To many observers, the downfall of Jensen Huang looks a little too neat. The most powerful man in the AI industry, who spent the past year fighting Washington’s restrictions on chip sales to China, was toppled in a single week by a classified intelligence memo that somehow found its way to The New York Times.
The suspicion is understandable. In September, Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face, the world’s largest open AI model platform, for nearly $13 billion. The deal extended Nvidia’s reach from the chips that power AI to the place where much of the world’s AI is shared and built. Weeks later, the leaks began.
But the timeline points in a more complicated direction.
The concerns about Alice Huang did not start after the Hugging Face deal. She and Jensen Huang were photographed together at the Computex trade show in Taiwan in 2024, after her company, Singapore-based Megaspeed, committed to buying about $2 billion worth of Nvidia chips. The Commerce Department was already investigating whether Megaspeed was helping Chinese firms get around US export controls, and later referred its findings to the Justice Department. According to the reporting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio supervised a classified memo warning about the relationship in the spring of 2026, months before the Hugging Face announcement, and before Huang joined President Donald Trump on his trip to China in May.
The core facts are not in dispute either. Huang admitted the affair in a memo to Nvidia staff, writing that he had been unfaithful to his wife. The second relationship, with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, involved one of his own direct reports, a governance problem no matter who revealed it. And it was Nvidia’s board, not a rival or a regulator, that ultimately forced him out.
Where the skeptics have a point is the leak itself.
A classified intelligence assessment does not end up in a newspaper by accident. Someone with access chose to put it there, and chose the moment. The question of who did it, and why now, is a legitimate one.
The list of people who stood to gain is not short. Huang was the loudest voice in America against export controls on AI chips. He argued publicly that restrictions only pushed China to build its own hardware, and he lobbied the White House directly. In December 2025, the Trump administration granted Nvidia permission to sell its advanced H200 chips to China in exchange for a cut of the sales, a deal that angered China hawks in both parties. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is poised to chair the Senate Banking Committee, had long accused Huang of lobbying in secret to “turbocharge China’s military.”
Now those same critics have exactly what they wanted. Lawmakers from both parties called for Huang to resign before he did, and CNBC reported that the scandal could give Congress fresh momentum to tighten chip export controls through this year’s defense bill. Even Trump, who had personally approved the H200 deal, said on Thursday that the affair would “renew that debate,” adding that the US should not be giving China high-end chips.
Beijing has seized on the same suspicion. China’s Foreign Ministry called the spy allegations a smear, and on Thursday accused Washington of fabricating “the false narrative of Chinese spies” as a pretext for technology restrictions. That should give anyone pause before embracing the “hit job” theory. A narrative that serves Beijing this neatly is not necessarily wrong, but it deserves extra scrutiny.
There is also a crucial distinction between a politically timed leak and a fabricated scandal. The first is entirely plausible. Washington runs on strategic leaks, and the people who wanted Huang sidelined had both motive and, potentially, access. The second runs into a wall of facts: a relationship Huang confirmed himself, a second affair inside his own company, a business partner under federal investigation, and an intelligence trail that began long before the Hugging Face deal.
Trump himself said on Thursday that it is not yet clear whether Alice Huang was a spy. No charges have been filed, and the intelligence assessment has not been made public. Those answers may still come, through the FBI investigation Trump said is underway, or through the closed-door congressional interview Huang has been summoned to on December 1.
Until then, two things can be true at once. The timing of the leak may well have been political. And Jensen Huang made himself vulnerable to it.
