The Second Secret That Got Jensen Huang Removed in 24 Hours

Has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team. Nvidia's board wrote that about Jensen Huang on a Sunday. Four days later, the same board told the SEC it had accepted his resignation, effective immediately after 33 years in charge. What reached that board in between was a second secret, and it took less than a day to finish him. The filing gives no reason, and there isn't a single word in it from him. It's signed by Colette Kress, his chief financial officer since 2013, who by the time she signed it was already the interim CEO and who'll stay on as chief financial officer until they find someone permanent. A few lines down, there's something NVIDIA had never had in its whole history, a chair of the board. They picked Harvey Jones, who's 73 and has sat on that board since 1993, the year the company started. In the press release, Jones used a word the board had used four days earlier. The board, he said, had full confidence, this time in Colette and the leadership team. Cress's line was about customers, partners, developers, and shareholders. Neither of them mentioned what had happened. When the market opened that Thursday, the stock fell more than 13% and Nvidia slipped below $4 trillion. By the close, it had clawed most of that back and finished down a little over 4%. About $2 trillion of the company's value had gone since its peak on October 6th, and Bernstein cut its price target on the stock in half that day, from $400 to $200. A fund manager, Richard Rael of Questar Capital Partners, said the missing succession plan made Nvidia uninvestable, and the analyst Stacey Rasgan said it wasn't clear who could be the visionary to lead it next. Yet the rulebook he left behind, NVIDIA's code of conduct, opens with a letter signed by Jensen. The trust that board was standing on had already been tested once. On October 29th, the New York Times reported that US intelligence officials believed Beijing had recruited a woman named Alice Huang to gather information about him. She's no relation. She was a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company that sells computing power for AI, and Megaspeed had bought more than $4.8 billion worth of Nvidia chips over about two years. A day after the story, Nvidia stopped being the most valuable company in the world. China's foreign ministry would later call the whole claim nothing but smears. Megaspeed hadn't been around long. It began as the Singapore arm of a Chinese gaming company, which was sold in 2023, renamed Megaspeed and turned toward AI data services, with Alice Huang as its managing director. By the weekend after the Times story, it wasn't only Washington. Officials in the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan had all suspected she could be working for Chinese intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported. Jensen Huang and Alice Huang had been photographed together at events in Taiwan in 2024 and again in 2025. Huang told Bloomberg his dealings with her were completely normal and not unusual, and for 10 days, that answer held. US intelligence had been watching Alice Huang for more than a year, and he reportedly never got the warning Americans sometimes get when a foreign service is working on them. Officials might have worried that warning him would tip her off. NVIDIA has said that if the threat was real, it would have expected to be told. The president had been briefed, the Times said, about a year before the story came out, and in the spring a classified memo went around top officials about how close the two of them were. One warning wasn't secret at all. In May, a short seller called Culper Research published a report betting against Nvidia, and in it, the relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang was called uncomfortably close. That day, Nvidia's stock went up about 3%. Megaspeed itself had been under investigation since 2024. Commerce department investigators were looking into whether it had helped Chinese customers get advanced Nvidia chips around US export rules, and Singapore opened an inquiry of its own NVIDIA's general counsel, Tim Teeter, contacted those commerce investigators in August 2025, saying a senior official had given him permission. They turned the meeting down and passed the request up to Jeffrey Kessler, a commerce undersecretary, who said the inquiry should carry on by the book. The Justice Department later took the case over, and today it's a It's a criminal investigation into Megaspeed. None of it had cost him his job. Eight days before he resigned, the chairman of three House committees wrote to Huang asking him to explain his contacts with Alice Huang and how NVIDIA guards against spies at a closed-door briefing on November 18th. They gave him until November 11th to say yes or pick another day. That date was a Wednesday. In their words, it was vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk. Two days after the letter, the reporting went further. A memo circulating among top U.S. officials, the Times said, called her an asset of China's Ministry of State Security. And a U.S. government memo, the Financial Times reported, described a romantic relationship between them. On Sunday, he answered the reporting himself in a memo to everyone at NVIDIA. I was unfaithful to my wife, he wrote. My actions hurt her and our children. And a little further down. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it. He left her name out, and China too, apart from the national security concerns he said news reports had raised, and he promised to cooperate with an investigation. The board answered that day as well. It opened an independent investigation, overseen by a committee of independent directors with an outside law firm advising, said it had no reason to believe national security or NVIDIA's secrets had been compromised, promised to examine all available information, and put that sentence about confidence on the record. A board that writes that on a Sunday has picked a side. Nothing in the memo had changed its mind about him. It had read the worst thing he'd admitted, and kept him. Monday showed what keeping him would cost. The stock fell more than 4%, and a group of investors sued NVIDIA and Huang for fraud, accusing them of concealing his ties to what the lawsuit calls a suspected Chinese spy. The director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, and the director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, briefed congressional leaders behind closed doors about the relationship. But the board didn't move against him. It hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton on Tuesday, with June Kim, a former acting U.S. attorney leading the work, to look into whether company secrets or national security had been compromised. You hire a firm like that when you expect to be looking for a while. But on Wednesday, the pressure started running the other way, and the case against her began to look thinner in the briefing rooms on Capitol Hill. Congressman Jim Himes, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, came