In November 2021, Huang Renxun attended the annual dinner held by the Semiconductor Industry Association in San Jose, California. That night, the industry group presented Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with its highest honor named after Intel co-founder Robert Noyce.
Huang arrived early with his wife, Lori Huang, and quickly walked to the bar for the pre-dinner reception, calling the event his first time out since the COVID-19 lockdown began in March 2020. He introduced Lori Huang to reporters gathered nearby, but they mostly talked to him.
By the time Huang accepted the award, two hours had passed. The Nvidia leader took to the stage with a bottle of red wine and two wine glasses to share with the hosts and steer the conversation toward unexpected topics. During this time, Lori Wong remained behind the scenes.
For more than 40 years, Huang has built his fledgling chip startup into the world's most valuable company, and Lori Huang has been by his side every step of the way. Nvidia's success made him an international business star. His face appeared on sweaters, his signature leather jackets became collectibles, and his net worth soared to nearly $150 billion.
In contrast, Lori Wong stays away from the spotlight.
That changed this week when Huang, 63, revealed that he had an extramarital affair with an executive whom the U.S. government identified as a Chinese spy. In a message shared with Nvidia employees, Huang apologized to his wife and two children, who both work at Nvidia, thrusting them into the public eye.
This blockbuster news has implications for U.S. national security and the economy. Nvidia's role as a major chip supplier to the artificial intelligence industry makes Huang a key centerpiece of an industry that already dominates stock markets.
This also had an impact on his personal life. His admission sparked speculation about the fate of his 41-year marriage to Lori Wong, 64. She is the chairman of the Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Huang Foundation, which has assets of $9 billion as of 2024, including $6 billion in new funds that year. More than half of Huang's 922 million Nvidia shares belong to a trust of which Huang and Lori Huang are co-trustees, according to financial documents. She is also the sole controller of a trust that owns about $5 billion worth of Nvidia stock.
Lori Huang joins a small group of tech giant spouses who have had to deal with public infidelity. The list includes MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Melinda French Gates, the ex-wife of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The billionaire ex-wife of a tech mogul has become such a fixture in American pop culture that she inspired characters in "The Devil Wears Prada 2" and the Maya Rudolph comedy "Loot."
Among the spouses of powerful current and former business leaders, Lori Wong's public persona stands out for her low-key privateness. She has not promoted her charity work in interviews or on the conference circuit.
“Lori was unusually low-key by the standards of a billionaire couple,” said George Rush, who co-wrote the long-running gossip column “Rush & Molloy” at The Daily News.
Rush noted that this made the affair all the more noteworthy in terms of its political and financial consequences. “The relationship between Bezos and Gates doesn’t have the quality to shake up markets and have a global impact,” he said. "This is unique."
Nvidia declined to comment, and Huang did not respond to a request for comment. (China has denied the espionage charges. Huang Le, a Chinese executive accused of spying for Beijing, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Similar to other spouses of tech billionaires like Scott, Lori Huang was crucial to getting her husband's company off the ground.
In the early 1980s, as one of the few female engineering majors at Oregon State University, she met Huang. The latter was her lab partner in a basic electrical engineering class, and he had persuaded her to join him on one of his weekly study dates. He later called meeting her "the most important thing that ever happened at OSU and in my life."
After graduating and getting married, the two moved to Silicon Valley to work as microchip designers. Both men were renowned as talented engineers. In an exclusive interview with The New Yorker in 2023, Huang said that Lori Huang worked at hardware and software manufacturer Silicon Graphics, where her salary was higher than Huang's salary at semiconductor company LSI Logic.
But according to Huang's biography "The Thinking Machine," the couple struggled to find suitable child care. Before Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993, Lori Huang gave up her career to raise their children, Spencer and Madison. Huang recalled on the How I Built This With Guy Raz podcast in May that when he missed his children's karate tournament to build the company, Lori Huang never complained. "That was her gift to me."
In interviews, Huang has often expressed his deep respect for Lori Huang. “It’s good to have someone in your life who unconditionally believes in you and believes that you are doing your best,” he said in a 2014 interview with a publication run by Oregon State University. "You need people like that, and Lori has been that person for me — ever since I was 18, she's been there and believed in me and knew I could do it. Even when I had self-doubt, she didn't."
