Tripp Mickle, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian Barnes, and Ana Swanson, reporting for The New York Times:

Nvidia said on Sunday that it was opening an investigation into Jensen Huang, its chief executive and co-founder, after he acknowledged to the company’s board that he had been intimate with a business executive who U.S. intelligence determined was a Chinese spy.

Mr. Huang’s relationship with the woman, who goes by Alice Huang, became a U.S. government concern after surveillance revealed that she was feeding information directly to Beijing. The revelation raised troubling possibilities because Mr. Huang is one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump.

In a message to the company, Mr. Huang apologized. “I was unfaithful to my wife,” he said. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”

Nvidia’s board said that it had “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised,” but that “the board’s inquiry will examine all available information.” It said Mr. Huang “fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.”

If you’re Nvidia’s board of directors, the first question running through your mind should be, “Is this person fit to lead our company?” Is a person who cheated on his wife with a Chinese spy fit to be the chief executive of one of the country’s — and perhaps the world’s — most valuable and important technology companies? It’s strikingly evident that the answer to that question is a resounding no. However, in the short term, firing Huang would send shockwaves through Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I wouldn’t even be surprised if there were an OpenAI blip-style employee revolt. Wall Street would not react lightly to one of the Valley’s most important executives being dismissed. All of this is to say that (a) I don’t think Huang will be ousted at the end of this “investigation,” and (b) I think that is the wrong call. Time will tell, of course.

The more interesting story here is one of national security. Huang egregiously lied to the public, Congress, and shareholders about how seriously Nvidia takes security and integrity, and whether those values even matter. During the Biden administration, Huang strongly opposed export controls, but when his preferred president took office, he became much more receptive to the idea. Huang said to reporters last year, “I’ve said it repeatedly that we support export controls, and that we should ensure that American companies have the best and the most and first.” Others in the artificial intelligence industry have echoed similar sentiments, pushing both administrations to tighten export rules on Nvidia’s famed H100 graphics processing units, used for training AI large language models. The government believes the Chinese could use AI as a strategic military advantage, and the private sector worries about competition from Chinese open-weight models. (As previously discussed in January 2025 and June.)

So if the Chinese receiving H100s is such a pertinent concern, it is by orders of magnitude more worrisome that a Chinese intelligence officer had an intimate relationship with one of our country’s most important businessmen. If you were one of those AI analysts circa 2025 who were panicked about DeepSeek and the People’s Liberation Army, you should be panicked about Huang’s infidelity. You should panic that one of the country’s most important people is so committed to adultery that he is willing to compromise national security for it. And you should definitely be panicked that Nvidia’s board of directors may not oust him because it values its stock price over national security — the same national security it had virtue-signaled about so much just a year ago.