out of a briefing on November 11th saying he couldn't tell whether Alice Huang was a spy or a dupe. He'd asked the officials whether the FBI had even opened a counterintelligence investigation, and they didn't know. A similar point came from outside, from Fred Gao, who writes a newsletter about China. The agencies had been watching her for a long time, he wrote, And they'd released no evidence at all. As he put it, unpublished means unfalsifiable, so Beijing has nothing to rebut. If the board had been weighing a case built on China, that case was getting weaker by the day. That left Huang, on Wednesday, with a board that had just backed him in writing, a law firm that had barely started, a deadline from Congress running out, and an accusation softening in Washington. Before the market opened on Thursday, he was gone. Late that Wednesday, the New York Times published a second story, this one about his company. Huang, it said, had also had a relationship with an NVIDIA executive, a vice president who reported to him. Within minutes, the Wall Street Journal followed with a story that the board was preparing to force out Huang. That was the second secret. It was somebody in his chain of command, at a company where about 60 people answered straight to him, with no chief operating officer and no named successor. His son and his daughter both work there too, in senior product jobs. So on Sunday, he'd apologize to a company where his children work, and where the other woman did too. After the market closed, the stock dropped more than 9%, in a week that was already on course to be its sixth losing week in a row. He owned about 3.6% of Nvidia, the biggest stake of any single person, but none of the special voting shares some founders keep to protect their seat. The meeting to decide his future ran into the evening, and a person who spoke to CNBC said the board made its decision that night, after the mood quickly turned, on the report of a second alleged affair. A year of warnings from the most serious people in the country hadn't shifted him from the top job. One story about his building? Had him out within a day. NVIDIA wrote November 11th at the top of that filing, in the box where a company has to give the date of the event it's reporting. Wednesday was the day the second story ran, and the day his deadline to answer Congress ran out. Whether that deadline had anything to do with what happened that Wednesday night, the filing doesn't say. What the paperwork does show is how quickly a board can act when the problem is one it can check for itself. Take that code of conduct again, the one that opens with his letter. Personal relationships are on its list of things that may create a conflict of interest. When a conflict like that comes up, you immediately remove yourself from any decision-making role in the matter. This time it was a man at the top of a company and somebody who, by the Times account, works under him. No intelligence agency had to confirm a reporting line. The board could hold it against an org chart. There was even a playbook for the next step, because the industry had been through this kind of case before. In June 2018, an investigation by Intel's internal and external lawyers found that its chief executive, Brian Krzanich, had had a past relationship with an employee, breaking a policy that covered every manager. Intel's board accepted his resignation, put its finance chief, Bob Swan, in as interim CEO, and opened a search for candidates inside and outside the company. Eight years later, NVIDIA did the same three things. It accepted a resignation, made its chief financial officer interim CEO, and said it would consider internal and external candidates, in the same order. Ethics questions under that code go to a compliance committee the board set up. NVIDIA operates without a chief compliance officer, and it has said the committee is made up of its head of operations, its head of human resources, and its finance chief, Colette Kress, the woman who signed the filing. Here's how I read it. Jensen Huang wasn't removed for the secret that frightened Washington. He was removed for the secret his board could prove on its own, with its rulebook and a playbook another chip company had already written. Only the intelligence agencies could answer the China question. The second one, the board answered in an evening. Once he was gone, the China question got murkier. CNN reported that officials at the CIA believed the intelligence collected so far, including intercepted communications, had not yet proved that Alice Huang was knowingly giving information to China. Some officials in the office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly saw calling her a spy as not entirely accurate and over-torqued. The Attorney General said the Justice Department had reached no conclusion about who she is and that calling her a spy was something he'd never said. The board had its answer the night he left. Washington's question is still open, and it's about the chips. Singapore's Home Affairs Ministry barred Alice Huang, who hasn't spoken publicly at all, from entering the country after she gave its police inaccurate information. It wasn't the first time Singapore had dealt with her. It had taken her passport in an investigation and only handed it back in February. Megaspeed's answer, that same day, was to say it had cooperated with inspections and was hiring an American law firm to review its Nvidia chip inventory and its export compliance. Two weeks after the story broke, the company at the center of it is only now bringing in lawyers to count what it has. The count matters, because Nvidia chips already turn up where they shouldn't. In October, a Chinese university under US trade restrictions, Northwestern Polytechnical, bought two of Nvidia's H200 chips, and Reuters, which reported the purchase, couldn't establish where they originally came from. It's happened before in court. A man named Alan Haoshu pleaded guilty last year to exporting and trying to export more than 160 million dollars worth of restricted Nvidia chips. Tingwei Sun pleaded guilty in a New York federal court this October to diverting servers with Nvidia chips inside them to China. And Taiwan has charged nine people, one of them an Nvidia employee. Two chips is a tiny number. Two turned up at a restricted university with no trail behind them, and Megaspeed bought billions of dollars worth. Those chips are the part no resignation answers, and the man Congress wants to ask about her is coming in. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said, the day he resigned, that Huang will come and talk to them, though the date was still being worked out, and Tim Scott has asked him to testify in the Senate on December 3rd. NVIDIA reports its quarterly results before any of that, with Colette Kress running the company. He'll walk into that room, whenever it is, as a man who doesn't run NVIDIA anymore. The one person at NVIDIA who knew every conversation he'd had with her no longer works there. Of all the NVIDIA chips that went through Megaspeed, how many can Megaspeed actually account for?