One Affair,
Two Superpowers
& Your Pension

On Thursday, 12 November, a company worth about $4 trillion put out a short notice. Its founder had resigned as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately. [1]

The company was Nvidia. If the name means little to you, its chips mean a lot to your life. They are the engines behind ChatGPT-style AI, the giant AI data centres going up around the world, and a big part of today’s stock-market boom. Nvidia’s market value was about $4.01 trillion even after the news broke. [17]

The founder was Jensen Huang, the only CEO Nvidia has ever had, in 33 years. His finance chief, Colette Kress, became interim CEO. The board also named its first-ever chairman, a sign of how much one man had run the show. [1]

The trigger was personal. Days earlier, Huang had admitted to an extramarital relationship with a woman US intelligence officials believe is a Chinese spy. Reports of a second relationship followed. [3] Nvidia’s shares fell about 14% when New York opened, then recovered to close 4.34% lower. [2] [3]

Think of advanced AI chips as the oil of this decade. Whoever has the most can build the smartest AI, for business and for the military. So since October 2022, the US has blocked its best chips from being sold to China without a special licence. [18] Nvidia’s top chip, called Blackwell, still cannot be sold directly to China. [19] Huang has said Nvidia’s share of China’s market went from 95% to zero. [9]

Now the story becomes a spy thriller. The woman at the centre, Alice Huang (no relation), was a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company that became one of Nvidia’s biggest customers in Southeast Asia. [4] Reporting says Megaspeed bought more than $4.8 billion of Nvidia chips in two years. Nearly $2 billion of them sit in data centres in Malaysia and Indonesia that allegedly serve Chinese customers remotely. [7] Megaspeed is under US criminal investigation over alleged chip smuggling. [6]

Here is the clever loophole at the heart of it. Shipping banned chips into China is illegal. But renting their computing power to a Chinese company from a data centre in Malaysia is not, under current rules. [8] The chips never cross the border; only the answers do, down an internet cable.

So Washington’s worry is simple: did the head of America’s most strategic company have a close relationship with someone working to get China around the wall? Beijing’s position is more tangled. It wants top chips, yet in 2025 its own internet regulator told giants like ByteDance and Alibaba to stop buying a China-special Nvidia chip, to push home-grown ones. [20] On the spy claim, its foreign ministry says it is “unsubstantiated” and “nothing but smears.” [21] Nvidia’s board says it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised. [5]

You may never have bought a single Nvidia share. You may still own some.

Big stock indexes like the US S&P 500 give each company a slice based on its size. Nvidia is so huge that it makes up about 6% of the S&P 500 and about 9% of the Nasdaq. [11] Millions of Americans hold those indexes in their 401(k)s, the US version of a retirement account, without ever choosing Nvidia. Nvidia lost about $450 billion in value between Huang’s admission and the eve of his exit. [13]

Indians are in this too. At least 13 Indian mutual fund schemes hold Nvidia; in one, the Mirae Asset S&P 500 Top 50 ETF, it is about 12% of the money. [16] In the Motilal Oswal Nasdaq 100 ETF, popular with Indians who want “a bit of America,” Nvidia was about 8%. [14] [15] Because Indian markets close before New York opens, Indian funds show the damage a day late, in the next NAV. [14]

So the dent is small, but it is real, and it came from a company most savers never chose, run by a man they had never met. Even the worst case is limited: if Nvidia somehow went to zero, someone fully in an S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100 fund would lose roughly 5% to 10%. [13]

Most large companies are built like a pyramid: the CEO, a few senior leaders below, and layers below them. Nvidia was built more like a wheel with Huang at the hub. He had more than 50 people reporting directly to him, with no president and no chief operating officer. [10]

The people meant to oversee him were old companions. Three directors had been on the board since Nvidia was founded in 1993, and the board’s average tenure was nearly 15 years, about double the norm for big US companies. [10] And here is the striking detail: the word “succession” does not appear once in Nvidia’s latest annual report. Microsoft’s uses it 25 times; Alphabet’s, 16. [10]

Investors have a name for this: key-person risk, the danger that a company’s value walks out of the door with one human being. Before the resignation, some analysts warned the stock could fall 20% if Huang left. [2] One well-known tech analyst called him “actually irreplaceable.” [17]

Nobody needs to judge anyone’s marriage to see the problem. Security services worry about three things when a powerful person has a hidden relationship. The first is access: the other person may hear things meant for very few ears. The second is leverage: a secret is something that can be used to pressure someone. The third is influence: a close friend can quietly shape decisions without ever stealing a document.

That third worry is the one in this story. The allegation is not mainly that blueprints were stolen. It is that a customer close to the CEO may have pushed Nvidia to lobby for more chip sales to China. [8] Separately, Nvidia is reported to have intervened with the US Commerce Department during the export probe into Megaspeed in 2025. [22]

Governments are acting on it. Singapore has barred Alice Huang from re-entering the country, over inaccurate information she gave its police. [5] In Washington, Senator Elizabeth Warren says Huang and Nvidia’s board “still owe Congress answers” on export compliance. [3]

When a giant stumbles, the money pulled out has to go somewhere. Thursday showed it clearly.

And then the twist. Small investors rushed in: Nvidia drew the biggest opening bid from individual traders that one research firm, Vanda, has ever recorded. [23] Some professionals agreed, calling the fall a buying chance; others were selling out because they could not see anyone replacing Huang. [17] [24]

Both sides were looking at the same facts. That’s what a market is: millions of people placing different bets on the same uncertain future.

Nvidia’s story is not only American and Chinese. A good part of its chips and software is designed in India. The company runs a large engineering centre in Bengaluru, with more teams in Hyderabad, working on chip design, AI software and computing platforms. [25] One 2024-era estimate counted Bengaluru as Nvidia’s third-largest location in the world after its US headquarters and Israel. [26]

So far there is no sign that Huang’s exit changes day-to-day work: the board says operations, customer commitments and product plans will “continue without interruption.” [1]

The bigger Indian lesson is about dependence. When one company in one country makes the chips the whole AI world needs, everyone else is exposed to its boardroom dramas. India is trying to build some of its own supply chain. This week the government opened applications for Semicon 2.0 and approved 12 more electronics-component projects worth about ₹7,503 crore, covering parts like circuit boards and battery materials. [27] That is a small step next to Nvidia’s scale, but it is the same idea: don’t let one stranger’s bad week become your crisis.

This is not advice to buy or sell anything. It is three things worth knowing about how your money actually works.

And a closing curiosity. Nvidia was started in 1993, famously dreamt up in a Denny’s diner. [29] Its founders took the name from invidia, the Latin word for envy. [30] For thirty years the rest of the industry envied Nvidia. This week, for the first time, it may be the other way round.