What, exactly, happened with Jensen Huang? (Spoiler: The "Chinese spy" has not been charged with anything)

Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and ran it for 33 years, is no longer its chief executive. Nvidia's board accepted his resignation as president, CEO and director on November 11, according to the company's securities filing, and named finance chief Colette Kress interim CEO. The filing does not say why he left.

If you are just tuning in, here is a full rundown of what happened with Jensen Huang, the relationship at the center of it (which is often referred to as the "Nvidia spy scandal"), and what is still at stake for the Santa Clara company he built.

On October 29, The New York Times reported that U.S. officials had concluded that Alice Huang, a former executive of the Singapore data center company Megaspeed, was a Chinese intelligence asset who had developed a close relationship with Huang. The two are not related. On November 8, Huang told Nvidia employees he had been unfaithful to his wife, and the board opened an independent investigation. On November 11, the Times reported a relationship with an Nvidia vice president who reported to him. The board accepted his resignation the same day.

No charges against Alice Huang appear in Justice Department releases or federal court records as of November 15. Singapore, which investigated her over Megaspeed's server purchases, says she was not investigated for espionage and that it found insufficient evidence that she had committed any offense in the matter it examined. China's foreign ministry calls the spy allegation unsubstantiated. Nvidia's board said on November 8 that it had no reason to believe national security or company secrets had been compromised.

What happened with Jensen Huang, from a Taipei bar in 2024 to his November 11 resignation:

The record runs back more than two years. These are the dated events. Each one is sourced in the sections that follow.

• June 2024: Jensen Huang joins a group of Nvidia's Asian customers at a Taipei bar after Alice Huang tells them she can bring him there, according to an executive in the group quoted by the Times in 2025. A person close to Nvidia told the paper Huang had already planned to attend.
• Late 2024: The U.S. government begins investigating Megaspeed after a Commerce Department official visits its data center in Malaysia, the Times later reported.
• February 2025: Singapore's police and customs agency open their own investigation into Megaspeed and its controllers.
• June 24, 2025: The U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security runs a post-shipment check at Megaspeed with Alice Huang present. Singapore police interview her the same day and impound her passport.
• August 2025: Nvidia's general counsel emails Commerce Department agents working on the Megaspeed case, the Times later reported.
• October 9, 2025: The Times reports that Commerce is investigating whether Megaspeed helped Chinese companies sidestep U.S. export restrictions.
• Around October 2025: President Trump is briefed on the intelligence about Alice Huang and does not act on it, the Times reported in 2026.
• February 26, 2026: Singapore returns Alice Huang's passport. She leaves the country and is barred from returning.
• Spring 2026: Secretary of State Marco Rubio circulates a memo to administration officials about Huang's relationship with Alice Huang, according to sources cited by NBC News.
• October 29, 2026: The Times reports that U.S. officials concluded she was a Chinese intelligence asset.
• November 8: Huang emails employees that he was unfaithful to his wife. The board opens an independent investigation.
• November 9: Nvidia shares fall 4.27%. A shareholder files a class action. Trump says the FBI is looking into the matter.
• November 11: The Times reports Huang's relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care. The board accepts his resignation.
• November 12: Nvidia announces the resignation. Singapore publishes the results of its investigation. House and Senate committees ask Huang to appear.

What Jensen Huang has admitted, and what he has not:

Huang's public statement on his personal conduct is the email Nvidia posted on November 8. It is an apology to his wife and family, and to Nvidia's employees, board, partners and shareholders.

"I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children."
Jensen Huang, in his November 8 email to Nvidia employees

The email does not name anyone. On national security, Huang wrote that he supports the board's investigation and "will cooperate fully." The Times reported the same day that Huang had acknowledged to Nvidia's board that he had been intimate with Alice Huang, as quoted in the shareholder complaint filed the next day.

None of the statements from Nvidia, Congress or Singapore cited in this article accuses Jensen Huang of spying. When Trump was first briefed, U.S. officials did not believe Huang knew that Alice Huang was gathering information for China, according to the Times' October 29 report. The same report said some senior officials now doubt he could have been unaware. Trump told reporters on November 9 that Huang had "absolutely no idea" she was a spy, The Associated Press reported.

Before November 8, Nvidia had described the contact as routine. A company spokesman told the Times on October 29 that Huang's interactions with Alice Huang were "not unusual or unexpected." Huang told Bloomberg on October 30 that Nvidia's dealings with Megaspeed were "normal and not unusual." Both statements are now quoted in the shareholder lawsuit as misleading.

Alice Huang and Megaspeed are at the center of US intelligence concerns:

Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is a Hong Kong resident who was Megaspeed's CEO, chairperson and one of its key controllers, according to Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs. The Times describes her as a Chinese citizen.

