the company's market capitalization became the first in history to cross the $5 trillion mark . By and large, Nvidia's balance sheets and chips are the foundation of the entire global AI bubble.

Huang's fan base has changed along with the stock charts. At first, he was adored by hardcore gamers and computer geeks, who later hated the former idol for retraining Nvidia into the head of AI progress, which began to release "AI slop" in the form of technologies such as DLSS 5.0 .

Jensen Huang holding an RTX 2080 graphics card, 2019

Then the baton was taken over by crypto miners, who, during the Bitcoin and Ether boom, swept graphics cards off the shelves by the truckload, cursing the shortage but praying for the hashrate. And in the ChatGPT era, Huang finally turned into a pop icon in the same black leather jacket. Mark Zuckerberg called him “the Taylor Swift of the tech world,” crowds at exhibitions in Taipei asked for his autographs on their chests and wallets, and Donald Trump made him a regular guest at the White House and his advisor on science and technology.

For Ukrainians, Huang "marked out" recently on October 21, 2026, at the GTC conference in Berlin. In the midst of a pompous presentation of new superchips, a protester from the audience shouted a question about what Nvidia is doing with the fact that its chips (in particular, Jetson Orin modules) are regularly found in the wreckage of Russian strike drones and cruise missiles with which Russia kills Ukrainians.

Huang stated that these were “important issues,” but asked not to disturb his report, promised to talk later, and as if nothing had happened, returned to the slides about the bright future of robotics. The “king of AI” did not comment on the substance of why American technologies have been in the hands of the aggressor for years, neither on stage nor after the security guards had taken the activist out of the hall.

This is just the beginning.

Jensen Huang's resignation does not put an end to this story, he is facing a grueling legal war on several fronts. The FBI is already conducting an official investigation into Huang's ties to Alice Huang and the possible leak of sensitive information to Beijing. In parallel, the US Department of Justice is launching a criminal case into chip smuggling through Megaspeed, leaders of relevant Congressional committees are demanding closed testimony from the former head of Nvidia about threats to national security, and angry investors are preparing to sue for billions of dollars in damages due to the concealment of information.

A separate political earthquake is brewing around the White House. As American media have learned, President Donald Trump was warned at least twice about Huang's mistress and the danger to national security. First, the intelligence services informed him about Alice Huang in October 2025, and in the spring of 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio even prepared a top-secret memorandum on the eve of the presidential visit to China. Trump ignored both signals, took Jensen with him to Beijing and earlier this week publicly defended him, calling him an "honest guy." Now, Senate Democrats are demanding that all correspondence between the Trump administration and Nvidia management be preserved, suspecting that China's export concessions were approved under the influence of a compromised lobbyist.

Nvidia itself is trying to prove to the markets that there is life after Huang. The company's CFO, Colette Kress , an industry veteran who has been managing the chipmaker's finances since 2013 and is now tasked with steering the company through the storm while retaining the role of CFO, has been named interim CEO. The board, led for the first time in history by independent chairman Harvey Jones, has begun a search for a permanent successor both internally and externally.

Among the main internal favorites, analysts and traders call Ian Buck, the architect of the CUDA platform and head of the data center division, which brings the lion's share of the company's profits. There is also talk on Wall Street about a possible invitation of heavyweights from outside, in particular, Apple's chief processor designer Johnny Sruji. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is urging Nvidia to seek the services of Tim Cook.

Among the candidates, the name of Lisa Xu was even mentioned - the head of AMD, Nvidia's main competitor in the graphics card market, who, ironically, is a relative of Huang, and Yahoo Finance named Xu as the best manager of the year. Not bad advertising, huh?

But whoever takes the top job in Santa Clara will inherit a bitter lesson - even the most powerful artificial intelligence in the world is powerless when its creator loses his sanity due to a banal weakness.

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