The epic, monumental downfall of NVIDIA Corp. co-founder and longtime CEO Jensen Huang has opened a floodgate of questions surrounding the chipmaker’s future, governance, and global supply chain, as fallout from an extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy triggers multiple federal inquiries and intensifies scrutiny over how restricted American technology continues to reach Beijing.

Huang’s departure followed a tense late-night board meeting on Wednesday, where people familiar with the matter described the typically commanding executive as visibly “broken and shattered.”

Ahead of the board’s vote that ultimately forced him out, Huang acknowledged his relationship with Alice Huang — a businesswoman suspected by U.S. intelligence agencies of ties to Beijing — and expressed remorse over the impact on his wife and the women publicly implicated, and said he no longer cared what happened to him. NVIDIA’s board has since launched an independent investigation, indicating it currently has no reason to believe company secrets or U.S. national security were compromised.

There has been no public finding that Jensen Huang violated export-control laws, and the Justice Department has not indicated it plans to pursue criminal charges against him or NVIDIA.

However, the scandal has cast a harsh spotlight on a complex corporate network tied to Alice Huang, whose Chinese name is Huang Le, and her alleged links to Huawei, NVIDIA’s chief Chinese competitor and a state-backed telecommunications giant.

According to corporate records compiled by private intelligence firm Tesari and shared with CNBC, Alice Huang held stakes in Chinese entities that supplied computing power to Huawei around late 2023, the same time she and Jensen Huang were first seen together publicly.

In 2016, she co-founded Shanghai Hexi, a financial firm that later acquired a 27% stake in data center developer Shanghai Century Longteng. That firm held a controlling stake in Shenzhen Yifeng Technology Co. Ltd., a mainland data center whose primary customer was Huawei Cloud. Hexi also guaranteed loans for the facility, while its business partner in Century Longteng, Zhejiang Century Huatong Group, began purchasing NVIDIA chips in 2023. Although Hexi exited its stake in 2024, Alice Huang’s husband and longtime business associate, Kang Wei, remains an executive at Century Longteng and attended the signing of its Huawei agreement.

Brian Andersen, a former Homeland Security Investigations supervisory special agent now at Tesari, said the convoluted nature of the corporate web appeared designed to obscure ties to Huawei and warranted a federal counterproliferation investigation into potential smuggling and export-control violations.

Alice Huang’s business footprint also intersects with Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud company at the center of federal scrutiny. In 2019, she sold a cloud business to Chinese gaming company 7Road, which later spun off Megaspeed in 2023. Megaspeed subsequently became a major NVIDIA partner, facilitating at least $7.5 billion in NVIDIA chip shipments to Chinese firms. Megaspeed has denied illegally diverting chips to China.

In Washington, the controversy has intensified political and legal pressure on the tech sector. According to administration officials, the Justice Department is conducting an antitrust probe into NVIDIA alongside two separate inquiries into Megaspeed and server maker Supermicro regarding Alice Huang’s involvement.

Supermicro has denied that Megaspeed was ever a customer and stated it is fully cooperating with U.S., Taiwanese, and Singaporean authorities. Meanwhile, the scandal has fueled criticism in Congress and the administration toward Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, with detractors accusing the Commerce Department of being too cozy with NVIDIA and failing to adequately police Asian chip sales.

The leadership vacuum coincides with mounting evidence that U.S. export restrictions — first imposed in 2022 and later tightened — have failed to halt China’s access to advanced NVIDIA processors.

While Jensen Huang previously stated that NVIDIA’s Chinese market share had dropped from 95% to zero, a Reuters review of more than 150 procurement notices, corporate disclosures, and construction contracts uncovered over 23 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) in Chinese computing projects built around restricted NVIDIA H100, H200, and H800 chips.

Spanning coastal tech hubs to remote provinces like Gansu, the projects involve universities, regional computing centers, and local government ventures.

Separately, an IDC report estimated NVIDIA still accounted for 34% of Chinese AI-accelerator shipments in the first half of 2026.

Although the Reuters findings have not been linked to Megaspeed or Alice Huang, analysts warn that Washington must shift its enforcement focus from initial buyers to the end users of computing power. With Huang’s resignation stripping NVIDIA of its most influential lobbyist and visionary leader, the company and its broader AI supply chain face deep uncertainty as U.S. lawmakers push for even stricter export controls.

NVIDIA, Huawei, Jensen Huang, Alice Huang, Megaspeed, the Justice Department, and China’s commerce ministry either declined to comment or could not be reached.

Indeed, NVIDIA’s dominance over AI — many refer to it as “the central bank of the AI industry” — may be nearing an end as rival chipmakers close the technological gap, according to Ian Weisberger, CEO of institutional trading platform CoinRoutes.

While market observers point to Jensen Huang’s departure as the immediate catalyst for NVIDIA’s recent stock decline, Weisberger argues the deeper issue is commoditization. As rivals such as AMD catch up, hardware is becoming increasingly interchangeable.

Weisberger noted that this shift will force buyers to compete on price, shifting profit margins away from chipmakers and toward companies building software and products on top of the hardware.

Even strong results in Tuesday’s upcoming earnings report won’t reverse the trend, as quarterly figures only reflect past demand. While the broader AI boom remains intact, Weisberger warned that the era of a single stock carrying roughly 8% of the S&P 500 may be over.