October 2026, one month before the collapse. NVIDIA, the $5.5 trillion giant behind every AI model, was run entirely by Jensen Huang.
No number two. No succession plan.Then Jensen emailed his staff: "To my colleagues at NVIDIA, I owe my family and all of you an apology... I was unfaithful to my wife."
The woman? Alice Huang. No relation. A businesswoman and major NVIDIA customer allegedly recruited by China as a honeypot. It got worse. Three days later, the NYT reported a second affair with an executive. By morning, Jensen was out. Then Reuters revealed a third woman. Over in four days.
But two things don't fit:
- The Spy: Alice's husband, a Chinese businessman, had known Jensen for 10 years and introduced them. He called her Jensen's "personal secretary." Singapore police never investigated her for spying.
- The Timing: Washington knew about Alice a year earlier. Nobody stopped Jensen.
Was it a spy, or just a billionaire with a blind spot? NVIDIA had an answer. Singapore is just where the invoices go. Big customers get billed there, and the chips themselves are almost always shipped somewhere else. Which raises a slightly awkward question. Mr. Huang, billions in sales build to Singapore, banned chips turning up in China. Are your chips being snuck in?
"Snuck? Do you know what one of our AI systems actually looks like? A chip? It weighs two tons, almost as heavy as your mom. There are one and a half million parts, and it costs $3 million. So nobody's carrying one through the airport."
Okay, Jensen, let's go see it. Singapore, 2025, the seventh floor of a glass tower, right in the middle of the financial district. This is the headquarters of a company called
Megaspeed, one of NVIDIA's biggest customers in Asia. In about three years, it bought nearly $5 billion of NVIDIA hardware.
"Hi. Is this Megaspeed? Yes. Where is everybody? Huh? This is everybody."
Two people, on a workday. And it gets better. Megaspeed also had a branch in Australia. On paper, the man running it was a 29-year-old who worked at a new stand. Suspicious.
So what is Megaspeed? Until three years ago, it had a different name, and it belonged to a Chinese video game company. Then, five months after Washington's chip ban, it was bought by a shell company in the British Virgin Islands, renamed Megaspeed and given a new boss. The shell company was called Wang Li Limited. Wang Li is the Chinese name of Alice Huang. On paper, she stepped down after eight months. But a later investigation quoted employees who said she was still the one running it.
And Megaspeed had one job. Buy NVIDIA chips. Put them in data centers in Malaysia and other countries. Rent out the computing power. That part is legal. Malaysia isn't China. But look at the numbers. Megaspeed's revenue the year it was created: zero. Its assets, one year later: $3 billion. So where does a...
Because by now, Jensen wasn't just a CEO. He was one of Donald Trump's favorite guests. He paid a million dollars for a seat at a dinner at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort. He joined Trump on official trips to the Middle East and the UK. And NVIDIA even gave $25 million to Trump's new White House ballroom, tied for the biggest donation on the list.
But not everyone around Trump trusted Jensen, not even Trump's own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. His team wrote a classified memo about Jensen. It warned Trump that the woman close to Jensen might be a Chinese spy. So when Trump planned his big trip to Beijing, Jensen's name wasn't originally on the guest list. Until at the last minute, Trump insisted on bringing him. Jensen got on and... The president says nobody ever warned him. So that was the shield. As long as Trump liked Jensen, the blacklist stayed empty and the memo stayed in a drawer.
Then America voted. The midterm elections. The president's party lost the house, then the Senate. A blue wave. Overnight, Jensen's friends in Washington got a lot weaker, and the people who had spent years warning about China and chips got a lot stronger.
The first crack had already shown five days before the vote, a news story about Jensen and Alice Huang. After the vote, the dam broke. The secret memo leaked. Congress summoned Jensen to come and explain himself. The shield that had protected him for years was gone, and every question Washington had been sitting on came pouring out at once. Then news broke of a second affair, and a few days later, a third. That was enough. Jensen Huang resigned.
"Oh, come on. The man resigned over an affair? Everybody screws up. Even the grates. This guy washed dishes at Denny's and built NVIDIA out of nothing. Ask the people who actually worked there. Most of them wanted him to stay. An affair? You think this is about an affair? Spy or not, she was using him to get chips. And while Jensen was telling the whole world there was no smuggling, banned chips were flooding into China through her company. Backdoor or front door, it's still selling to China. And guess who was making money the whole time? Jensen, and the..."