Nvidia billionaire’s affair scandal drags his wife of 41 years into the spotlight

In November 2021, Jensen Huang attended the annual dinner held by the Semiconductor Industry Association in San Jose, California. That night, the trade group gave Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, its highest honour, named for Intel co-founder Robert Noyce.

Huang arrived early with his wife, Lori Huang, and quickly headed to the bar at the pre-dinner reception, saying the event was the first time he had been out of his house since the COVID-19 lockdown began in March 2020. He introduced his wife to reporters who clustered nearby, but they mainly talked to him.

By the time Huang received the award, two hours had passed. The Nvidia leader walked onstage with a bottle of red wine and two glasses, sharing them with a moderator and taking the conversation into unexpected topics. Throughout, Lori Huang remained in the background.

For more than 40 years, Lori Huang has been by Jensen Huang’s side as he built his fledgling chip start-up into one of the most valuable companies in the world. Nvidia’s success turned Jensen Huang into an international business star. His face is on sweaters, his signature leather jackets have become collectors items and his net worth has soared to nearly $US150 billion ($219 billion).

By contrast, Lori Huang stayed far from the spotlight.

That changed this week, when Jensen Huang, 63, revealed that he had had an affair with an executive identified by the US government as a Chinese spy. In his admission, which he shared in a message to Nvidia employees, Jensen Huang apologised to his wife, as well as his two children, who both work at Nvidia, thrusting them into the limelight. The crisis deepened on Thursday amid allegations of a second affair and reports the company’s board is considering ousting its chief executive and founder.

This week’s bombshell news had implications for US national security and the economy. Nvidia’s role as the artificial intelligence industry’s main supplier of chips makes Huang a crucial linchpin for an industry that has come to dominate the stock market.

It also has ramifications for his personal life. Huang’s admission has fuelled speculation about the fate of his 41-year marriage with Lori Huang, 64. She is president of the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, which had $US9 billion ($13.1 billion) in assets as of 2024, including $US6 billion in fresh funding that year. Of Jensen Huang’s 922 million Nvidia shares, more than half belong to a trust where he and Lori Huang are the co-trustees, according to financial filings. She is also the sole controller of a trust that owns about $US5 billion worth of Nvidia shares.

Lori Huang joins a small group of tech titan spouses who have had to grapple with public infidelity. The list includes MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Melinda French Gates, ex-wife of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The billionaire ex-wife of a tech mogul has become such a fixture in American pop culture that it has inspired characters in The Devil Wears Prada 2 and the Maya Rudolph comedy Loot.

Lori Huang’s public profile stands out among the current and former spouses of powerful business leaders because of how private she has been. She has not promoted her philanthropic work in interviews or on the conference circuit.

“Lori is unusually modest by the standards of billionaire couples,” said George Rush, who formerly co-authored Rush & Molloy, a long-running gossip column at The New York Daily News.

That added further intrigue to the political and economic consequences of the affair, Rush noted. “Bezos and Gates didn’t have this dynamic, where the relationship could move markets and have this global fallout,” he said. “It is one of a kind.”

Nvidia declined to comment and Lori Huang did not respond to a request for comment. (China has rejected the espionage claims. Alice Huang, the Chinese executive accused of spying for Beijing, has not responded to requests for comment.)

Similar to other tech billionaire spouses like Scott, Lori Huang was crucial to the start of her husband’s company.

She met Jensen Huang as one of a handful of women studying engineering at Oregon State University in the early 1980s. Jensen Huang was her lab partner in an electrical engineering fundamentals class, and he persuaded her to join him for a weekly study date. He later called meeting her “the most important, single event of OSU, and of my life”.

After the pair graduated and married, they moved to Silicon Valley to work as microchip designers. Both were known as gifted engineers. Lori Huang worked at Silicon Graphics, a hardware and software maker, where her salary was higher than Jensen Huang’s at LSI Logic, a semiconductor company, he said in a 2023 profile in The New Yorker.

But the couple struggled to find the right childcare, according to The Thinking Machine a biography of Jensen Huang. Just before he co-founded Nvidia in 1993, Lori Huang gave up her career to raise their children, Spencer and Madison. While Jensen Huang missed their karate tournaments to build his company, Lori Huang never complained, he recalled in May on the podcast How I Built This with Guy Raz. “That’s the gift that she gave me.”

Jensen Huang has frequently shared a warm reverence for his wife in interviews. “It’s good to have someone in your life who unconditionally believes in you, who believes you’re doing your best,” he said in an interview with a publication run by Oregon State University in 2014. “You need people like that, and Lori’s always been that person for me — 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.”

When Jensen Huang’s Nvidia shares made him wealthy, the family set up an endowment that ballooned alongside their net worth. The foundation has donated to the San Francisco Opera and acquired computing power to donate to universities and nonprofits. The Huangs have sidestepped political donations.

Through it all, Lori Huang was a frequent presence at her husband’s public events, including state dinners, conference appearances and celebrations of the couple’s donations to Stanford University and Oregon State University. She generally stayed in the background while he gave speeches and hobnobbed with industry executives and reporters.

“She’s been to every conference, every speech, you know, and every moment of Nvidia, she was there,” he said in an interview this year with CNA, an Asian news network. “Lori’s been with me for a long time, our whole life.”

She even helped shape his public image. Along with her daughter Madison, she dressed Jensen Huang in a designer leather jacket that has become his trademark look. Madison joined Nvidia in 2020 and Spencer joined the company in 2022. Madison’s husband, Nico Caprez, also works there.

Jensen Huang ended his message to Nvidia employees about the affair with a request: “My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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