Nvidia’s board of directors has no member with the title of chair. Instead, a “lead director” is “designated annually by a majority of the independent directors,” and founder and chief executive Jensen Huang is the board’s sole executive member. Huang holds a “plain vanilla” 3.6% shareholding and does not enjoy the “supercharged voting rights that are par for the course elsewhere,” The Guardian columnist Nils Pratley noted. Pratley wrote that the arrangement “sounds like a formula for ensuring the attention remains wholly focused on Huang, the sole executive member.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the Invest in Germany Summit in Berlin. Photograph: Lisi Niesner/Reuters.

The independent directors’ investigation will examine whether Huang “has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort,” and the directors stressed there is now “no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised.” Pratley said the legitimate questions did not end there.

Pratley described Alice Huang, who is not related to Jensen Huang, as the alleged Chinese spy. He asked whether Huang had broken Nvidia’s internal code of conduct, whether he had misled the board about his relationship with Alice Huang, and whether the board knew of U.S. intelligence reports that Alice Huang had been hired by China’s ministry of state security to spy on the Nvidia boss, as reported by The New York Times. He also asked what security precautions were in place and noted that other boards in other countries might have insisted on suspending Huang until all the facts were in.

Pratley also asked what independent directors can do against a founder they depend on. He questioned whether Huang is “too big – and too well-connected – to sack?”, writing that “one doesn’t have to be overly cynical to think” Huang starts with “one huge advantage” as the board’s investigation into “the alleged honeytrap spy scandal” begins. His assessment of the wider system was blunt: “The world of US big tech is not, to put it mildly, strong on checks and balances on a founder’s power.”

Pratley wrote: “The chipmaker faces business risks and political scrutiny due to its over-reliance on founder and CEO Jensen Huang.” He placed that judgment inside a wider American pattern, writing that “the cult of the superstar founder or chief executive runs deep” and that “there is a fair argument that such set-ups encourage adventurous risk-taking in pursuit of grand corporate visions.” Such governance arrangements, he said, look unsuited to situations where the behavior of the boss is under scrutiny and the role of the board itself is being examined.

Defenses of Huang have begun. Donald Trump said, “An honourable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it,” and Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, which Pratley described as “the powerful Silicon Valley investor,” said, “Jensen is irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership.” Pratley said there was little doubt the U.S. tech and political establishment would like the affair to end up in “a series of bland conclusions about an everyday infidelity.”

The case places Huang at the center of a U.S.-China row. The political half of Pratley’s assessment points at Washington. He predicted the affair would be examined by newly empowered Democrats in Congress because it touches on “how forcefully – or not – the administration has been enforcing its own national security restrictions on chip sales to China.” He said the process would go on for months, that Huang’s personal relationship with Trump would come under the spotlight like never before, and that Nvidia’s board would be wise not to rely on the “irreplaceable” consensus holding or on the political heat going away.

Even if the board clears Huang, Pratley asked, will the Nvidia boss still look “so all-conquering” by the end? His lobbying clout in Washington, he wrote, will be diminished. He also wrote that “Nvidia’s shareholders, if they’re doing their job properly, will surely insist on far greater visibility on where the company’s chips end up.”

On succession, Pratley was direct: Nvidia’s board, he said, does not appear to have spent much time worrying about succession planning, “key person risk” or other concerns he described as standard ones among corporate-governance specialists outside the US. He nevertheless described over-reliance on one individual as a business risk and said overdue succession planning may be needed.

Pratley credited the 63-year-old Huang with spotting “the enormous AI opportunity” for GPU chips that originated in the world of video games and wrote, “The rise of Nvidia has been extraordinary.” He concluded that there may come a point when it is in Nvidia’s own interests to move on from the Jensen Huang era.