Nvidia's board has stopped talking about an investigation and started running one. The company's independent directors have retained Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct what they call a "thorough and independent investigation" into CEO Jensen Huang, Reuters reported — and the lawyer in charge is the kind of hire that signals the board is not treating this as a formality.
The probe will be led by Joon Kim, a former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who joined Wachtell just last month. Kim was second-in-command under former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and he previously led the independent investigation into sexual harassment allegations against former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. He has taken on mobsters, CEOs, and a governor; now he is examining whether the chief executive of the world's most valuable chipmaker put company secrets — or national security — at risk.
The questions stem from reporting last month that Huang had a relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese national and former executive at the Singapore-based data center firm Megaspeed, whom U.S. intelligence agencies concluded was a Chinese intelligence asset. Huang has since admitted to an extramarital affair. Reuters could not independently verify the intelligence allegation, which China has denied, and no public evidence has shown that Huang knowingly passed confidential information to anyone.
Nvidia's board opened its inquiry on Sunday, saying it had "no reason to believe" secrets were compromised but that the review would "examine all available information." Huang has pledged to cooperate and says he will keep leading the company. The board has given no timetable for the investigation and has not said whether its findings will be made public — and probes like this can take weeks or months, and can end in governance changes, new oversight, or action against executives.
The hire is only one of several tracks converging on Nvidia at once. The FBI is conducting its own investigation, a shareholder suit was filed Monday in federal court in California, and three House committee chairs have asked Huang to attend a closed-door briefing on November 18 — with his answer due today. As of Tuesday afternoon, he had not replied, according to ABC News.
That convergence is the story. Nvidia is not just the dominant supplier of AI chips; it is, to a remarkable degree, Jensen Huang's company, built over more than three decades under one leader. The board picked the most expensive, most feared crisis firm on Wall Street — a single-office Manhattan shop that invented the poison pill and has represented OpenAI, Goldman Sachs, and the NBA in its own workplace investigation — because it needs the answer to be credible to Washington, to shareholders, and to the customers buying its chips.
The next test comes fast: Nvidia reports earnings on November 17, and the probe will be hanging over the call. Watch whether Huang answers the House letter today, and whether the board commits to making Kim's findings public when he is done. Until then, the world's most important chipmaker is being investigated by a prosecutor it hired itself — which is exactly how serious this has become.
— via Reuters