The Times' October 29 report said U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded she was passing information to Beijing, and that surveillance of her revealed her relationship with Huang. A later report in the Times, relayed by Bloomberg and quoted in the amended shareholder complaint, said U.S. officials believed she was working for China's Ministry of State Security. Her exact role is unclear: a former national security official told NBC News she may not have been a career spy, but someone asked to cooperate because of her access to Huang.

Megaspeed bought more than $4.8 billion of Nvidia chips in two years, the Times reported:

Megaspeed is a Singapore-incorporated company that buys Nvidia hardware and rents out computing power. It bought more than $4.8 billion of Nvidia chips over two years, the AP reported, citing the Times. The Times reported that Megaspeed bought chips from the American arm of the Chinese server maker Inspur and supplied the computing power to Alibaba and other Chinese companies. Investigators suspect some of those chips reached China illegally, the Times reported.

Nvidia has said it found no evidence of diversion. In October 2025, a spokesman told the Times that Nvidia's compliance team had found Megaspeed was owned and run outside China with no Chinese shareholders, and that site visits found no evidence of diversion.

The Commerce Department's Megaspeed investigation moved to the Justice Department:

Commerce Department agents had spent months on the Megaspeed case when it moved to the Justice Department, the Times reported on November 9, in a story summarized by The Next Web. In August 2025, Nvidia's general counsel, Tim Teter, emailed the agents and wrote that a senior Commerce official, Jeffrey Kessler, had given Nvidia permission to reach out, according to the report. Some officials saw the contact as a breach that could taint the case. The Justice Department asked Commerce to pause its work, and Commerce complied. A Commerce spokesman told the Times the department had handled this and other cases strictly by the book.

On November 12, the chairs of three House committees asked Teter and Under Secretary of Commerce Jeffrey Kessler to appear before Congress as well.

Singapore found insufficient evidence to establish that Alice Huang committed an offense:

Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs laid out its own case file on November 12.

• What Singapore investigated: Possible false declarations about server purchases. The servers were bought by companies under investigation and exported through Singapore to Malaysia without entering the Singapore market. Police were checking whether they were then routed to another destination.
• What it did not investigate: The ministry says Alice Huang "was not investigated for espionage."
• The finding: In February 2026, police concluded with the Attorney-General's Chambers that there was insufficient evidence to establish that she had committed any offense tied to Megaspeed's possible inaccurate declarations.
• The penalty: Police found she gave them information she knew to be inaccurate, to play down her role in Megaspeed. She received a stern warning and was barred from re-entering Singapore.
• Still open: Investigations into Megaspeed and six other people. None of the six has been in Singapore since February 2025.

The ministry also said Singapore had asked U.S. authorities to help secure cooperation from the server supplier Supermicro, and had received limited information or assistance. Taiwan has revoked Alice Huang's entry permit, Interior Minister Liu Shyh-fang told lawmakers.

China calls the "Chinese spy" allegation unsubstantiated:

Asked about the board's investigation on November 9, foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said the "Chinese spy" allegation is "purely unsubstantiated and directed at smearing China." Alice Huang has not commented publicly.

The New York Times reported a relationship with an Nvidia executive on November 11:

The second report added a governance question to the national security one. Five people who worked at Nvidia told the Times that Huang had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, who reported to him. Both are married to other people.

Huang and Powell were seen being affectionate at a San Jose hotel during Nvidia's GTC developer conference in March, according to the Times. A bystander filmed them, and Huang's security staff offered that person a nondisclosure agreement, three people briefed on the incident told the paper. The Times said it had not seen the video. Nvidia declined to provide a statement, and Powell did not immediately respond to the paper.

When the Times reached Huang by phone, he said, "I don't think you should be talking to me directly," and ended the call. The Times noted that Nvidia's code of conduct tells employees to avoid conflicts that include personal relationships.

A day later, Reuters reported that Huang had an intimate relationship with a second Nvidia employee, citing two people familiar with the matter. Reuters did not name her. Neither report has been confirmed by Nvidia or Huang.

Nvidia's securities filing gives no reason for Jensen Huang's resignation:

The board's position moved quickly in four days.

1. November 8: The board said it had confidence in Huang and his leadership team while the investigation went ahead.
2. November 10: The independent directors retained former acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim and his firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to run it.
3. November 11: The board met to decide whether to oust Huang, Reuters reported, and accepted his resignation the same day, according to the 8-K.
4. November 12: Nvidia announced the change and thanked Huang for his "immeasurable contributions to the company and the industry."

