Nvidia’s independent directors have hired Joon H. Kim and the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to lead their investigation into chief executive Jensen Huang. Kim is a former acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The one-line statement from the independent members of the Nvidia board was issued at 14:07 ET (19:07 UTC) on 10 November, through GlobeNewswire.
It says Kim and his firm will carry out the “thorough and independent investigation” that the board first announced on Sunday. The New York Times then reported the hiring as breaking news at 19:31 UTC, and described the inquiry as an investigation into Huang’s affair with a Chinese executive.
The board had not named its lawyers when it opened the inquiry on 8 November, the day Huang admitted to an affair in a letter to staff. In its first statement, the board said it was looking into reports that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. It added that it had “no reason to believe” that national security or Nvidia’s secrets had been compromised. The Wall Street Journal reported that Wachtell will examine whether Nvidia was the target of a foreign espionage effort, citing the company.
Who Joon Kim is, and why Nvidia’s choice of investigator matters
Kim led the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan after Preet Bharara was fired in March 2017, serving as acting US Attorney until early 2018. He later co-led the 2021 independent investigation for New York Attorney General Letitia James into sexual harassment allegations against Governor Andrew Cuomo. That inquiry concluded that Cuomo had sexually harassed multiple women, which he denied, and he resigned within weeks of its publication. His record spans one of the busiest federal prosecutor’s offices in the country and a high-profile inquiry into a powerful man’s personal conduct.
Wachtell is one of the best-known boardroom law firms in the US, and its founding partner Martin Lipton devised the “poison pill” takeover defence in the 1980s. Hiring a former prosecutor from such a firm gives the board an investigator with standing in Washington and on Wall Street. The board has not said how long the inquiry will take, or whether its findings will be made public. Nvidia has also not said whether Huang will step back from any duties while the investigation runs. The decision on his future ultimately sits with the 11 Nvidia directors, whom The Information profiled on Tuesday as the people who must decide whether he stays on.
What the Wachtell investigation means for Huang’s week
The hiring adds another layer to a fast-moving scandal. A Chinese company linked to Alice Huang was reported on Tuesday to have helped move $7.5 billion of Nvidia chips into China, a claim that has not been tested in public. President Donald Trump has said the FBI is looking into the matter, as we covered in our report on his comments. China’s foreign ministry has called the espionage claims “nothing but smears against China”. No charges have been reported against Alice Huang or any of the companies named in the reports.
Investors have reacted sharply, and Nvidia shares were trading about 6% lower on Tuesday afternoon in New York, after a fall of more than 4% on Monday. Huang also faces a deadline from three House committee chairs, who asked him to respond by 11 November and attend a closed-door briefing on 18 November. Our Megaspeed explainer sets out the background, and Nvidia reports its third-quarter results on 17 November.
