Jensen Huang’s Week From Hell: Out at Nvidia, Called to Testify, and Reuters Reports Another Employee Relationship

The Full Story

The Timeline, Day by Day

Late October: Reporting begins to tie Huang to Alice Huang (no relation), also known as Huang Le, a Chinese businesswoman who was a top executive at Singapore data-center firm Megaspeed in 2023. Huang told Bloomberg on Oct. 29 their interactions were “completely normal and not unusual,” according to Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow. U.S. officials believed she had been recruited by China’s top intelligence agency, the New York Times reported, per the BBC.

Nov. 5: The chairs of House Foreign Affairs (Brian Mast), the Select Committee on China (John Moolenaar) and House Intelligence (Rick Crawford) ask Huang to brief them behind closed doors on Nov. 18 about Alice Huang and Nvidia’s protections against foreign spying. They give him until Nov. 11 to answer.

Sunday, Nov. 8: Huang admits in a staff email that he was “unfaithful” to his wife, without naming anyone, and Nvidia’s board opens an outside investigation while saying it still has confidence in him. Our story from that day.

Monday, Nov. 9: Trump says the FBI is looking into the Alice Huang matter and that Huang told him he had “no idea she was a spy.” Trump says he believes him.

Tuesday, Nov. 10: The board hires Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and former acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim to run the investigation. That same day, Trump called Huang and urged him to keep fighting for his job, the New York Times later reported, citing two people briefed on the call.

Wednesday, Nov. 11: The New York Times reports a second relationship, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, who reported to him (our story). The Wall Street Journal reports the board is preparing to oust him (our story). The board meets that night. Mast later says Huang agreed that day to testify.

Thursday, Nov. 12: Nvidia announces Huang’s resignation. Trump floats a replacement on Truth Social, then tells Stephen A. Smith that Huang is “going through hell.” Reuters reports a relationship with a second Nvidia employee. Sen. Tim Scott asks Huang to testify Dec. 3.

Friday, Nov. 13: The BBC reports Huang has been “summoned” to testify before Congress, and the Financial Times publishes “The downfall of Jensen Huang,” which says that after 33 years building Nvidia into the world’s most valuable company, its founder’s career fell apart in less than two weeks.

The Exit: 33 Years, Three Lines

Nvidia’s announcement was brisk. Huang resigned as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately. Colette Kress, CFO since 2013, will run the company on an interim basis while also staying CFO, and the board will look at inside and outside candidates. Harvey C. Jones, a former Synopsys CEO, is now chair, a job Nvidia never had before.

The release thanked Huang for “immeasurable contributions” and did not mention the affairs. There was no quote from Huang, which plenty of people online read as a sign of how voluntary this was. Nvidia still plans to report quarterly results on Tuesday, Nov. 17.

The money side is brutal. Nvidia lost about $550 billion in market value in five days, the BBC reported, the steepest five-day drop since it went public. Shares fell 5.5% on Thursday alone, according to Reuters.

Bloomberg, citing people close to him, described Huang in his final hours as defeated, and reported he called himself a “piece of shit.” That is Bloomberg’s account; Huang has not spoken publicly since the resignation, and a personal representative declined to comment to the BBC.

The Affairs, and What Is Only Reported

Huang has admitted to one thing on the record: being “unfaithful” to his wife of 40 years, Lori Huang. He did not name anyone.

Everything else comes from reporting. The woman at the center of the first story is Alice Huang, identified by the New York Times. The second, per the Times, is Kimberly Powell, a longtime Nvidia executive who reported to him; BBC sources said employees had noticed the two were unusually close. Powell has not responded to requests for comment.

Then came the Reuters exclusive by Max A. Cherney and Alexandra Alper: Huang “had an intimate relationship with a second employee, according to two people familiar with the matter.” Reuters is not naming her and could not reach her. Nvidia declined to comment, and Huang, Powell and the board’s representative did not reply, Reuters said. If it holds up, that makes three relationships in reporting, two with people inside the company. The headlines have been calling it the “third affair.”

The Alleged Spy Link

The national-security piece is why this left the gossip pages. Megaspeed, the company Alice Huang helped run, had been suspected of helping divert Nvidia chips to China, which it says was investigated and debunked, and Singapore has been investigating it over alleged sanctions-dodging, the BBC reported. Singapore said this week it barred her from returning.

But here is the twist the spy narrative now has to deal with. On Thursday, Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department has not concluded whether she was a Chinese spy, though the FBI is “of course” investigating. CNN reported that some U.S. intelligence officials say what has been collected so far does not prove she was acting for Beijing. China’s foreign ministry calls the allegations “entirely groundless.” Nvidia’s board has said it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised.

So, to be clear: “alleged Chinese spy” is how the BBC and others describe her, based on what U.S. officials told reporters. It is not a charge and not a finding.

Congress Wants Him on the Record

Here is where the “summoned” headline comes from, and the precise version matters. On Thursday, Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, sent letters asking Huang to testify publicly on Dec. 3 and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Dec. 10, the BBC reported. Scott asked Huang to appear voluntarily but warned the committee could issue a subpoena. “The American people deserve answers,” Scott posted on X. Lutnick has agreed to appear.

