Ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang concealed a string of reported affairs with women that included an alleged Chinese spy from key executives at the chipmaking giant — partly with the help of an unusual and opaque management structure that one insider called “Jensen by design,” The Post has learned.
Huang, who resigned as Nvidia CEO on Thursday after the board began an investigation, had a direct hand in crafting and approving the company’s earlier denials about his romantic entanglement with alleged China spy Alice Huang, three sources familiar with the matter said.
In doing so, Jensen Huang misled high-level company insiders that included key members of Nvidia’s legal team – leaving them with egg on their faces when he was finally forced to admit the truth, sources told The Post.
Those included general counsel Tim Teter, as well as the chipmaker’s head of public policy communications, John Rizzo, the sources added.
Nvidia’s aggressive pushback on reports about Huang’s affair had included a fiery statement by Rizzo, who told the New York Times on Oct. 29 that Huang’s relationship with former Megaspeed executive Alice Huang was “not unusual or unexpected.”
“Jensen personally approved and authorized” the company’s responses, one source told The Post.
One source said media reports of Huang’s affairs had blindsided many executives – with some reckoning that the CEO had been able to hide his shenanigans partly because the company’s dozens of teams at its headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., and across the US and abroad are highly compartmentalized.
In a stunning show of micromanagement, Huang was communicating with a staggering 60 executives who reported to him directly, responding to as many as 1,000 emails in a single day.
“He intentionally structured the company in such a way that no one executive knew what he was up to,” the source told The Post. “I think that’s Jensen by design. This guy is smart.”
Huang also was frequently and directly involved in Nvidia’s public messaging on controversial and politically sensitive matters including export controls and chip sales to China, sources said.
“He was definitely [involved] on anything related to Megaspeed,” one source said.
Representatives for Nvidia and Huang declined to comment.
Huang finally came clean last Friday night, when Teter confronted him at his house and asked if the news reports about his relationship with Alice Huang were true, sources said. Even then, Huang continued to insist that he only had the one affair.
That claim blew up in Nvidia’s face by midweek, when reports emerged that Huang had also had an affair with the company’s vice president of healthcare Kimberly Powell, as well as a third unnamed woman.
Stephen Witt, Huang’s biographer, wrote in a column that a former Nvidia employee told him that the affair with Powell was “common knowledge in the company.”
While gossip had swirled inside the company that Huang and Powell had an overly friendly relationship, no hard evidence surfaced prior to the Times’ report on the affair, one of the sources said.
A day after Rizzo issued the company’s denial, Huang personally denied the affair on the record, telling Bloomberg that their dealings were “normal and not unusual.”
A source close to Rizzo, who once held roles at the US Treasury Department and with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), said there was a “zero percent chance” that the executive would have knowingly lied on Huang’s behalf.
“One, he has more integrity than that,” the source close to Rizzo said. “And number two, he would have absolutely advised that that approach would be disastrous. There’s just no way he would do that.”
Internally, Huang’s denials about infidelity with Megaspeed’s Huang began in late summer or early fall of last year, when New York Times reporters first approached Nvidia about its ties to the Singapore-based firm, sources said.
As The Post has reported, US officials, including staffers at the Commerce Department, were already concerned at that point that Megaspeed was involved in smuggling of Nvidia’s best AI chips to China in violation of US export controls.
At the time, Huang instructed staffers to push back hard on any insinuation that he and Megaspeed’s Huang were involved in an inappropriate relationship, sources said.
The Times ultimately published a report on Oct. 9, 2025 with the headline “A Mystery CEO and Billions in Sales: Is China Buying Banned Nvidia Chips?”
The report included a now-infamous photo of the leather jacket-wearing Huang and Megaspeed’s Huang, who are not related, sitting together on a couch at a bar in Taipei in June 2024. It also included a claim that Alice Huang had bragged ‘I bet you guys I can get Jensen here’ to a group at the bar.
Behind the scenes, Huang insisted that any insinuation of an affair was “categorically untrue” to the point of being “almost offensive,” and instructed staffers to push back hard on the Times’ reporters, a source said.
