The latest scandal this week about tech company Nvidia is that its now former CEO Jensen Huang allegedly had affairs with multiple women.
On Wednesday night, The New York Times reported Huang had a romantic relationship with an executive who reports to
him, Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. That news came just three days after Huang sent a memo to his staff admitting to having an affair with a woman who U.S. officials have identified as a Chinese spy. On Thursday, Nvidia’s board announced that Huang resigned and that Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, will serve as interim CEO as the board starts a search for a permanent replacement. The tech company has opened an investigation into Huang as its stock market price plummets.
A counterintelligence expert tells Rolling Stone that if the Chinese intelligence agency knew Huang was likely to have extramarital partners while married to his wife of 40 years, Lori Huang, this would have made him a very vulnerable target.
“Infidelity is a known vulnerability,” says Holden Triplett, a former FBI agent specializing in Chinese and Russian counterintelligence. Triplett also served as the director of counterintelligence at the National Security Council for a year during President Donald Trump’s first administration. He’s now a co-founder of Trenchcoat Advisors, a consulting group that advises private businesses on security risk. In his experience, he says people who have affair partners are “great targets” for intelligence agencies.
“Anyone who’s living a double life has vulnerabilities that could be exploited,” Triplett says. “One, they’ve got something to hide from people so you could blackmail them. Two, they know that person is open to having relationships with other people.”
Triplett says that if China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) knew about this vulnerability, it could have been seen as a pathway to get close to the head of a company that is considered a linchpin to the AI industry. Nvidia is worth nearly four trillion dollars, making up a large percentage of the stock market and affecting millions of Americans’ retirement funds and investments. The company creates 85 percent of the chips used for advanced AI, a technology that is not only affecting daily life but significantly impacts our country’s military.
Triplett says that in the counterintelligence world they use the acronym MINCES — Money, Ideology, Nationalism, Coercion, Ego/Excitement, Sex — to identify what motivates people and can be exploited. “At the end of the day, it’s the M and the S, the money and sex, which tend to be some of the greatest motivators out there,” says Triplett, adding that for a billionaire like Huang, money would likely not have been as great a motivator as sex or a romantic relationship. “Even a guy who’s running a four trillion dollar company is still susceptible to someone saying nice things to him.”
Triplett says that while intelligence agencies sometimes send out specific officers to try to seduce targets, it’s more often they find people who are within the target’s circle and then recruit them to gather information or influence their actions. He says agencies recruit potential spies who could be introduced by a friend of the target’s so as not to set off alarm bells. In Huang’s case, alleged Chinese spy Alice Huang was reportedly introduced to him by her husband Kang Wei, who’d known the Nvidia CEO for a decade. Huang was the top executive of Megaspeed, a Singaporean shell company that sidestepped U.S. laws prohibiting exporting Nvidia’s AI chips to China. China has denied the espionage allegations, meanwhile Alice Huang has returned to Beijing, according to Bloomberg News.
Triplett says that even though Jensen Huang has resigned from Nvidia, this does not mean the company is in the clear as a target of economic espionage. Based on how important Nvidia is, he says we should assume there are multiple operations and attempts to penetrate the organization, whether its information systems being hacked or people being targeted.
“That’s just the nature of the business now,” he says, adding that intelligence agencies often use a multi-pronged approach when trying to get information or exert influence over companies. For example, an employee might click on a link in an email that creates problems with the server, around the same time they meet a friendly person who asks a lot of questions about their work.
When conducting counterintelligence training for corporations, Triplett says he tells people to be aware of red flags like a significant other asking questions about specific business details or private schedules. “You’re really looking out for people who are exceptionally interested and continue to return to certain subjects that have less to do with you, and more to do with your company.”
While cyber attacks create a digital footprint, using humans to gather intelligence can be exceptionally effective because it can go on for years and leave very little trace.
And it’s why private companies having such a large influence on AI technology and data critical to national security — with such a heavy effect on the stock market, as well — is incredibly risky.
“The memes that have come out of this are on fire and they’re hilarious, but this is extremely serious,” says Triplett. “The targeting of Jensen Huang and Nvidia is an attempt to undermine U.S. national security. It’s not just a salacious Love Island for tech bros [situation], it will have a significant impact and is part of a larger campaign going on right now of China against the U.S.”
In previous decades, when the government controlled the technology on which the military relied, it was easier to keep classified and protected. Government employees were trained to identify counterintelligence attacks.
“That’s shifted,” says Triplett, “For the last 15 years or so China has been pretty prolific in targeting private companies. This sounds very Hollywood-esque, that there’s groups of spies in this dark world trying to subvert you, and have you do things against your will. But they’re there, and, if anything, countries are using their spy agencies in a more active way since the end of the Cold War and maybe even since World War II.”
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