Simon Campanello: Espionage and infidelity have rocked the world's most important companies

The tech moguls in Silicon Valley are not always a likable bunch.

Mark Zuckerberg brags about how he hunts wild boar with a bow and feeds the beef cows on his ranch with beer to produce the world's best meat. Elon Musk spends his nights spewing hate and pubescent humor on the app he owns, and so on.

In this context, Jensen Huang has been a hero figure. A likable and seemingly down-to-earth father type, even if his uniform consists of Tom Ford leather jackets that cost a couple of months' wages each.

He's a real engineering guy, a self-proclaimed geek, who confidently led his chip company for over 30 years, from the first graphics cards for 3D games to becoming the biggest winner of the AI ​​boom.

But Huang's image has taken a serious hit in the past week.

It started with a revelation in the New York Times that Chinese business executive Alice Huang (they are not related, just have the same last name), who was close to Jensen Huang, was singled out as a spy. She has been the head of the Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, which reportedly helps Chinese tech companies circumvent the US export ban on powerful AI chips.

The Americans do not want Nvidia's strongest chip to end up in the hands of the Chinese, because they are afraid of being outclassed in the AI ​​race. Megaspeed is said to have gotten around the ban by building data centers around Southeast Asia, filling them with Nvidia chips, and then leasing the computing power to Chinese tech companies. A multi-billion dollar project that no one really knows how it was financed.

But that's not enough. Alice Huang is thus said to have provided Chinese authorities with information, about what is unclear. But Jensen Huang, as the leader of the AI ​​boom's most important company and a close ally of Donald Trump, is of course a brilliant target for a suspected honey trap.

Over the weekend, the story took a new turn when Jensen Huang admitted that he and Alice Huang were more than just business partners. Now an affair of infidelity is also shaking the chip giant's management.

After photos of the two partying and mingling circulated, Nvidia initially claimed that the relationship between them was strictly business. But after Jensen Huang has now admitted and apologized for the affair, the company's board has acted.

During Sunday came the news that the company is appointing an independent investigation into Jensen Huang "being a target for foreign intelligence".

The board certifies that they continue to have full confidence in their founder and CEO and that he will continue to work as usual during the investigation. But the announcement still caused Nvidia's share price to fall five percent in pre-market trading - even though Donald Trump was quick to defend Huang with words like: "I think he's an honest guy".

All this comes after a tough week where Nvidia lost its position as the world's most valued company to Apple. A price drop that is not primarily due to the spy drama, but the blue wave that swept over the American mid-term elections. It probably paves the way for stricter regulation of the AI ​​sector, something that would disadvantage Nvidia.

The question many are now asking is whether Jensen Huang can continue to lead what many describe as the world's most important company right now. Or whether the 63-year-old will finally hand over the CEO role - and how that can affect both companies and the AI ​​sector.