Nvidia’s Board Opened a Probe Into Its Own CEO. The Company Is Worth $4.5 Trillion.

1 What happened

On Sunday, Nvidia’s board of directors announced it is opening an independent investigation into reports that founder and chief executive Jensen Huang was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The reporting at the center of the probe, from the New York Times in late October and the Financial Times on November 6, says Huang had a relationship with a Chinese businesswoman named Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud computing firm and Nvidia customer that US authorities have investigated over suspicions it helped Beijing gain access to advanced Nvidia chips barred from shipment to China. The two Huangs are not related.

In a message to Nvidia employees the same day, Huang admitted he had been unfaithful to his wife and said he supports the investigation and will cooperate fully. The board said a committee of independent directors, assisted by outside independent counsel, will oversee the inquiry, and that it currently has no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised — though the inquiry will examine all available information. Three Republican House committee chairs have asked Huang to attend a closed-door briefing on November 18 about how he came into contact with Alice Huang and Nvidia’s protections against foreign espionage. Huang remains chief executive while the inquiry proceeds, and no charges have been announced against anyone.

2 Why it matters

First, this is a national-security question about the most strategically important company in tech. Nvidia’s chips sit at the center of the US–China technology rivalry, and Washington has restricted exports of advanced AI chips to China since 2022. Any suggestion that access to its chief executive was cultivated by a foreign intelligence service is exactly the scenario export controls are meant to prevent — even if nothing was ever shared.

Second, the timing. Nvidia reports third-quarter earnings on November 17, one day before the congressional briefing, and investors will want answers about governance and whether the board’s probe could change the leadership of a $4.5 trillion company. The board has expressed confidence in Huang and his team, but the inquiry has no timeline and no findings yet.

Third, the story lands after a brutal week for tech stocks, and it raises a question that goes beyond one chief executive’s judgment: whether the company that powers the AI boom can keep its leadership stable while Washington and Beijing fight over its chips. Nvidia’s next earnings report was already the most anticipated date on the tech calendar. Now it comes with a board investigation and a congressional briefing attached.

3 What to watch next

• Nov 17 — earnings Nvidia reports third-quarter results. Listen for what Huang and the board say about the investigation on the earnings call, and whether analysts press the governance question.
• Nov 18 — Congress Huang has been asked to attend a closed-door briefing with the chairs of the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Select Committee on China. It is a briefing, not a hearing, and no finding of wrongdoing has been announced.
• The investigation The board gave no timeline and named neither the committee members nor the outside counsel running the review. It said it would provide updates “as appropriate.”
• The stock Markets have not yet had a chance to price the news — it broke on a Sunday. Monday’s open is the first real test of how investors read a board probe at the world’s most valuable company.

The rest of today’s briefing

Anthropic pushes ahead with its IPO roadshow next week at a lower valuation — Anthropic is pressing ahead with its initial public offering despite last week’s sharp selloff, with its roadshow expected to start next week and a Nasdaq listing still targeted for the week of November 16, ahead of Thanksgiving. The company is now prepared to accept a valuation of $1.25 to $1.75 trillion and raise $80 to $100 billion, according to investors cited by the Financial Times, well below the $2 trillion the most optimistic investors had hoped for in October. Bloomberg reported buyers are discussing $1.2 to $1.3 trillion, with some as low as $1.1 trillion. The last valuation Anthropic has confirmed is $965 billion from its May Series H round. — The Decoder

OpenAI raises $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, well short of its target — OpenAI has closed on an initial $11 billion in new funding, the first part of a round valuing the company at $1.25 trillion, Bloomberg reported on Friday, with Reuters separately confirming the figures. The amount is less than half of the $30 billion OpenAI originally sought at a valuation of around $1.4 trillion, and the round could still grow to about $20 billion in the coming weeks. SoftBank and Abu Dhabi’s MGX participated in the first close. CFO Sarah Friar confirmed the $1.25 trillion valuation on television, calling it almost 50 percent above the $852 billion valuation from OpenAI’s March round. — TechCrunch

Elvis Presley’s rights holders and Eminem’s publisher sue Suno over AI music — The rights holders behind Elvis Presley and Eminem’s longtime publisher Eight Mile Style filed separate federal lawsuits against Suno, the AI music generator, on Friday, November 6. The Presley case alleges Suno copied 859 compositions to train its models and lets users generate songs imitating Presley’s voice, invoking Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, the 2024 law protecting artists’ voices against unauthorized AI clones. Eight Mile Style’s complaint covers 269 Eminem compositions and seeks more than $41 million. Eminem himself is not a party to the suit, and Suno denies wrongdoing. — Engadget

Google DeepMind’s AI agents find two weaknesses in legacy 1024-bit RSA encryption — Google DeepMind said its AI agents, guided by human cryptographers, found two previously unknown weaknesses in 1024-bit RSA, the older encryption standard behind many digital signatures. One makes forging signatures far cheaper when an attacker controls part of the signed data; DeepMind estimates its forgery algorithm is around 1,600 times faster than the best published method for short fingerprints. The other cuts the cost of factoring many 1024-bit keys at once by about 30 times. Both gains are theoretical estimates, and modern 2048-bit keys are unaffected. — Google DeepMind

Bank of England: three years of AI bought just 0.5% of productivity — The Bank of England’s November Monetary Policy Report found that firms estimate AI has raised their productivity by only around 0.5 percent over three years, or 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points of extra annual growth since early 2024. The Bank attributes most of the growth so far to companies building and selling the technology rather than businesses becoming more efficient by using it. On jobs, firms report close to zero overall employment effect, though they are becoming less likely to hire or replace departing workers. — The Register

Claude Code’s “Don’t Ask Again” feature leaked passwords into 1,122 public GitHub repositories — Security firm Apiiro reported that approving a shell command with “Yes, and don’t ask again” in Anthropic’s Claude Code saves the exact command text, secrets included, into a settings file that gets committed with the rest of the code. Apiiro scanned 104,185 public copies of the file and classified 1,122 as holding at least one real secret, totaling 1,379 distinct values. Counting git history and saved transcripts, the broader total reaches 2,539 secrets across 1,994 repositories, including 379 database passwords. One company notified by the researchers confirmed its exposed key was live. — The Hacker News

Google takes over Crusoe’s Wyoming data center site in a $17 billion bet — Google has acquired Crusoe’s data center development site in southeast Wyoming, Crusoe confirmed on November 6, taking direct control of a project it had once declined to rent. The move follows Google’s announcement of a $17 billion long-term investment in its first Wyoming data center, a campus in Laramie County. The plan includes a contracted 702-megawatt fuel-cell development running on natural gas with carbon capture and storage. Neither company disclosed the price Google paid Crusoe for the site. — TechCrunch

Microsoft’s flagship AI Frontiers research group is over, and its founder has left — John Langford, the Microsoft Research leader who helped create AI Frontiers, announced on November 6 that he has left the company, writing that the roughly 50-person team behind the AutoGen agent framework and the Fara computer-use agent was folded into Microsoft AI in early September. Langford said the two groups simply could not work together, with Microsoft AI’s leadership favoring scaling over research. Microsoft has not commented publicly on the group’s status. — Business Examiner

Taiwan’s October exports surge nearly 59% on AI demand — Taiwan’s exports rose 58.9 percent from a year earlier to $96.76 billion, a record monthly level for a third straight month, topping analysts’ forecasts for a 50 percent rise. Exports of electronic components rose 61.4 percent to $32.68 billion, a new monthly high. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest maker of advanced chips, is a major supplier to Nvidia, Apple, and other leading tech companies. — Reuters