On Monday, at least four law firms announced they are looking into whether Nvidia misled its investors, and one has already gone to court. Every one of these moves goes back to an affair that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has now admitted.
The other person in the affair is Alice Huang, who also goes by Huang Le. She is a top executive at Megaspeed, a firm based in Singapore, and she is not related to Jensen Huang. According to The New York Times, authorities believe she was a recruit of China’s Ministry of State Security with a specific assignment to get inside the Nvidia CEO’s inner circle, which would make her more than a Chinese intelligence asset.
A lawsuit arrived on day one
TechCrunch reported that Rosen Law Firm, based in New York, filed a proposed securities class action on Monday in the Northern District of California, naming both Nvidia and Jensen Huang. Retail investor Mark Kistenmacher is the investor on whose behalf the suit was filed.
The proposed class would include anyone who bought Nvidia securities from Oct. 9, 2025, through Nov. 8, 2026. The complaint singles out three statements it describes as misleading. Two are recent claims that nothing was out of the ordinary: one came from Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo, the other from Jensen Huang. The third is the CEO’s denial in May 2025 that Nvidia’s AI chips were being diverted to China.
Schall, Brown, & Schwartz and Levi & Korsinsky are among the other firms that have announced investigations. Speaking to TechCrunch that morning, Stanford Law professor Robert Bartlett said he “would definitely wager that there’ll be a filing.”
What pushed the lawyers to act so quickly
Bartlett lays out a short argument. Jensen Huang sits at the top of Nvidia, and the company’s public statements described the relationship as entirely normal. In Bartlett’s view, securities law would count those statements as misleading regardless of who made them.
Timing plays a part as well. TechCrunch reported that anyone hoping to become lead plaintiff has 60 days from the first notice of a complaint to petition the court.
Then there is the size of the defendant. Nvidia routinely trades the title of world’s most valuable company with Apple, and on occasion Microsoft. Last week it went past $5 trillion before dropping back. Suing a company that large brings attention and the prospect of big contingency fees, so a wave of filings was almost certain.
TechCrunch pointed out that a stack of announcements says little about how strong the case is. The hit to Nvidia’s reputation is already done, though. Its shares fell more than 4% on Monday, erasing roughly $193 billion in company value.
Chips and China
The most worrying claim in the Times report is that Chinese intelligence handlers told Alice Huang to steer Jensen Huang toward lobbying for looser restrictions on sales of Nvidia’s AI GPUs in China.
Jensen Huang won approval from President Donald Trump in 2025 for two export arrangements covering sales of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. Under both deals, the U.S. government took a double-digit share of the revenue, a setup legal experts have called probably unconstitutional.
Nvidia has started its own investigation. Trump says the FBI has too.
A scenario with no evidence behind it so far
Bartlett told TechCrunch he anticipates several tiers of liability for Nvidia and its CEO. Securities fraud claims are possible, as are claims that the board failed in its oversight duties. Beyond those sits a “whole other ball game”: the case in which Jensen Huang knew Alice Huang was a Chinese spy.
Nothing so far shows that he knew. Trump has said he thinks the CEO had no idea. Senior administration officials did not share that view, according to the Times.
Analysts have broadly said that a sudden end to Huang’s 33 years at Nvidia is a real possibility, and that the affair has left both the CEO and the company open to wide-ranging liability.
The board backed him before investigating
According to The Wall Street Journal, the investigation is drawing attention to the way Nvidia is governed. Jensen Huang holds complete operational control, the company has no CEO succession plan, and board members at times seem to behave as if they answer to him.
In announcing its investigation, the board also stated its belief that Huang’s conduct had not put national security or Nvidia’s secrets at risk, and that it retains “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team.”
“To say there’s no issue before you’ve done an investigation, that’s not appropriate,” Harry Kraemer Jr., a professor of management at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told the Journal. “That’s how you lose credibility.”
Finding a replacement would be hard. Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., wrote to Fast Company: “There is no other person on the management team bench that can step in seamlessly as CEO.”