The CEO of Nvidia — the $3 trillion company at the center of America's AI arms race with China — admitted Sunday he had an extramarital affair with a woman U.S. intelligence believes was recruited by Beijing to infiltrate the company, and nobody in Washington did a thing about it until the press found out.

Jensen Huang, 63, emailed staff to confess he "was unfaithful to my wife" and apologized for hurting his family. "There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry," he wrote, according to CNBC. But this isn't a tabloid divorce story. The woman at the center of it, Alice Huang, is a former Chinese television reporter turned executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center company that bought more than $4.8 billion in Nvidia chips over the past two years. U.S. intelligence determined she was acting as an asset of China's Ministry of State Security, passing commercial information to Beijing, the New York Times reported.

A classified memo drafted in spring 2025 under Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned top Trump administration policymakers that Alice Huang had been recruited by Chinese intelligence to learn about U.S.-made AI chips and possibly influence Nvidia to push for the most advanced chips to be manufactured in China. American authorities suspected she was smuggling chips to China.

So what did Washington do with that warning? Nothing visible. Despite the intelligence, Huang was invited to join Trump's delegation to China in May, and he and his wife were seated at the top table with Trump and Xi Jinping at a September White House state dinner, the Guardian reported.

Nvidia's board launched an independent investigation Sunday, stating it "has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" but would examine all available information. Huang said he supports the investigation and will cooperate fully. "I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American," he wrote.

Trump brushed off the revelations Sunday. "I haven't heard he's done anything wrong," he told reporters. "He dealt with somebody, but you know, so does everybody else." He suggested he would still take Huang on an upcoming trip to Asia. Rubio, who oversaw the memo flagging the threat, now calls it an "internal corporate matter," according to CBS News.

Republican lawmakers are less casual. They've asked Huang to give the House foreign affairs and intelligence committees a closed-door briefing next week on Nvidia's "security protocols against foreign adversary espionage" and his relationship with the suspected Chinese asset.

China's government called the espionage claims "groundless speculation," CBS News reported.

Huang has previously advocated selling all but the most advanced chips to China — a policy position that happens to align with Beijing's interests and Nvidia's bottom line. The board says it still has "confidence in Jensen and his leadership."

The question isn't whether a CEO cheated on his wife. The question is how a Chinese intelligence asset got within arm's reach of the man who controls the most critical technology in the U.S.-China rivalry, why the intelligence community's warnings went unheeded for over a year, and who in Washington decided that state dinners were more important than national security.