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Jensen Huang is to step down as CEO of Nvidia after bombshell revelations that he had an affair with a businesswoman accused of being a Chinese spy.
Huang’s exit plunges a $4 trillion company into uncertainty and threatens to disrupt a complex AI ecosystem that has long relied on the world’s most valuable company to scale.
At the eye of the storm is Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, who US intelligence officials believe was funnelling information to Beijing as she courted Nvidia’s CEO.
China denies allegations of corporate espionage as a “smear campaign”. But Washington is rattled, having spent years trying to keep Beijing from the secrets to rival its hold on cutting-edge AI technology.
The Nvidia spy scandal is only the latest in a long-running saga of alleged ‘honeytrap’ plots, whereby rival states exploit “vulnerabilities” like sexual relationships for strategic gain.
Taiwanese-American engineer Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and oversaw its growth from making graphics processing units (GPUs) with $40,000 in the bank to the world’s most valuable tech company since 2025.
For years, Nvidia was best known to gamers chasing top-tier graphics. But its chips'
