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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, leader of one of the world’s hottest chipmakers, is under immense scrutiny after he admitted to an extramarital affair, and the company’s board said it plans to investigate him in light of recent reporting that he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort.

The stunning admission follows a series of reports that Nvidia’s leader was targeted by former Megaspeed International executive Alice Huang, who the U.S. government suspects was recruited by a Chinese spy agency. The CEO previously denied having anything but a “normal” relationship with the woman.

Analysts say this will prompt calls for closer examination of tech companies’ dealings with China.

“This is a black eye moment for Jensen and will spark multiple congressional inquiries at a minimum and will create an overhang on the stock for a myriad of reasons,” said Daniel Ives, partner and senior managing director at merchant bank Yorkville Ives & Co. in an equity research note. “This will also increase major scrutiny regarding selling chips to China, which remains a key battleground issue in DC,” wrote Ives, who has an “outperform” rating on the stock.

Nvidia’s board said in a statement on Sunday that it has confidence in Huang and his leadership team. On Sunday in after-hours trading, Nvidia’s stock was $188.70 a share, up about 1%.

“While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board’s inquiry will examine all available information,” Nvidia’s board said.

In a staff memo, Huang apologized to his family and Nvidia employees.

“I was unfaithful to my wife,” Huang wrote. “My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”

Huang wrote that he is committed to protecting Nvidia and supporting America’s national security, adding that he is “proud and grateful to be an American” and supports the investigation.

The transgression blemishes Huang’s leadership, which has been admired by many people in Silicon Valley. Huang, a former microprocessor designer and Denny’s dishwasher, discussed the idea behind Nvidia inside a Denny’s in San Jose with fellow entrepreneurs Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. They co-founded the Santa Clara-based chipmaker in 1993.

Since then, Huang’s profile has risen to the status of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, with thousands of people gathering to hear his keynotes.

The company’s valuation has risen dramatically in recent years alongside AI’s boom. The company reached a record market capitalization of nearly $5.8 trillion in October. That has slipped below $5 trillion, however, weighed down by concern about the sustainability of AI infrastructure build-out.

“It certainly is going to put a cloud over Jensen and Nvidia for a while,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at advisory services firm Enderle Group, adding that Nvidia sells products to the U.S. Department of Defense. “If it turns out that he was intimate with the Chinese spy, Nvidia could face some pullback from the U.S. government.”

The company has no public succession plan, and Huang has no obvious heir apparent. He has repeatedly said he wants to continue in his role for decades and has created an informal organizational structure around him that eschews a conventional hierarchy. Instead, his direct reports are tasked with rapidly implementing his decisions.

Huang has said that this system gives his company the flexibility to react to rapid changes in technology and remain agile. But it has also created a situation where there’s no replacement ready to step in and take over Huang’s relentless schedule.

Concerns that sensitive information might leak through Nvidia’s contacts with China have fueled calls for investigations and greater scrutiny of Huang and the company, ratcheting pressure in what has already been a difficult geopolitical balancing act.

“The big issue is China is all out in everything they can do to try to compromise U.S. security, whether it’s running a honeypot scheme or whether it’s blackmailing or extorting existing employees across U.S. firms,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research. “The issue here is if the extortion resulted in Nvidia making policies or the CEO making policies that would compromise national security. That’s what’s at stake.”

Legislators, including Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), said Congress will look into these relationships.

“The more I learn about the insane relationship between the Trump Administration, Chinese spies, and AI billionaires, the more I’m convinced there is nothing this administration does that isn’t corrupt,” Coons wrote on X on Saturday. “Congress will investigate and get answers.”

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on Coons’ statement or Nvidia’s board investigation.

While Nvidia is allowed to ship a limited range of products to China under a licensing program granted by the current Trump administration, Beijing has restricted imports of the chips — an impasse that continues to curb the chipmaker’s sales in the world’s second-largest economy.

Megaspeed, based in Singapore, has been accused of breaking U.S. export restrictions and smuggling Nvidia chips to China. Huang had told Bloomberg that his contacts with Megaspeed employees were typical of business relationships he has with many Chinese customers and executives.

Bloomberg contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — In September, just weeks before Americans were set to vote in this year’s midterm elections, a sudden panic over the dangers posed by artificial intelligence caught the White House off guard. A whistleblower had gained viral attention warning the technology could soon pose an existential threat.

President Trump was quick to dismiss concerns, evoking urgency in the U.S. race to achieve global dominance in superintelligence. He rejected calls to negotiate guardrails on the most advanced AI models with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, weeks later, during a prime opportunity to do so in Washington.

