Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted last week that he cheated on his wife, Lori Huang, and his company’s board is looking into it. The board is not troubled that he strayed. It is troubled by whom he strayed with.
Alice Huang, no relation, is a Chinese national. Many believe she spies for Beijing. She once worked at CCTV, China’s state television. Then she moved into tech investing. Most recently she was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore firm that bought Nvidia chips.
Megaspeed was set up in 2023, just after the United States began limiting chip sales to China. China wants those chips to train its best AI models. Megaspeed soon became one of Nvidia’s biggest customers, spending more than $4.8 billion. It said the chips were for cloud data centers in Southeast Asia.
But late in 2024, an American inspector visited Megaspeed’s data center in Malaysia. He found Nvidia servers and chips still sealed in their shipping crates. Megaspeed denies that it was passing the freight on to China.
Alice Huang’s work at Megaspeed is how she got close to Jensen.
Among American tech bosses, Jensen led the push to keep selling to Beijing. Now he and his company are in the hot seat. The Democrats who take over Congress in January will be glad to haul him in for questions about the affair. It is a handy excuse for sweeping new rules on AI firms and their data centers.
So the affair gets buried in a larger tale of AI, trade, and great-power rivalry.
But the affair is the heart of it. Jensen’s betrayal reminds us that the kings of tech are fallen men. A man who will cheat on his wife of 40 years is not a man to be trusted. And among the kings of tech, men who can be trusted are scarce.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was the subject of a lengthy New Yorker piece that doubted his honesty. Some of the people quoted called him a “sociopath.” The piece traced his chase for tens of billions of dollars from Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, even as his company did business with the U.S. government and military. Both countries have long feuded with Iran, a country we are now at war with.
OpenAI and its rival Anthropic have both taken billions in investments from funds based in the Gulf. One of those funds is under scrutiny for its heavy bets on China. A fair-minded person may ask whether these firms owe more to their foreign backers than to our security.
Dario Amodei is CEO of Anthropic. His wife, Cami Clark, once co-founded a company that sold “free luxury porn” to women. She sought money from Jeffrey Epstein. For a time she was the mistress of Eric Schmidt. At her urging, Schmidt put early money into Anthropic. His stake may now be worth $20 billion.
Schmidt, who once ran Google, has had no shortage of affairs in forty years of marriage. Many were with women decades younger. He and his wife still appear together in public as philanthropic donors. Schmidt now runs Relativity Space, which is working with NASA to send payloads to Mars. The company is also bidding for Space Force contracts.
Elon Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX, has paid women to bear his children and keep quiet about it. His first wife said he treated her like an employee, then divorced her without warning. Two months after filing for divorce, he was engaged to the actress Talulah Riley. The two were married, divorced, married again, and divorced again.
Musk’s SpaceX owns 11,000 satellites that serve the U.S. military and its allies, Ukraine among them. SpaceX also offers its Grok AI to the Pentagon.
Gossip may seem like static, but it is a signal. The men who run America’s most important tech companies hold a low view of the marriage covenant. History has its share of men who cheated at home and served well abroad. But they cheated in an age that still called it cheating, and they feared being found out. These men do not.
Given this low view of marriage, it’s hard to fathom how loyal these men will be to our country.
These men own the satellites our military uses for communications and intelligence. They control the AI that powers autonomous weapons systems. They build reusable rockets to extend our reach in space.
The coverage so far has dwelt on what Jensen’s affair means for trade and defense. That is the smaller story. The CEO of one of the world’s great companies broke a sacred vow. He has plenty of company.
We have grown so used to cheating that we hardly notice it. Our journalists have traded the language of Scripture for the language of the Associated Press, which forbids moral judgment. The gossip page is the one place left where newspapers report on sin, but they share it for entertainment, not for condemnation. The press can speak of loyalty to country, but not of loyalty to a wife.
Jensen should know better. As a boy he boarded at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, and he has kept up with the school.
In 2019, he and his wife gave $2 million to build a girls’ dorm and classroom building there. They cut the ribbon together. In 2020, in the depths of Covid, he gave a video address to Oneida’s graduates.
Oddly, his six-minute speech never mentions God. It does say that meeting his wife was one of the great events of his life.
His apology letter never mentions God either, though it does show remorse. “To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.”
Jensen’s deepest problem is one he shares with Altman, Amodei, Schmidt, and Musk. None of them seems to be in covenant with the God who made all things and will judge all things. They do not confess Christ, so they have no pardon for past sins. They do not believe Scripture, so they have no law to warn them away from future sin.
They live as if sacred vows are not real. They are wrong, and their error is our nation’s peril.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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