Nvidia and its CEO sued for "misleading" its shareholders about the espionage case

WashingtonThe snowball effect from the alleged espionage scandal involving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is growing. This Tuesday, a lawsuit was filed against Huang and the company for lying to shareholders about the extramarital affair Huang was having with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, who has now been discovered to be a Chinese spy. For a year, the industry had already known about the affair and, in fact, Jensen Huang and the company had come out to publicly deny it. But after the case grew in the press, the CEO acknowledged the relationship.

The lawsuit against the $4.3 trillion company was filed in California just after US President Donald Trump confirmed yesterday that the FBI is also investigating the case. Previously, the tech firm's board of directors had already announced that they had also opened an internal and independent investigation, but they denied that Huang's extramarital relationship could have compromised the country's national security. Likewise, the board has also decided to keep Huang in his position, despite the fact that the company's shares collapsed yesterday following the discovery.

In part, the company has avoided dismissing Huang because there is no clear successor for the person who built the most important tech giant in the development of artificial intelligence. Nvidia is essential to the US economy, where a large part of GDP growth in recent years has been linked to the development of AI and its growth on the stock market. According to The Economist, Nvidia shares have accounted for "15 cents of every dollar of return generated by the US stock market since 2023".

The company is so important because it is the one that manufactures the semiconductors and microchips that other companies, such as OpenAI or Anthropic, need to continue advancing with their chatbots. Beyond its market value, it is also central to the US economy because Nvidia has created a kind of vicious circle where it has become one of its clients' major investors, so that they, in turn, can continue to buy microchips from it.