Who is Jensen Huang and why is the Nvidia CEO scandal important?

In terms of corporate fallout, what's happened at Nvidia has been huge.

The company, seen as the darling of the AI era, has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value since it was revealed that its chief executive Jensen Huang had an affair with a suspected Chinese spy.

Nvidia and Mr Huang are now being sued, accused of ⁠defrauding shareholders by concealing the affair.

Nvidia has both benefited from and brought about the global AI revolution.

And, as CEOs go, few are as synonymous with a company as Jensen Huang.

"Treating this simply as a sex scandal misses the point," technology strategist Josh Kennedy-White says.

"The real issue is whether personal access to one of the world's most strategically important executives became a channel for intelligence gathering or influence."

Born in Taiwan, Mr Huang moved to the US at the age of nine and at some point, he naturalised as a US citizen.

At 17, he attended university in Oregon where he met his wife Lori Mills, who was two years his senior.

Both were studying electrical engineering and Mr Huang has previously recounted using the pick-up line: "Do you wanna see my homework?"

They had weekly study dates, became lab partners and, five years later, married.

In an interview with a magazine at his alma mater in 2013, he described how his wife's support has always been unconditional.

"Ever since I was 18, she was there believing in me and knowing I could do it. Even when I had self doubts, she didn't," he said.

The two went on to have two children, Spencer and Madison Huang, who both now hold executive roles at Nvidia.

In 1993, at a diner in San Jose, Mr Huang met with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, fellow engineers he'd worked with in the chip industry since the late 1980s.

There they came up with Nvidia, starting with just $40,000 in capital. In order to incorporate the business, the three founders chucked in $200 a piece.

Originally gaming was the focus. The founders believed the PC gaming market was set to grow and would need more powerful graphics processing.

After a near business-ending initial failure, Nvidia invented what's regarded as the world's first Graphics Processing Unit in 1999. The chips could make advanced computer graphics allowing for advanced 3D environments in video games and perform huge numbers of calculations in parallel.

It wasn't long before developers realised their uses could go far beyond gaming.

"We created the world's first programmable accelerator," Mr Huang said in 2023.

"And the benefit of an accelerator is whatever you designed it to do, it does it incredibly efficiently."

Nvidia's chips, by all accounts, are unparalleled. They're so hot, companies struggle to get their hands on them, and the metrics of Nvidia's growth are dizzying.

To give you a sense of some of the numbers: Its shares have increased some 477,000 per cent since listing in 1999; almost five-fold in the past five years.

For Mr Huang, who is estimated to own about 3.5 per cent of the company, his wealth has skyrocketed.

According to Forbes, he was worth $2 billion in 2017 — and now, about $154 billion, putting him in the top 10 most wealthy people in the world.

With his trademark leather jackets and high-profile product launches, Mr Huang is omnipresent at Nvidia.

Its website lists him as co-founder, president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.

And many of the company's executives are relatives of Huang.

Nvidia, and Mr Huang, have walked a fine line balancing the demands of Washington and Beijing.

Nvidia is headquartered in California with the vast majority of its chips produced by the chipmaker TSMC in Taiwan, along with some production in the US and South Korea.

The US restricted the exports of chips to China in 2022, citing it as an issue of national defence.

It's been a huge point of contention between the world's two superpowers with Beijing racing to develop its own semiconductor industry.

Mr Huang, who is one of US President Donald Trump's closest allies in Silicon Valley, has tried to push the administration to loosen restrictions.

He's argued that American companies should be able to compete globally and that it would prevent China's chip industry developing too powerfully.

He's had some success. Earlier this year Washington gave the greenlight for Nvidia to sell its second-tier chip (the H200) to Chinese companies, so long as they could take a 25 per cent cut.

There have also been reports about Chinese companies illegally getting access to US chip technology through the backdoor.

One company, for example, is a Singapore cloud computing firm Megaspeed which is being investigated by the US over suspicions it's helping get Nvidia AI chips into China.

The Wall Street Journal reports Alice Huang, the alleged Chinese spy who had an affair with Mr Huang, was previously Megaspeed's boss.

It was in this capacity that she allegedly met Mr Huang at an Nvidia event in California in 2024. It's not known how long the affair lasted nor where Ms Huang is now. She has not responded to journalist requests for comment.

Now the affair is part of an FBI investigation, with Mr Trump saying he "was amazed" by the allegations.

"I know the FBI is looking into it … I think that he'll be in good shape," he said.

US lawmakers say Congress is likely to tighten China's access to US chips as part of the fallout while Nvidia's board has launched an internal investigation.

"The so-called Chinese spy narrative is purely a groundless accusation, slander, and a smear," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said.

Josh Kennedy-White, chief commercial officer at strategic communications firm IN2, said the scandal exposes the danger of making one company and one individual so indispensable to the global AI economy.

"The Huang affair is a reminder that the most valuable target may not be a government official," he told ABC News.

Jensen Huang hasn't tweeted or released anything public since he sent staff a letter on Sunday.

"I owe my family and all of you an apology," he wrote.

"I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."