On Monday, WIRED exclusively reported that last year Huang began working with a crisis PR firm to manage his personal communications. In October 2025, those PR consultants started to be looped in on all press inquiries involving Huang, whether those inquiries were personal or professional in nature.
The timing lines up with a New York Times report that month that the US Commerce Department was investigating whether Alice Huang’s Megaspeed was helping Chinese companies get around American export controls with the help of a vast web of subsidiaries. The investigation was reportedly halted and transferred to the Justice Department after Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter inquired about it.
Huang has been a vocal critic of these export controls, which he argues unnecessarily constrain the market for American chips, create discrete Chinese and American tech ecosystems, and spur China to build competitive chips of its own. Huang has worked to develop a relationship with Trump in order to advocate for policies that are advantageous for Nvidia, including the idea of opening its markets to China.
Huang cofounded Nvidia in 1993 with friends Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The trio reportedly brainstormed their vision for the company in a Denny’s diner and aspired to bring realistic 3D graphics to personal computers. For the first few decades of its existence, Nvidia was primarily known in the gaming community for creating chips powerful enough to render high-quality in-game graphics.
In 2012, after a new kind of neural network known as AlexNet won a high-profile prize in computer vision, Nvidia pivoted from high-speed computer graphics to building chips that would support artificial intelligence. Huang has repeatedly said that the introduction of AlexNet, which was developed by AI engineers Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton, was a “Big Bang”–like event for computing.
Because its new GPUs proved highly effective at powering AI models that require massive amounts of processing power, the value of Nvidia shares soared in 2023 and 2024, in lockstep with the broader AI boom that began sweeping through the world economy. In the summer of 2025, Nvidia became the first company in history to cross $4 trillion in value.
As of September 2026, the company controlled about 90 percent of the GPU market. Much of Nvidia’s epic rise over the few decades has been attributed not just to its cutting-edge chips and its software “moat,” CUDA, that keeps developers locked into those chips, but also to the fast-thinking, controlling, charismatic, and often bombastic leadership style of Huang himself. Now, that critical part of the company’s success is out.
