A closer look

Monday, November 9, is the first US stock market opening since Jensen Huang admitted to having an affair. How will the stock price move? Nobody knows.
On November 8, Jensen Huang sent a letter to all employees, 257 words long.
"I owe my family and all of you an apology." The extramarital affair is true, "I was unfaithful to my wife, there is no excuse."
On the same day, the Nvidia board announced it has hired outside lawyers to establish an independent committee to investigate him.
On October 29, The New York Times first broke this story, and Nvidia's stock price plunged about 3% that day. Monday, November 9, is the first US market opening after he admitted it.
The female lead is named Huang Le, Alex Huang, a Chinese businesswoman. Jensen Huang's letter did not mention her name, but the whole world knows it is her. US intelligence agencies have determined that she is a spy recruited by China's Ministry of State Security, and her mission was to get close to Jensen Huang.
Two appearances together, both in Taipei.
One night on a certain day in June 2024, Jensen Huang was drinking and celebrating with several important Asian clients of Nvidia at a bar in Taipei; a company called Night Thunder posted photos of that night on LinkedIn, and Huang Le was sitting beside him. At that time, her identity was a senior executive at the Singaporean data center company MSPEED, claiming that she would buy 2 billion USD worth of Nvidia AI equipment over the next year.
In May 2025, during the computer show, Jensen Huang had dinner with several AI suppliers in Taipei; as he walked out of the restaurant and accepted an interview with Taiwanese media, the camera captured the person behind him was again Huang Le. Both are surnamed Huang, but they have no family relationship.
The New York Times reported on these two photos back in October 2025; at that time, everyone only cared about chip smuggling, and nobody knew that US intelligence agencies were already monitoring this person.
Huang Le's resume is written very beautifully: in a Chinese private equity database, she is smiling brilliantly in a red dress, identified as a fund manager and executive director of the "Shanghai Hexi Investment" fund. The resume says she served as a reporter for Hunan TV and CCTV News for about 4 years, and later worked in the financial industry for 8 years, serving as a deputy assistant to a head of HSBC's private banking department and a vice president of securities business at CITIC Securities.
The New York Post asked Hunan TV, and an executive replied: "Never heard of this person." On the websites of Hunan TV and CCTV, no reporter articles signed with her name can be found.
Externally, she calls herself the CEO of MSPEED; company documents show that she was only listed as Managing Director for the first 8 months after the company's founding, after which her name was removed.
The New York Times interviewed tech industry investors familiar with MSPEED, who said Huang Le and her partners often bragged to people about her relationship with Jensen Huang, using this relationship to attract investment. Her own private social media accounts also posted photos of Jensen Huang.
Now look at the chips. MSPEED is headquartered in Singapore, and its business is building data centers in Southeast Asia and renting out AI computing power. Customs records obtained by The New York Times show that from June 2024 to February 2026, MSPEED's affiliated companies in Malaysia bought a total of at least several hundred million USD worth of advanced AI equipment containing Nvidia chips, a large portion of which was bought through a US subsidiary of Inspur, a major Chinese server manufacturer. Inspur's parent company had long been placed on the US export control blacklist for building supercomputers for the Chinese military, but its US subsidiary was not sanctioned.
According to MSPEED's claim, the chip entities did not enter China; Chinese companies only rented computing power remotely. According to current rules, this practice itself is not necessarily illegal and is a loophole that US export controls have not plugged to this day. But if MSPEED was actually buying chips on behalf of Chinese enterprises or smuggling them into China, then it is illegal.
In September 2024, US Department of Commerce officials checked its server room in Malaysia and found many expensive Nvidia devices still in boxes, not opened at all. Those in the know understand that you first put out the equipment for the inspectors to see, and then move it elsewhere after they leave.
There is another set of data that is even more absurd: up until November 2025, MSPEED imported a total of approximately 136,000 Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia sent its own auditors to check the data center and only found a few thousand of the latest chips. A New York Times reporter went to its office in Singapore, and on a normal working day, there were actually only two employees; it is simply a shell company.
Singaporean police have already confirmed they are investigating this company, and the US Department of Commerce investigation has also been transferred to the Department of Justice. Nvidia's statement has remained unchanged, saying that these allegations of illegal shipping were thoroughly investigated last year and proven unfounded.
The October 29 New York Times report also cited people who had heard top-secret briefings saying that US intelligence agencies have already identified Huang Le as a Chinese intelligence asset, constantly passing information for Beijing. Moreover, Trump had already seen this briefing last year. The explanation is that Trump did not want to affect Nvidia's chip sales because Nvidia supports the stock market and economy, and he also did not want to make US-China relations more complicated.
The report also said that until that day, Jensen Huang had never received a so-called "defensive briefing," which is a type of warning where US intelligence agencies face-to-face notify a citizen when they discover they are being targeted by foreign spies. However, The New York Times saying this might also be to blacken Trump; it cannot be ruled out that Trump reminded him face-to-face.
On the day the report came out, Jensen Huang responded in a Bloomberg interview. He said there was nothing improper between Nvidia and MSPEED executives, the company had already checked, and MSPEED did not illegally ship Nvidia's AI processors to China. His original words were: "We have verified all the GPUs they have deployed; every single one has been counted."
On October 31, The Wall Street Journal reported that intelligence units in three places—the US, Singapore, and Taiwan—all had reason to believe Huang Le might be a Chinese spy.