Over in the House, the three Republican chairs are still sorting out their closed-door session. Mast told The Hill that Huang has agreed to come in and that they are negotiating “which day, which attorneys, his personnel,” adding that it is “likely going to be under oath, transcribed, video recorded.” Mast told reporters Huang agreed to testify by Thanksgiving, TechCrunch reported, while the BBC says the House letter now points to Dec. 1. The date is not locked. Moolenaar told ABC News that if talks fall through, “all three chairs have said we will use our subpoena power.”

Mast did not pretend to be neutral about the man: “Jensen and I have been very at odds as some of you already know on export controls,” he said, per TechCrunch, “but he has some very serious questions to answer.” Democrats want in too. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted that Congress “must demand answers from Mr. Huang and others at Nvidia,” and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked the administration to preserve records on Nvidia chip exports to China, ABC reported.

Trump: “He’s Going Through Hell”

Trump has been Huang’s most powerful friend, and he still sounds like one. In a Thursday interview with Stephen A. Smith, he called Huang a “tremendous talent” and said Huang phoned him the day before he resigned. “I spoke to him yesterday. He’s going through hell. What he feels most badly about is his wife and family,” Trump said, as quoted by Business Insider and Forbes.

Asked if Huang should have stepped down, Trump made it all about the spy question: “Was the woman a spy, and I don’t know if that’s been determined yet, but if the woman was a spy, yes, if the woman was not a spy, perhaps it would be different.” He predicted Huang will “end up on his feet,” per The Verge.

He also already has a replacement in mind. Forbes’ Siladitya Ray noted that Trump again touted Tim Cook, who recently stepped back from Apple’s CEO job, writing on Truth Social that “A Legend replaces a Legend!” That is Trump’s pitch, not Nvidia’s; the board says it is running its own search, and Cook has said nothing publicly about it.

From the Archive: The China Debate He Once Called “Lunacy”

An older clip is making the rounds again this week, and the timing explains why. In an April 2026 episode of the Dwarkesh Podcast, recorded when Huang was still CEO, host Dwarkesh Patel read him Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s line comparing chip sales to China to selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that Boeing made the missile casings. “Comparing AI to anything that you just mentioned is lunacy,” Huang shot back, as Business Insider reported at the time.

When Patel pushed the enriched-uranium comparison, Huang called it “a lousy analogy” and “an illogical analogy,” and said, “We’re not enriched uranium. It’s a chip, and it’s a chip that they can make themselves.” Later in the exchange he added, “You’re not talking to somebody who woke up a loser,” calling the idea of conceding China’s market a “losing mindset” that “makes no sense to me.”

Nothing in that interview touches the affairs or Alice Huang. It is a past conversation about export policy, from months before any of this broke. But it is the clearest look at the argument he was making in Washington while, according to later reporting, U.S. officials were already worried about who was close to him.

PCP Take

Strip away the memes (“at this point it’s easier to have an intimate relationship with Jensen Huang than it is to buy an RTX 5090” was one of the week’s best, from The Verge’s Tom Warren) and you are left with two stories stacked on top of each other.

One is old-fashioned corporate governance: a CEO, relationships with people who worked for him, and a hotel moment a bystander reportedly filmed and was then offered an NDA over, per the Times. Boards have pushed out CEOs for less, and Intel and McDonald’s did exactly that. The other is a geopolitical thriller whose central claim, that Alice Huang was a Chinese asset, is getting softer, not harder, by the day.

Here is the irony nobody planned. Huang spent years telling Washington that treating chips like weapons was “lunacy.” Now his career has ended in exactly the kind of national-security fight he said made no sense, and the next round is in a hearing room. Whether you think he was a reckless founder, a target, or both, the questions on Dec. 3 will be about chips, not his marriage. That is the hearing to watch.

50 Cent Has a Job Offer

The pop-culture pile-on did not take long. On Nov. 12, 50 Cent posted an AI-generated version of his “P.I.M.P.” video that, Billboard and Complex reported, puts Huang in Snoop Dogg’s place. In the caption, he joked, “Jensen don’t sweat it come be head of AI at G-Unit film & television.” It is a bit, not a hiring announcement, and it tells you how fast the week jumped from a boardroom to a punchline.

Watch @50cent’s reel on Instagram

50 Cent on Instagram, Nov. 12, 2026. View the original post.

What We Don’t Know Yet

Who the second employee in the Reuters report is, and whether Nvidia’s investigation confirms any of the reported relationships.

Whether Alice Huang was working for Chinese intelligence. The DOJ says it has not decided, and the FBI is still investigating.

Whether Huang shows up voluntarily on Dec. 3 and for the House session, or whether anyone actually issues a subpoena.

Who runs Nvidia next. Kress is interim; the board is searching. We will update this story when Huang, Nvidia or the committees go on the record.

More coverage is on our Tech & AI page, and Huang’s profile is on our Who’s Who.