| Sat · Nov 14, 2026 |  | DEEPDIVE |
THE SATURDAY DEEPDIVE Jensen Huang Is Out. Nvidia's Export Questions Remain. Two weeks after the first report that US officials saw him as the target of a Chinese spy effort, Nvidia's founder was gone. READ THE DEEPDIVE →Photo: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg/Getty Images, via CNN |
33 years Huang ran the company he co-founded in 1993 | $5.8T Nvidia's market value at its October peak | 30.5% share price fall from record close to the exit |
 | By Kim Isenberg 26 min read · Records as of Nov. 13, 2026 | Forwarded? Subscribe free → |
THE SHORT VERSION
| → | The espionage claim is unproven: the attorney general says no conclusion has been reached, and parts of the intelligence community doubt it. |
| → | Huang's infidelity is admitted; the identities of the women rest on anonymous reporting. |
| → | Megaspeed's volumes and proceedings are documented, and Malaysia says it never cleared the company; a violation is not established. |
| → | By anonymous accounts, a reported relationship with a direct report moved the board; Nvidia has given no reason. |
| → | And because Nvidia was organized around its founder, one person's conduct was enough to shake a company Washington counts as strategic. |
Dear Readers,
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At 8:52 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday, November 12, the filing system of the US Securities and Exchange Commission accepted a short report from Nvidia, a so-called 8-K. The board had accepted Jensen Huang's resignation as president, chief executive and director on November 11, effective immediately1. Huang co-founded the company in 1993 and ran it for 33 years, from a graphics-chip start-up to the main supplier of the processors that AI models are trained and run on. Neither the filing nor Nvidia's press release gave a reason, and the release did not quote him.
The exit took two weeks. On October 29, the New York Times reported that US officials regarded a Chinese executive at a Singapore-based Nvidia customer as an intelligence asset, and that surveillance had shown a close relationship between her and Huang2. Ten days later Huang told his staff he had been unfaithful to his wife, and the board said it had confidence in him; three days after that, it accepted his resignation3.
Nvidia is not an ordinary company in this story. Its chips are the hardware that US export controls are built around, the rules meant to keep the most capable AI processors out of China. Washington has treated the company as a strategic asset and Huang as its voice. After a meeting between the two, the administration licensed exports of Nvidia's China-specific H20 chip, and US officials said they expected 15% or more of the revenue4,5. Suspicions that Chinese intelligence got close to its chief executive, and that its chips reached Chinese customers via Singapore, touch a question for the whole industry: can the US control where the hardware for frontier AI ends up?
The tempting version is a Chinese honey trap. The record shows three strands instead: an espionage allegation that rests on anonymous officials and an unpublished memo; reported relationships, one of them with a direct report, which Huang has admitted only in general terms; and an export-control record around the customer Megaspeed in which trade volumes and official proceedings are documented but no violation has been established. The three strands meet in one person and one company, and underneath them sits a founder's company with no chair until this week, no chief compliance officer and no named successor.
So what actually brought Jensen Huang down, and what does his fall mean for Nvidia and for its relationship with Washington?
In Today's Issue: what happened and when, who is involved and how firmly we know it, who takes over, and what the fall means for Nvidia's stock, its earnings and its standing in Washington. Records as of November 13, 2026, 11 a.m. Eastern time; share prices as of Friday's close.
All the best,
Kim Isenberg
Kim IsenbergTHE DEEPDIVE · 9 CHAPTERS
How Jensen Huang Fell, and What His Fall Exposes About Nvidia and Washington
Jensen Huang at Nvidia's GTC Berlin keynote on October 21, 2026, eight days before the first New York Times report. (Photo: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg/Getty Images, via CNN)
CHAPTER 01
The run-up: a customer called Megaspeed
In March 2023 the Chinese gaming and cloud company 7Road, whose owners included China's central and local governments according to The New York Times (NYT), spun off its Singapore subsidiary under the name Megaspeed. Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, the executive at the center of the later reports, was registered as one of its directors from March to November 20236. By Bloomberg's account, Megaspeed became Nvidia's largest buyer in Southeast Asia7.