A few days later, Congress officially stepped in. The Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Chairman of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee—three Republican chairs—jointly wrote a letter to Jensen Huang. The letter was written on November 4 and made public on the 5th. The letter referred to Huang Le as the "Chinese intelligence asset" in the public reports and required Jensen Huang to attend a closed-door briefing jointly held by the three committees on November 18 to explain his dealings with Huang Le and what security mechanisms Nvidia has to prevent foreign adversary espionage, and he must reply by November 11 on whether he accepts. There was also a sentence in the letter: "Congress must determine to what extent US national security has been placed in danger."
The day before November 18 happens to be the day Nvidia announces its third-quarter financial report. There is another background: on November 3, the US just held midterm elections, with the Democrats taking both the Senate and the House simultaneously; the new Congress will take office in January next year, and the chairs of these three committees will all change to Democrats. Those sending the letter now are Republicans, and those taking over next year are Democrats; both parties in Congress intend to pursue this matter to the end.
On November 6, The New York Times officially reported that secret briefings from the Trump administration said Huang Le is an agent of the CCP's Ministry of State Security, with two layers of missions: one is to probe details of AI chips, and the other is to push Nvidia to persuade the US government to open chips to China. The report also said that Huang Le has wide connections, including not only Jensen Huang but also senior executives at Gigabyte in Taiwan, linked to a network of enterprises and investors centered in Shanghai and Zhejiang.
On the same day, the British Financial Times also followed up with a report, stating that the US government believes there was a romantic relationship between Jensen Huang and Huang Le. This memorandum had already spread among a small group of high-level US government officials before Trump went to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping. Rubio had also warned top government officials before Trump's visit to Beijing this May, saying Jensen Huang was closely related to a Chinese spy. This memorandum was drafted this spring under Rubio's supervision and listed as top secret, based on intelligence agencies' electronic surveillance of Huang Le, and was distributed to a group of officials with high-level security clearances before Trump's visit.
When Trump was in Beijing, Jensen Huang was not initially among the invited accompanying business and tech moguls. Later reports said that after Trump knew Jensen Huang was not invited, he personally called Jensen Huang; Jensen Huang then flew to Alaska and boarded the plane during the presidential aircraft's layover.
The Financial Times also reported that US national security officials had long been privately dissatisfied with Jensen Huang because he had personally lobbied Trump earlier this year, wanting Nvidia's H200 chips to be sold to China.
An affair for an ordinary person is a private matter, and the public should not normally interfere. Jensen Huang's wife has not said anything publicly to this day; outsiders have no standing to gossip. But the trouble is that the object of his affair is someone identified by US intelligence agencies as a CCP spy; in this way, it involves the interests of a vast number of shareholders and becomes a national security issue that the public has the right to question.
The CCP Foreign Ministry said this is groundless speculation, and Hu Xijin said this is a spy novel. These words coming from the CCP's mouth are a bit funny; Chinese people themselves understand this best, the 31st stratagem in the "Thirty-Six Stratagems" is called the Honey Trap, even primary school students know this. The official WeChat account of the same Ministry of State Security has frequently published articles in the last two years reminding Chinese civil servants and researchers to be careful of foreign spies, with many cases saying people were dragged down through methods of making friends or discussing feelings. In the State Security Ministry's own publicity, such methods truly exist and are very common threats; how is it that when US reports say China uses the same method, it becomes groundless speculation?
Thinking one layer deeper: that this matter has escalated to this point is partly the consequence of Old Huang offending the US hawks. Looking through his speeches over the past two years, almost every sentence steps on the pain points of the DC national security circle. At last year's Taipei computer show, he publicly said that US export controls on China were a failure; in a podcast program in September of the same year, pointing to those in DC who are tough on China, he called them "China hawks," using this label as a mark of shame.
The Financial Times reported that US national security officials were privately dissatisfied with him long ago. If you look from the perspective of intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of State—people who treat China as the number one adversary every day—what this man says in front of the president is almost always the opposite of their judgement, and yet the president always listens to him. The position of every department in the US government depends on which seat he is sitting in, and a country's decision is often the result of mutual gaming between various departments. Following this train of thought, leaking is the most commonly used weapon in power struggles.
A memorandum listed as top secret begins to appear paragraph by paragraph in The New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal one week before the midterm elections; it is hard to say this is a coincidence. High probability is that someone inside the US government felt that normal channels could not manage Trump, so they let the media and Congress manage this matter. However, even if the information is true and was truly released by hawks, the motive for releasing the information cannot change the content of the information itself: Jensen Huang himself has already admitted to an extramarital affair, an extramarital affair with a Chinese spy; this point has nothing to do with who released the information.
In that 257-word letter, Jensen Huang specially emphasized at the end that he is "committed to protecting Nvidia and supporting US national security." This sentence is a surrender to the US hawks.
Bloomberg describes this as a crisis that Nvidia has never encountered in its 30 years of founding. Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in 1993; for 30 years, he has been the only CEO, personally holding about 870 million shares, accounting for 3.58% of the company. Nvidia's annual reports have written for many years that "the company relies on senior leadership," and up to today, the company has not had any successor.
He will not step down for the time being, but after this incident, his influence in DC is much less than before. Whether advanced chips can be sold to China was originally decided by US government export licenses, and had nothing to do with him having the final say. However, his past advocacy for easing restrictions, once considered possibly influenced by emotion, has its credibility greatly discounted; as a result, it conversely gives those advocating for tightening the most powerful reason, and the easing plans originally under discussion will also be harder to pass.
On November 17, Nvidia will announce its third-quarter financial report; will analysts ask about this on the call at that time, and how exactly will he answer? To what extent will the board's independent investigation go? Will the investigations by the US Department of Justice and Singaporean police on MSPEED have results? Will Huang Le herself appear?
136,000 GPUs, found on the books, not found in the server rooms. He admitted to 257 words; for the remaining hundred thousand or so chips, nobody has taken account yet.