AI chip manufacturer: Jensen Huang spied? What makes the Nvidia scandal so explosive

The most important chip developer is facing perhaps its biggest crisis: founder and boss Jensen Huang is said to have maintained a relationship with a Chinese agent. What is already known.

Nvidia boss Huang: The world's leading AI chip manufacturer is experiencing what is probably its biggest scandal.

Beijing, Stuttgart, Munich, Frankfurt, San Francisco, Washington. Nvidia, currently the world's most important chip developer, is launching an independent investigation into its CEO and founder Jensen Huang. This news, published on Sunday by Nvidia's board of directors, was so powerful that the AI ​​group's shares lost more than six percent at the start of trading in the USA.

What it's about is spicy: Huang cheated on his wife with a suspected Chinese agent. The Nvidia board of directors announced that a committee of independent directors would clarify the allegation with external lawyers. Huang said he would “fully cooperate.”

Even if many of the connections are still unclear, it is already clear that this is one of the global company's biggest scandals - which is also likely to have political consequences.

The Handelsblatt provides an overview of the most important questions and answers.

What happened?

The New York Times newspaper first reported late last month that Huang was said to have had a "close relationship" with a Chinese businesswoman named Alice Huang. Despite the same name, she is not related to the Nvidia founder, but is the manager of the Singapore-based company Megaspeed. The data center operator is an Nvidia customer under scrutiny for possibly helping to bring Nvidia's AI server chips to China despite a U.S. export ban.