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On Sunday, the CEO of the most valuable chip company in the world sent his employees an apology for cheating on his wife.
"I was unfaithful to my wife," Jensen Huang wrote. "My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did."
He didn't name the woman. Two weeks earlier, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence officials believe Alice Huang, an executive tied to the Nvidia chip customer Megaspeed, may have been passing information to China's Ministry of State Security.
Nvidia's chips power almost the entire AI race. That puts this story well beyond the gossip pages, and the tactic at the center of it is centuries old.
What we know, and what we don’t.
Confirmed: Huang admitted to infidelity. Nvidia's board formed a committee of independent directors and hired Wachtell Lipton to investigate. The board says it has "no reason to believe" national security or Nvidia's secrets were compromised.
Reported, not proven: The Times says Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned officials about the relationship before Huang joined President Trump's trip to Beijing in May. The Information reported that the relationship goes back to 2023 and that a web of companies tied to Alice Huang and her family helped Chinese buyers get $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips. The Times also reported that a Commerce Department inquiry into Megaspeed was halted after Nvidia's general counsel contacted officials in 2025. The Justice Department is now running a criminal investigation into Megaspeed.
Denied: China's Foreign Ministry called the report "pure fabrication out of thin air." Megaspeed says on-site reviews by Nvidia, the Commerce Department, and Malaysian authorities found no evidence of illicit chip transfers.
The fallout came fast. President Trump told reporters the FBI is "looking into" it. Rep. Brian Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he's prepared to subpoena Huang. Shareholders filed a class action accusing Nvidia of hiding the risk. On Monday, Nvidia fell about 4% on a day the broader chip index rose nearly 7%. Yahoo Finance found that was Nvidia's worst showing during a chip rally that size since 1999.
To be clear, Huang hasn't been accused of a crime, and nobody has shown that any Nvidia secret left the building. But the playbook here is one of the oldest in business.
Stolen secrets go back to the very beginning of the US.
In the 1700s, Britain banned the export of its textile machines and tried to keep the people who knew how to build them from leaving. A 21-year-old apprentice named Samuel Slater memorized as much as he could about Richard Arkwright's mills, sailed to New York in 1789, and helped launch the American textile industry in Rhode Island. Americans called him the father of the American Industrial Revolution. In the English town he left behind, he was "Slater the Traitor."
Historians still argue over how much he really rebuilt from memory. The lesson held up anyway: the most valuable technology usually leaves inside someone's head.
Then the target became people with access.
From about 2011 to 2015, a Chinese student named Christine Fang built close ties with Bay Area politicians, fundraising and volunteering for campaigns, including Rep. Eric Swalwell's. U.S. officials told Axios they believed she was working for China's main civilian spy agency. She left the country abruptly in 2015 after the FBI began asking questions.
Last year, The Times of London reported that Chinese and Russian operatives were targeting Silicon Valley tech workers through dating apps, fake investors, and even marriage. Insiders called it "sex warfare." One security consultant described getting a steady stream of polished LinkedIn requests from the same type of attractive young woman.
In tech, the thief is often already on payroll.
Before leaving Google's self-driving car project in 2016, engineer Anthony Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 confidential files, then sold his new startup to Uber. Waymo sued, and Uber settled for about $245 million in equity. Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison and was pardoned before serving a day.
Between 2022 and 2023, Google engineer Linwei Ding copied more than 2,000 pages of the company's AI chip and supercomputing secrets while quietly building his own China-based AI startup. In January, a jury delivered what prosecutors called the first AI-related economic espionage conviction. The judge later threw out the espionage counts, and in September Ding was sentenced to just under a year in prison.
The scale is hard to picture. Back in 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau was opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 12 hours.
AI raises the stakes.
When Slater crossed the Atlantic, he still had to build the mill. In AI, the prize is smaller and easier to move: a chip shipment, a design file, a set of model weights. Export controls have made Nvidia's chips one of the most sought-after things on the planet, which is exactly why a company like Megaspeed draws so much scrutiny.
The tools are changing on the attack side too. Two weeks ago I wrote about how a Chinese state-sponsored group used AI to run most of a cyberespionage campaign against about thirty organizations. Hacking keeps getting cheaper. Building trust with the right person still takes years, and when it works, it gets past every firewall.
What this means moving forward.
When I invest, I'm betting on a person as much as a product. Investors call it key person risk, and this week Nvidia became the biggest example I've ever seen. A company worth trillions saw its stock move on one man's private life.
For founders, the lesson is practical. Most security plans are built around systems: passwords, firewalls, access logs. Far fewer account for the people who have access to your most sensitive information, and who in their lives might want it. As your company becomes more valuable, so does everyone close to it.
You don't need to be paranoid. But if you work anywhere near AI, chips, defense, or a fast-growing startup, assume your work matters to someone you've never met. Some of the people who seem very curious about it will want more than a conversation.
Hit reply and tell me: should a CEO's personal life be the board's business? I read every single response.
Jenny
P.S. Open LinkedIn and look at the last ten connection requests you accepted from people you've never met. If any of them asked about your work before asking anything about you, take a second look.
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