Jensen Huang Said It Was Just Business. On Sunday He Told His Whole Company He’d Been Unfaithful.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape to Sunday, when Jensen Huang — the face of the AI boom, black leather jacket and all — emailed every employee at Nvidia. The email was not about chips. “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he wrote. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.” He said he takes full responsibility and accepts the criticism that comes with it. He also said he supports the investigation — the one his own board had just opened into whether he had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.

Run it back a month. In late October, the New York Times reported that US intelligence agencies had concluded Alice Huang — a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, no relation to Jensen — was passing information to Beijing. The Financial Times reported that US intelligence believed she and Huang were romantically involved. Megaspeed has bought more than $4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips since June 2024, according to the Times, and US officials suspect the relationship became a channel — for information, and possibly for chips reaching Chinese buyers despite export controls.

Nvidia’s answer, at the time: nothing to see here. Huang’s meetings were “not unusual or unexpected,” the company said — meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job. Huang told Bloomberg his interactions with Megaspeed employees were routine business. He did not name anyone in Sunday’s email. The reporting from the Times and the Financial Times identifies the relationship as the one with Alice Huang — the same relationship Nvidia had spent a month calling ordinary.

The espionage claims are claims. None has been proven. Beijing’s foreign ministry said Monday that the allegation Alice Huang gathered information for China was “purely groundless speculation and an attempt to smear and malign China.” Nvidia’s board says it has “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised.” What is on the record, in Huang’s own hand, is the sequence: the denial ran for a month, and then the confession replaced it.

The bill arrived Monday morning. Nvidia shares fell about 4.5% in premarket trading, Reuters reported, and roughly 7% in Monday trading, according to CNN — a slide to multi-month lows on a morning when the rest of the market climbed. A committee of independent directors, assisted by outside counsel, now runs the board’s inquiry. Three Republican House committee chairs had already written to Huang on Thursday — before the confession — asking him to answer questions about Megaspeed and Nvidia’s safeguards against foreign espionage; the closed-door briefing they want is set for Nov. 18, one day after Nvidia reports earnings. Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld puts Huang’s odds of surviving as CEO at about 50-50.

President Trump was briefed on the intelligence about the alleged spying last year. Asked Sunday whether he wished he had acted on it, he said no: “I think he’s an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it.”

There is no bench behind him, either. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993, and the company has no clear successor — a point CNN’s coverage made while noting that corporate boards have historically moved on chief executives caught in affairs within days. Nvidia’s public line Monday was that none of this slows anything down: Huang, a spokesperson told CNN, is “committed to continuing to lead NVIDIA as CEO without interruption.”

Huang built Nvidia past $4 trillion by seeing the future before anyone else in the room. The play that got him is not new technology. It is the oldest one in the espionage book, and US intelligence watched it develop for a year while the public story stayed “just business.” On Sunday, the man himself closed the distance between those two stories — in writing, to everyone who works for him. The review on the whole month is simple: Jensen Huang is outta pocket.

More of the day’s tape lives with Previously’s news coverage.