Shipping records show where much of the hardware went. The NYT analyzed customs data from the provider ImportGenius and found nearly $2 billion of Nvidia equipment delivered to Megaspeed's Malaysian subsidiary Speedmatrix between June 2024 and June 2025. Most of it came from Aivres, the US arm of the Chinese server maker Inspur, which has been on the Entity List since 2023, the US trade blacklist whose members need a licence to receive American technology6. A second NYT analysis counts at least $4.8 billion of equipment going to a Malaysian sister company between June 2024 and February 20262. The windows overlap and the companies are defined differently, so the figures cannot be added.
Megaspeed's office at Ocean Financial Centre in Singapore on November 10, 2026. (Photo: Taryn Ng/AFP/Getty Images, via CNN)
Two New York Times analyses of ImportGenius trade data tie billions of dollars of Nvidia hardware to Megaspeed's Malaysian affiliates. The windows overlap, so the figures must not be added, and neither shows that the hardware reached China or that any law was broken. (Source: The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2025 and Oct. 29, 2026; chart: Superintelligence)
What the data do not show matters as much. Export controls govern where advanced chips may be shipped, and a former Commerce Department official told CNN that a gap in the rules let Chinese customers use such chips remotely, by renting computing power in data centers outside China8. When a US export official visited Megaspeed's Malaysian data center in September 2024, the equipment was still in its boxes, and in 2025 the NYT found no conclusive evidence that the hardware had moved on to China6. Megaspeed says reviews by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), Malaysia's trade ministry and Nvidia found "no evidence of any violations"9. Malaysia contradicted that on November 13: its trade ministry says it "has never cleared" Megaspeed or Speedmatrix, calls its site visits routine monitoring of the data-center sector, and is working with customs to determine whether chips brought into Malaysia were re-exported, and if so, legally10.
In 2025 the threads drew together. Singapore opened an investigation into Megaspeed in February. In June, Nvidia stopped all sales and shipments to Megaspeed, according to its spokesperson, and Singapore police questioned Alice Huang and took her passport4,11. Yet Malaysian trade data analyzed by Bloomberg show Megaspeed importing at least 17,544 of Nvidia's GB300 units, worth about $787 million, in November 2025; how they reached the company is unexplained12. That summer, Nvidia's general counsel Tim Teter contacted Jeffrey Kessler, the head of BIS. Shortly afterwards the Commerce inquiry into Megaspeed was paused at the Justice Department's request and moved to the Justice Department (DOJ), which according to anonymous sources now runs a criminal investigation4,13.
The WSJ on why the Justice Department took over the Megaspeed case, citing anonymous sources. (Source: The Wall Street Journal, "How Jensen Huang's Affair Spiraled Into a National Security Nightmare", Nov. 9, 2026; highlight added)
A new report adds a location in China. Citing financing filings, Bloomberg reported on November 13 that 193 servers worth about $73 million, among them machines with Nvidia's restricted H800, H100 and H200 chips, sat in a Shanghai data center and had been pledged as collateral in January 2025 by a unit of Shanghai Longteng Intelligent Computing; Megaspeed had used a rendering of the facility in a 2024 investor presentation14. Bloomberg describes Shanghai Longteng as a company founded by Alice Huang, but corporate records show she gave up her shares in 2017, and the filings show neither how the servers were acquired nor whether she was involved. A person familiar with the transaction told Bloomberg that Dell originally sold the servers to Aperia, a Singapore company; Dell said it stopped sales and support to Aperia in February 2025; Aperia denies wrongdoing, Super Micro says its sales complied with US export rules, and Nvidia declined to comment14.
Bloomberg's account of the Shanghai collateral filings, including what they do not show. (Source: Bloomberg, "Alice Huang-Linked Firm Procured Banned Nvidia Chips in China", Nov. 13, 2026; highlight added)
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