In a message to company staff, Huang said: "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."

The board said it has no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised, but its inquiry will examine all available information. The board also expressed confidence in Huang and his leadership team, indicating he will remain CEO.

Multiple news outlets reported this fall that U.S. intelligence agencies had connected Huang to Alice Huang, a Chinese tech executive who is not related to him. The agencies believed she had been passing information to the Chinese government. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly warned administration officials earlier this year that Huang was in a close relationship with a suspected spy. President Donald Trump did not act on that information and asked Huang to join him on a trip to China in May, according to reports.

Huang, who grew up in Oregon and graduated from Aloha High School and Oregon State University, is a major figure in the global technology industry. Nvidia, which he leads, is one of the world's most valuable companies with a market value of $4.5 trillion, and its graphics processing units powered the artificial intelligence boom. The company has engineering offices in Washington County and at least a few hundred employees in Oregon, according to state records.

Huang met his wife, Lori, when they were engineering students at Oregon State. In 2022, the couple donated $50 million to build the Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Learning Center, a supercomputing research center scheduled to open early next year in Corvallis. The center is expected to advance research in climate change, battery design, materials science and semiconductor physics.

"It's cool for climate scientists, it's cool for computer scientists, it's going to be great for the students," Huang said in an interview two years ago. "It's going to be great for Oregon and hopefully it's going to be great for generations."

Huang is also a close ally of Trump and a donor to the president's ballroom project under construction at the former site of the White House's East Wing.

The investigation comes as Nvidia's central role in the AI economy makes its leadership stability a matter of broad concern. Bernstein investment analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote to clients Sunday warning that Huang's troubles could be a serious problem for the company because he plays an especially central role in its operations.

"Nvidia is not an ordinary company and Jensen is not an ordinary CEO. He IS Nvidia," Rasgon wrote. "Hence, it is not immediately clear who would (or could) step in should (for whatever reason) he were to find himself unwilling, or unable, to lead."

Rasgon added that while the effectiveness of the alleged spying is unclear, the episode will increase skepticism about artificial intelligence and big tech companies.

"At a minimum, we suspect the overhang is going to be around for a while," he wrote.