// PC GAMER — GAMING
Jensen Huang’s affair with alleged Chinese spy highlights how the GPU company’s dealings are now everyone’s business
He used to sell gaming GPUs, now he's in the middle of a geopolitical quagmire.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to an extramarital affair in a statement published on Nvidia's newsroom. A strange move for the $4.5 trillion company without the added context: the person he's suspected of having an affair with has also been deemed a Chinese intelligence asset by US officials, and was investigated for smuggling none other than Nvidia's own chips.
The story goes far deeper than Huang's affair; revolving around national security, export controls, spying, chip smuggling, and US/China relations. It's in large part about AI, and who controls the hardware that makes it possible. So, if you're wondering why Huang might be the target of Chinese intelligence to begin with, or why he's announcing his affair in the most public way possible, here's how we got to this point.
Nvidia is at the centre of the debate about whether the United States should sell its most technologically advanced chips to China. The US had already ensured China couldn't make the most cutting-edge chips through a ban of Netherlands-based ASML's chipmaking machines. Yet it has also moved between qualified bans of high-performance chips, leading to made-for-China GPUs, such as the RTX 4090D, RTX 5090 D, and H20; to outright bans, namely the ongoing restrictions for the Blackwell architecture; Nvidia's latest and greatest.
There have been a lot of changes to export controls between the US and China, going back to Biden's trade war. Limitations were introduced in 2023 that used "weighted teraflops" and "adjusted peak performance" to decide which systems were deemed too good to be sold in China. It also limited specific cards based on their total processing power and performance density, which nixed specific chips such as the RTX 4090 (and later the RTX 5090).
Both Nvidia and AMD had to build slower versions of their GPUs to try to keep revenue flooding in from China. This itself was a contentious move, with then-Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, saying "if you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them [China] to do AI, I'm going to control it the very next day." They went back and forth on this approach a lot.
The good news for Nvidia and AMD was that it was President Trump who eased controls on GPUs, such as the H20 and MI308. Both chips were pared-back versions of existing chips, H200 and MI300, respectively, for the Chinese market in order to meet restrictions. The bad news was Trump said he'd do it in return for 15% of their China revenue. That was in August, 2025.
Whether either company sold any chips to China around that time is another matter, their respective CEOs suggest few, if any. Jensen Huang said in October, 2025, Nvidia was "100% out of China… we went from 95% market share to 0%."
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