Shareholders Sue Nvidia and Jensen Huang Over Alleged Links to Suspected Chinese Spy
Nvidia and its chief executive, Jensen Huang, have been sued by a shareholder who accuses the chipmaker of misleading investors about Huang’s alleged relationship with a woman described in court papers as a suspected Chinese spy.
The proposed class action was filed in federal court in San Jose, California, on Monday, shortly after US markets closed, and names both the company and Huang as defendants. It is the first courtroom chapter in a scandal that has already cost Nvidia hundreds of billions of dollars in market value and prompted the company’s board to open an independent investigation.
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The plaintiff, Mark Kistenmacher, is represented by The Rosen Law Firm and is seeking class-action status on behalf of investors who bought Nvidia securities between 9 October 2025 and 8 November 2026.
What the lawsuit alleges
The complaint, filed as Kistenmacher v. NVIDIA Corporation in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Nvidia and Huang of violating federal securities law by making materially false and misleading statements about the company’s dealings with Megaspeed, a Singapore-based Nvidia customer.
At the centre of the case is Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive whom the complaint describes as a suspected Chinese spy. The two are not related. The suit alleges that Nvidia concealed the relationship and the national security concerns it raised, while publicly describing Huang’s dealings with Megaspeed as routine.
The complaint challenges four public statements, including remarks by a Nvidia spokesperson in October 2025 that compliance staff had found Megaspeed was not owned by China. It argues that investors were kept in the dark about risks that threatened Nvidia’s reputation and its business, and that the company’s share price was artificially inflated as a result.
The suit seeks unspecified damages. None of the allegations has been tested in court, and Alice Huang has not been charged with any offence.
A $192 billion day for Nvidia shares
Nvidia shares fell $7.97, or 4.27%, to close at $178.67 on Monday, the first trading day after the company’s board disclosed its investigation. The drop wiped about $192.1 billion from Nvidia’s market value in a single session.
The shares had already been under pressure. Reporting by Engadget put Nvidia on course to lose more than $470 billion in market value over two days as the affair and its national security implications dominated coverage of the world’s most valuable chipmaker.
Shareholder lawsuits of this kind commonly follow sharp declines in a company’s share price, and the complaint was filed about five minutes after Monday’s market close, according to Reuters.
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How the Megaspeed affair unfolded
The affair came to public attention through reporting by The New York Times. On 9 October 2025, the newspaper published a story detailing Nvidia’s connection to Megaspeed, which the company rebuffed as a routine business relationship.
On 29 October, the Times published a further feature claiming that Huang had become the subject of a suspected Chinese intelligence operation. Huang subsequently acknowledged to Nvidia’s board that he had an intimate relationship with Alice Huang, and on Sunday 8 November the board said it was opening an independent investigation into reports that its founder and chief executive had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort.
The board said it had no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised, and it has set no timeline for its review.
Megaspeed itself has been under scrutiny for longer. US officials suspect the Singapore firm of helping Chinese companies obtain restricted Nvidia chips, and the US Commerce Department began investigating the company and Alice Huang in 2024, after Megaspeed shipped billions of dollars’ worth of advanced Nvidia AI equipment into Malaysia.
What happens next
The case will now proceed through the Northern District of California, where a judge must first decide whether to certify it as a class action covering the proposed period from October 2025 to November 2026. That process is likely to take months, and Nvidia has yet to file a formal response to the complaint.
The board’s independent investigation is running in parallel, and its findings could prove decisive for both the lawsuit and Huang’s standing at the company he co-founded. For now, the episode has turned a personal scandal into a legal and financial test for the chipmaker at the centre of the global artificial intelligence boom — and for the investors who bought its shares while the affair remained undisclosed.
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