Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Drops to 10th on Forbes List as Shares Fall Amid Spy Probe Report

Within the first half-hour of trading on Monday, Jensen Huang's fortune shrank from $162.2 billion to $154.7 billion. That $7.4 billion slide, tracked in Forbes' real-time billionaire rankings, moved the Nvidia chief executive down two places, from eighth to tenth, on the list of the world's richest people. At one point he dipped out of the top 10 entirely, when Nvidia shares opened more than 7% lower and erased $10.3 billion from his wealth. The drop left him behind Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

The cause was the first trading session since Nvidia confirmed an investigation into Huang. By 1.30 pm EST, the stock was down 5.5%, having fallen as much as 7% in premarket trading. The company's market capitalisation slid from $4.5 trillion at Friday's close to $4.24 trillion. Nvidia regularly trades places with Apple as the world's most valuable publicly traded company. It was also the only one of the so-called Magnificent Seven, a group that includes Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla, to post a premarket decline on Monday.

The shares moved after Huang admitted on Sunday that he had an affair. In a statement to employees, he apologised and said he supported the company's investigation. Nvidia's board said it had appointed a committee of independent directors, working with external legal counsel, to examine all available information. It added that it had no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised.

The inquiry follows a New York Times report last month saying US intelligence agencies had identified a close relationship between Huang and Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen whom Washington suspects of gathering information for Beijing. According to the Times, citing a memo circulated within the Trump administration, she was recruited by China's top spy agency to collect information on Jensen Huang for the ministry of state security. It is unclear when the two first met, but they were photographed together at a bar in Taipei in June 2024. A Reuters source confirmed the woman in that photo was Alice Huang.

She has also reportedly had links with other leaders in the AI chip industry, including executives at Gigabyte, which assembles Nvidia supercomputers. She has described herself as chief executive of Megaspeed, a Singapore-based neocloud and AI computing services provider. The Times reported that the company removed her as managing director from its official paperwork after the first eight months. Megaspeed was set up in 2023, when the Chinese gaming and cloud company 7Road spun off its overseas operations in Singapore. It partners with Nvidia and supplies the company's technology across Asia-Pacific. US authorities have examined since 2024 whether Megaspeed played a role in China's access to Nvidia chips, and a Commerce Department official once found Nvidia equipment still in boxes at a data centre site in Malaysia, raising concerns it could be shipped elsewhere.

The Times also reported that intelligence officials briefed President Donald Trump on their findings about Alice Huang roughly a year ago, and that he took no action. An Nvidia spokesperson told the paper earlier that Huang's interactions with her were not unusual or unexpected, and that meeting customers is part of his job. Huang has become an ally and technology adviser to Trump, who rolled back the Biden administration's 2022 restrictions on global exports of advanced AI chips. On Sunday night Trump called Huang an "honorable guy" and said he would still include him in his upcoming visit to China.

The timing is delicate for Nvidia, which reports quarterly earnings next Tuesday after the market closes. Its second-quarter results showed data centre revenue of $89 billion, up 117% from a year earlier and about 92% of the company's total revenue of $96.2 billion, which beat expectations. That report, and the board committee's work, are the next things to watch.