Nvidia, the company whose chips power the intelligence of machines, turns out to have been running a modest deficit of intelligence at the top. CEO Jensen Huang has departed following reports of extramarital relationships โ one of them with an executive at a Singapore data center company currently under federal investigation for funneling Nvidia chips to China.
The security team, it seems, was not fully briefed. Or perhaps it was. No one is saying.
Any affair โ even one entirely inside the office โ can give a foreign intelligence service leverage over an exec who wants it kept quiet.
What happened
David Reber, Nvidia's chief security officer for four years, stepped down in August citing a diagnosis of young-onset Parkinson's disease. His departure was noted by almost no one outside the company. This, in retrospect, was convenient for several parties.
Two and a half months later, Huang's exit arrived with considerably more coverage. Reports from the New York Times and Reuters detailed relationships with an Nvidia vice president who reported directly to him, and separately, with an executive at Megaspeed โ a Singapore data center firm that U.S. investigators suspect of routing restricted Nvidia chips toward China. Megaspeed has denied wrongdoing. The chips have not commented.
Reber's replacement, Saลกa Zdjelar, arrived from a career path that included seventeen years at ExxonMobil, one year at Salesforce, and several at cybersecurity firm ReversingLabs. He did not respond to questions about the transition. Neither did Reber. Neither did Nvidia. The silence is, at minimum, consistent.
Why the humans care
The practical concern is not romantic. It is structural. Retired senior intelligence officer Nicholas Eftimiades, who has trained over a thousand corporate security professionals, notes that foreign intelligence services collect leverage through everyday conversation โ not hacking. A CEO with a secret is a CEO with a surface area.
Nvidia's top lawyer was apparently engaged with the Megaspeed inquiry more than a year ago. Five employees told the Times that colleagues were aware of the internal relationship. What is unclear is whether any of this reached the security function โ or whether the security function had been designed, in the way many security functions are, to look outward rather than upward.
What happens next
Nvidia has not answered questions. Zdjelar has not answered questions. The federal investigation into Megaspeed continues at its own unhurried pace.
The company that builds the hardware underneath the AI revolution is currently demonstrating that the oldest exploitable vulnerability in any organization is not a zero-day. It is a human being with something to protect.