The tech world has spent the day digesting the extraordinary news that Jensen Huang – the charismatic, leather-jacket wearing chief executive of the multi-trillion dollar firm Nvidia – is being investigated by his own company over an extramarital affair with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy.
None of us had that on our bingo cards for 2026.
Huang’s alleged romantic affair with Alice Huang (no relation), the former CEO of a Singapore-based data centre company, has cast ripples far beyond his immediate family – undoubtedly on an emotional rollercoaster of their own – taking us to a crossroads at which technology, geopolitics and national security intersect.
In a nutshell, this is about the bitter rivalry between the US and China, as well as whether Jensen Huang has betrayed the US as well as his wife.
The US is locked in a fierce race with China to develop the best AI models.
“Whoever wins AI, wins,” as US President Donald Trump puts it. He thinks that the country with the more dominant AI technology will benefit the most from it and, ultimately, will be the most powerful in the world. He may well be right.
Nvidia happens to make the best chips in the business for AI – so much so that it has been overwhelmed with demand.
It sets its prices accordingly: a single unit of the firm’s latest kit for data centres starts at £37,000 ($50,000). A medium or large site might have hundreds of them.
The US administration initially slapped an export ban on Nvidia’s more recent devices to prevent China from taking advantage of their superior capabilities. It has since softened the rules a little.
But there are suggestions that Alice Huang’s company, Megaspeed, may have been involved in sneaking them into the country while she was in charge. Bloomberg reported that the firm bought billions of dollars worth of Nvidia tech in November 2025. Megaspeed denies that it was used illegitimately.
For his part, Jensen Huang has lobbied heavily for the export rules between the two countries to be relaxed, arguing against the weight of general opinion that the AI race doesn’t matter and that it would be no bad thing for China to become dependent on US tech.
“President Trump wants American to win and President Xi wants China to win, and it’s possible for both of them to do so,” he told the BBC last year.
It think it’s safe to assume that neither country sees it that way.