The scandal threatens to taint Huang’s largely positive personal brand — one that transformed him into an icon for individual and professional investors alike.
(CNN) — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has spent more than three decades building a company that has made him one of the most powerful figures in tech. Now, stunning allegations threaten that legacy, as his board has hired a high-profile law firm to investigate one of the biggest corporate scandals in modern memory.
On Tuesday, chipmaker Nvidia announced it had retained New York law firm law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to lead the investigation into whether Huang, 63, was a target of a foreign intelligence effort.
It is a painful moment for Huang. Yet, by his own telling, pain has been his making.
“Greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people: It’s formed out of people who’ve suffered,” Huang told an audience of students at Stanford University, his alma mater, in 2024.
He then wished them “ample doses of pain and suffering.”
At the time of Huang’s speech, delivered in his trademark black leather jacket, Nvidia appeared to be on an unstoppable trajectory, hurtling towards a historic $5 trillion market valuation. The company, whose chips and software underpin the world’s most advanced AI models, was fast becoming a central force in financial markets and the broader economy.
But the revelation of Huang’s relationship with a woman who US officials have said is a Chinese asset has cast a dark cloud over Huang and the company. The scandal has sent Nvidia shares ( NVDA ) down over 5% this week. Federal lawmakers are calling for investigations and new restrictions on exports of advanced chips that could dent the company’s business.
Meanwhile, Wall Street analysts are now questioning whether Huang could be forced out or step down as CEO – and who could replace him with no clear, public succession plan in place.
The matter could also have great personal consequences, including Huang’s status as one of the world’s most popular and influential CEOs, and his relationships with family. Huang married his college sweetheart, Lori, in 1985. They have two children, Madison and Spencer, both of whom occupy senior positions at Nvidia.
“I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it,” Huang said in a statement Sunday. “I am committed to protecting Nvidia and supporting America’s national security.”
Huang has built a mythology around Nvidia’s ability to defy disaster. The business suffered a near-death experience in the mid-1990s and has made big missteps, such as a failed foray into smartphone technology. Nvidia’s unofficial motto — “our company is 30 days from going out of business” — is a reminder to its roughly 42,000 employees of how far the mighty can fall.
If you walked into a San Jose, California, branch of Denny’s a couple of years ago, you may have spotted a sign above one of the diner’s red booths: “THE BOOTH THAT LAUNCHED A $2 TRILLION COMPANY.”
It was here, in 1993, that Huang – whose first job aged 15 was spent washing dishes at a Denny’s in Portland, Oregon – cooked up the idea for Nvidia with co-founders and fellow electrical engineers Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky. Today, Nvidia is worth more than $4 trillion in market value, making it the second-most valuable company in the world.
The trio wanted to design semiconductor chips that could create more realistic graphics for video games, signing a deal with Japanese gaming developer Sega. But they made a strategic blunder within their first decade that nearly tanked the firm: They had designed an unconventional 3D chip that few developers could use. It was a costly mistake, helping send Nvidia hurtling toward bankruptcy. An eleventh-hour $5 million investment from Sega provided Nvidia a crucial lifeline.
Nvidia spent the next decade in gaming. But by the mid-aughts, Huang realized that some of its chips – containing processing units that could perform many calculations in tandem – could have applications beyond gaming.
It developed CUDA, software that allowed computer programmers to use its chips more generally. In 2016, Huang was filmed delivering Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer to Elon Musk, the co-founder of what was then a little-known research lab called OpenAI.
A few years later, when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, Nvidia was already in position to capitalize on the ensuing boom. In its most recent fiscal quarter, Nvidia’s revenue more than doubled year-on-year, a sign of its continued core role in powering the AI boom even four years after ChatGPT’s launch.
If Nvidia was thriving, then so was Huang. Hehas found himself a frequent visitor to the White House and a favorite of President Donald Trump. He has lobbied for looser export controls on advanced chips to China and, in September, joined tech leaders to advocate for the “ self-policing ” of AI risks.
On Monday, Trump defended Huang. “I think he’s an honorable guy,” he told reporters. “He’s done an amazing job for our country.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Monday that allegations that Beijing had used an operative to gather information on Nvidia were “purely groundless speculation and an attempt to smear and malign China.”
The scandal threatens to taint Huang’s largely positive personal brand – one that has transformed him into an icon among individual and professional investors alike.
It wasn’t unusual during Nvidia’s meteoric rise for superfans to host watch parties for quarterly earnings. Some bought $178 sweaters featuring a cartoon depiction of Huang at a company conference this year. At a Taiwanese tech conference in 2024, Huang was pictured , like a rock star, signing a woman’s top near her chest.
Last month, podcaster Lex Fridman posted a video of Huang giving him a tour of food markets in Taiwan, where he was born. The pair ate pepper buns and oyster pancakes as chaotic crowds snapped pictures of Huang, who today has an estimated net worth of roughly $141 billion, making him the 13th-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He told Fridman that, growing up, his parents didn’t have the money for restaurants, so they would opt for the night market.
“I love everything (about it),” he said. “I love the people. Everybody’s working hard for a living.”
Huang, born Jen-Hsun Huang in 1963, moved from Taiwan to Thailand as a child and then to the United States, where his father had enrolled in a training program with a company making air conditioning units. Huang, aged 9, and his brother went ahead of their parents to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington.
The early years were tough. His uncle sent them to school in Kentucky, where Huang endured racist taunts and attempts by local kids to knock him off a flimsy footbridge on the way to class, according to an interview he gave to The New Yorker in 2023.
His parents joined the brothers a couple of years later, and the family decamped to Oregon, where Huang would excel at school and eventually attend Oregon State University, majoring in electrical engineering.
There, he met his lab partner and future wife, Lori Mills.
After college, Huang worked at chipmakers (including AMD, now a Nvidia competitor) and studied for a master’s degree at Stanford. By 30, he was married, with two children, and found himself in a Denny’s sketching a plan for a company that would, one day, become central to the spread of a paradigm-shifting technology.
Huang is known to be a difficult and exacting boss with a track record of publicly scolding staff. He dislikes workplace hierarchy and told Fridman in a separate podcast that he has more than 60 direct reports and doesn’t hold one-on-one meetings.
Despite this intensity, staff are fiercely loyal. Nvidia’s vertiginous share price – it’s risen 988% in the past four years – has reportedly made a good chunk o