Privately, the president expressed concern that public hysteria over AI could jolt markets that have become excessively concentrated in AI-related stocks. He had already seen fresh polling that showed widespread bipartisan opposition to the boom in construction of AI data centers, a push by Trump that has cannibalized chips and energy from other sectors of the economy, driving up costs.

Now, on the campaign trail in the final days before the vote, Trump is vowing to expand a “golden age” of prosperity through the end of his presidency. But experts say his policies on AI have set the U.S. economy up for a period of tremendous risk over the next two years.

Some of the world’s leading financiers are sounding increasingly alarmed about an AI bubble. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, has warned that AI stocks have become detached from financial fundamentals, pushing markets to precarious highs. Ken Griffin, the world’s richest hedge fund owner, said last week that AI is “almost certainly” fueling a market bubble that could be on the verge of a burst.

Economists warn that Trump has overseen fiscal policy that would give the federal government fewer tools than it has had in the past to respond to a crisis.

“Trump could easily run into a financial crisis before his term is up,” said Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard. “It is entirely plausible to have a 30% — or more — drop in the stock market, and in the context of an economy so dependent on AI, this in turn could easily lead to a recession and widespread financial distress.”

Spending on data center infrastructure last winter and spring accounted for nearly all U.S. economic growth, according to independent analyses. Without it, growth would have slowed to a mere fraction of a percentage point, leaving the economy nearly stagnant and flirting with recession.

The Nasdaq 100 has about 70% of its index weight in companies that depend on AI, from semiconductor manufacturers and Big Tech giants to cloud platforms and software providers. Anthropic, one of the top AI industry leaders, plans an initial public offering next month, while its chief rival, OpenAI, expects to go public next year.

From left, Chris Painter, president of the Model Evaluation and Threat Research, Marius Hobbhahn, CEO of Apollo Research, Paul Ohm, professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, Kurt Gaudette, senior vice president of Dragos, and Daniel Kokotajlo, executive director of the AI Futures Project, are sworn in to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Disaster Management, District of Columbia, and Census hearing titled “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks,” in Dirksen Senate Office Building on Wednesday, September 30, 2026.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

“Because government finances are already strained, with the national debt on a patently unsustainable trajectory, there is no guarantee of a sharp drop in long-term borrowing rates for the government,” Rogoff continued. “So the options for bailing out the financial sector, or fighting recession, could be much more constrained than during the global financial crisis.”

While doubling down on the promise of an untested, frontier technology, Trump’s other economic policies may be hobbling its growth. Tariffs have raised the costs of imported chips, servers, networking equipment, metals and electrical components, and visa restrictions have tied the hands of industry leaders trying to secure the world’s best talent. Runaway federal deficits have driven long-term bond interest rates, adding pressure on AI firms already strapped with debt.

Servaas Storm, an economist closely following the AI sector at the Delft University of Technology, said the industry is already facing severe financial headwinds that could precipitate a panic.

Prices for energy, chips and minerals are driving up the cost of doing business, while early AI adopters such as Microsoft, Meta and Walmart are scaling back its use as employees spend too much time correcting errors, cleaning up low-quality output and addressing security lapses.

Slower adoption could further complicate the search for revenue, particularly for companies already struggling to monetize the technology. For now, hyperscalers are shouldering the cost of financing frontier AI labs that, as Storm put it, “do not have a credible path to profitability.”

“There is indeed an AI bubble in the stock market and in data center construction, which could pop rather soon, as rising debt loads and elevated interest rates could prove too much to sustain it,” Storm said. “That moment is not imminent, but it is approaching — and it will very likely happen before the end of Trump’s presidency.”

An economy already under duress from Trump’s other economic policies — from tariffs and tax cuts to the Iran war — could precipitate further pain, said Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Leading AI companies are already running “day-after” drills in anticipation of an AI-related crisis within the next year, according to Axios.

Americans head into election day deeply pessimistic about the economy, with 77% rating it fair or poor, according to a Fox News poll. A separate CNBC survey found that just 34% approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 35% of Republicans disapprove — a record high within his own party.

Inflation has fallen sharply from its 9% peak in 2022, during a pandemic-era surge, reaching 2.9% by the end of Biden’s presidency. Under Trump, it has climbed once again to 3.7%, driven by rising energy, transportation and housing costs — among the top concerns for voters entering next month’s vote.

Persistent inflation has forced the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates elevated, squeezing borrowers. And those rates — paired with high government spending and concerns over mounting deficits — have pressured the bond market, pushing 10-year Treasury yields to levels not seen since the early 2000s.

“Financial crises, by their nature, are virtually impossible to predict,” Duffie said, asked whether he shared concerns of a potential AI bubble.

“If we know we are going to be in a crisis soon,” he added, “markets advance the crisis to now.”