In terms of corporate fallout, what has happened at Nvidia has been huge.
The company, seen as the darling of the AI era, has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value since it was revealed that its chief executive, Jensen Huang, had an affair with a suspected Chinese spy.
Nvidia and Mr Huang are now being sued, accused of defrauding shareholders by concealing the affair.
Nvidia has both benefited from and brought about the global AI revolution.
And, as CEOs go, few are as synonymous with a company as Jensen Huang.
“Treating this simply as a sex scandal misses the point,” technology strategist Josh Kennedy-White says.
“The real issue is whether personal access to one of the world’s most strategically important executives became a channel for intelligence gathering or influence.”
So how did we get here?
Born in Taiwan, Mr Huang moved to the US at the age of nine and, at some point, naturalized as a US citizen.
At 17, he attended university in Oregon, where he met his wife Lori Mills, who was two years his senior.
Both were studying electrical engineering, and Mr Huang has previously recounted using the pick-up line: “Do you wanna see my homework?”
They had weekly study dates, became lab partners and, five years later, married.
In an interview with a magazine at his alma mater in 2013, he described how his wife’s support has always been unconditional.
“Ever since I was 18, she was there believing in me and knowing I could do it. Even when I had self-doubts, she didn’t,” he said.
The two went on to have two children, Spencer and Madison Huang, who both now hold executive roles at Nvidia.
In 1993, at a diner in San Jose, Mr Huang met with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, fellow engineers he had worked with in the chip industry since the late 1980s.
They came up with Nvidia, starting with just $40,000 in capital. In order to incorporate the business, the three founders gave $200 each.
Originally, gaming was the focus. The founders believed the PC gaming market was set to grow and would need more powerful graphics processing.
After a near business-ending initial failure, Nvidia invented what is regarded as the world’s first Graphics Processing Unit in 1999. The chips could make advanced computer graphics, allowing for advanced 3D environments in video games and perform huge numbers of calculations in parallel.
It was not long before developers realized their uses could go far beyond gaming.
“We created the world’s first programmable accelerator,” Mr Huang said in 2023.
“And the benefit of an accelerator is whatever you designed it to do, it does it incredibly efficiently.”
And so, the era of modern AI was born.
Nvidia’s chips, by all accounts, are unparalleled. They are so hot, companies struggle to get their hands on them, and the metrics of Nvidia’s growth are dizzying.
To give you a sense of some of the numbers: Its shares have increased some 477,000% since listing in 1999; almost five-fold in the past five years.
For Mr Huang, who is estimated to own about 3.5% of the company, his wealth has skyrocketed.
According to Forbes, he was worth $2 billion in 2017 — and now, about $154 billion, putting him in the top 10 wealthiest people in the world.
With his trademark leather jackets and high-profile product launches, Mr Huang is omnipresent at Nvidia.
Its website lists him as co-founder, president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.
“He is Nvidia. [He] clearly sets the long-term strategy and direction, and pulls most of the company’s strings himself,” said Stacy Rasgon, a Bernstein analyst.
And many of the company’s executives are relatives of Huang.
Nvidia and Mr Huang have walked a fine line, balancing the demands of Washington and Beijing.
Nvidia is headquartered in California, with the vast majority of its chips produced by the chipmaker TSMC in Taiwan, along with some production in the US and South Korea.
The US restricted the exports of chips to China in 2022, citing it as an issue of national defense.
It has been a huge point of contention between the world’s two superpowers, with Beijing racing to develop its own semiconductor industry.
Mr Huang, who is one of US President Donald Trump’s closest allies in Silicon Valley, has tried to push the administration to loosen restrictions.
He has argued that American companies should be able to compete globally and that it would prevent China’s chip industry from developing too powerfully.
He has had some success. Earlier this year, Washington gave the green light for Nvidia to sell its second-tier chip (the H200) to Chinese companies, so long as they could take a 25% cut.
There have also been reports about Chinese companies illegally getting access to US chip technology through the backdoor.
One company, for example, is a Singapore cloud computing firm, Megaspeed, which is being investigated by the US over suspicions it’s helping get Nvidia AI chips into China.
The Wall Street Journal reports Alice Huang, the alleged Chinese spy who had an affair with Mr Huang, was previously Megaspeed’s boss.
It was in this capacity that she allegedly met Mr Huang at an Nvidia event in California in 2024. It’s not known how long the affair lasted nor where Ms Huang is now. She has not responded to journalists’ requests for comment.
Now the affair is part of an FBI investigation, with Mr Trump saying he “was amazed” by the allegations.
“I know the FBI is looking into it … I think that he’ll be in good shape,” he said.
US politicians say Congress is likely to tighten China’s access to US chips as part of the fallout while Nvidia’s board has launched an internal investigation.
Beijing has denied the allegations.
“The so-called Chinese spy narrative is purely a groundless accusation, slander, and a smear,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said.
Josh Kennedy-White, chief commercial officer at strategic communications firm IN2, said the scandal exposes the danger of making one company and one individual so indispensable to the global AI economy.
“The Huang affair is a reminder that the most valuable target may not be a government official,” he told ABC News.
“When corporate leaders control technologies of national importance, their personal vulnerabilities can become strategic vulnerabilities.”
Jensen Huang has not tweeted or released anything public since he sent staff a letter on Sunday.
“I owe my family and all of you an apology,” he wrote.
“I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”