The release gives no reason. A company spokesperson told NBC News that Huang will not work with Nvidia in any capacity. Rep. John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, called it Huang's "firing from the company he founded."

Jensen Huang's story so far, sorted into documents and reporting:

Much of what has been written about Jensen Huang rests on anonymous sources. This table separates what a document shows from what has only been reported, as of November 15.

Investigations into Jensen Huang, Nvidia and Megaspeed are running on several fronts:

These are the inquiries and proceedings on the public record so far.

1. Nvidia's board: An independent investigation by a committee of independent directors, run by Joon H. Kim of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The board has given no timeline.
2. The FBI: Trump said on November 9 that the FBI is "looking into it in terms of something else," the AP reported. He did not describe its scope.
3. The Justice Department: The Megaspeed case it took over from Commerce, according to the Times.
4. Singapore police: The continuing investigation into Megaspeed and six other people.
5. The House: Reps. Brian Mast, John Moolenaar and Rick Crawford, who chair the Foreign Affairs, China and Intelligence committees, asked Huang on November 4 for a joint, closed-door briefing on November 18. They sent a second request on November 12, after his resignation.
6. The Senate Banking Committee: Chairman Tim Scott asked Huang to testify on December 3 and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on December 10, and threatened to subpoena Huang if he did not cooperate, UPI reported. Lutnick agreed to appear voluntarily, his spokesperson told NBC News.
7. The shareholder class action: Kistenmacher v. NVIDIA, filed November 9 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and assigned to Judge Charles R. Breyer. It claims violations of Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act. An amended complaint filed November 13 widened the class to buyers from December 19, 2024, through November 12, 2026. None of its allegations has been tested in court.

Nvidia stock lost 12.7% in the week Jensen Huang admitted infidelity and resigned:

Nvidia closed at $186.64 on Friday, November 6, before the board's weekend statement. It closed at $162.85 on Friday, November 13, according to Nasdaq. That is a 12.7% fall, or about $573 billion in market value on the 24.1 billion shares Nvidia reported outstanding in August.

The daily moves line up with the news. Shares fell 4.27% on November 9, 5.47% on November 10 and 4.34% on November 12, the day the resignation was announced, after trading as low as $148.80 that morning. They rose 2.87% on November 11, before the Times' report on Powell.

The longer slide is harder to pin on one cause. Nvidia is down 31.9% from its record close of $239.24 on October 6. Part of that drop came before the October 29 report, and the largest one-day fall in this period, 9.26% on November 5, came during a broad sell-off in AI and chip stocks three days before the board's statement.

CalPERS reported 46.1 million Nvidia shares in its most recent holdings filing:

CalPERS, the pension fund for California's public employees, has a direct stake in the slide. CalPERS reported holding 46,071,341 Nvidia shares on June 30, 2026, in its latest quarterly filing with the SEC. At that share count, the stake would have been worth about $9.9 billion at the October 28 close and about $7.5 billion on November 13, a drop of about $2.4 billion. CalPERS may have bought or sold Nvidia shares since June. Its filing for September 30 is due in the coming days.

Colette Kress is running Nvidia while the board searches for a permanent CEO:

Kress, 59, has been Nvidia's chief financial officer since 2013 and will keep that job while she serves as interim CEO, the 8-K says. Before Nvidia she spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at companies including Cisco and Microsoft. The board says it will consider internal and external candidates for the permanent job.

The board also named its first-ever chair, Harvey C. Jones, 73. Jones has been a director since 1993 and is a former CEO and executive chairman of the software company Synopsys. Trump posted that there was "only one man" to replace Huang: Tim Cook, who handed Apple's CEO job to John Ternus in September and is now its executive chair. Nvidia has not named any candidate.

Kress will present Nvidia's next quarterly results on Tuesday, November 17. Results are due at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific time, with the call at 2 p.m.

Jensen Huang has been asked to brief the House and testify before the Senate Banking Committee:

Jensen Huang no longer runs Nvidia, but the questions about Alice Huang and Megaspeed are still open. The House chairs have asked him for a closed-door briefing, originally requested for November 18, and House Republicans said they were negotiating with Huang over his testimony, UPI reported. The Senate Banking Committee has asked him to testify on December 3, with a subpoena threatened if he declines. Nvidia's board investigation, the Justice Department's Megaspeed case, Singapore's remaining investigations and the shareholder lawsuit all continue.

The calendar will shift in January. House Republicans lose control of their committees when the chamber turns over to Democrats, and any House subpoena would likely expire, ABC News reported. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on Senate Banking, has pressed for Huang's testimony since 2025. Until any of these inquiries reports, the account of what Jensen Huang knew rests on his own email, the board's statements, the president's account of their phone call and anonymous sources.