Washington: Nvidia's board is weighing whether Jensen Huang should stay on as chief executive after reports that he had two extramarital relationships, one with a woman US intelligence concluded was a Chinese asset. Reports on Wednesday said the board was preparing for his possible exit.
The company has said its board began an internal investigation "regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports", and that it has no reason to believe US national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised. Nvidia has expressed confidence in Huang and his leadership team.
The political heat is rising. President Donald Trump said on Monday that the FBI is investigating the relationship. Congressman Jamie Raskin said the fate of Huang as CEO is for the board to decide, but that lawmakers have a legitimate interest in whether a suspected honeytrap influenced US chip policy. "Did this whole scheme end up compromising the national security of the United States? That is our legitimate interest," he said, adding that oversight hearings are likely.
China's foreign ministry called the spying claim "a groundless accusation, slander and a smear", and accused Washington of using the row to push a technology blockade.
The affair matters in India for plainer reasons: money and machines. Nvidia Graphics Pvt Ltd employees held about 7.05 million unvested restricted stock units as on March 31, 2026, worth about $1.2 billion when the shares traded near $170, according to a review of the Indian arm's filings with the corporate affairs ministry. With the stock lower, those units were worth about $1.11 billion — roughly $600 million of paper gains gone in six weeks.
India's AI build-out leans on the same vendor. Reliance's planned 1 GW data centre at Jamnagar, Yotta's order for 20,736 liquid-cooled Blackwell Ultra GPUs and the IndiaAI Mission's compute programme all run on Nvidia hardware.
Huang, 63, owns 3.6 per cent of the company and has no obvious successor. Nvidia's 11-member board has no chair.
Next: the board's investigation, and the congressional hearings that Raskin expects.