Nvidia founder’s wife faces spotlight that MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates know well
Lori Huang stayed out of public view through four decades of marriage and Nvidia’s rise. Her husband’s resignation Thursday has changed that, though there’s been no word of a split. Read More
As the fallout from Jensen Huang’s affair came to a head with his resignation as Nvidia CEO on Thursday, attention has turned in part to his wife, Lori Huang, who has stayed largely in the background during their 41-year marriage.
A New York Times profile, and other media coverage, placed Lori Huang alongside two familiar Seattle names — MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Melinda French Gates, ex-wife of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — as tech billionaires’ spouses who have faced infidelity playing out in public.
Huang acknowledged to employees on Sunday that he had been unfaithful to his wife. The admission followed Times reporting last month that a Chinese businesswoman he had become close to had been identified by U.S. officials as an intelligence asset. China has denied the espionage claims.
On Wednesday, the Times reported that Huang also had an extramarital relationship with an Nvidia executive who reports to him, citing five people who worked at the company.
Nvidia named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO. Kress spent 13 years at Microsoft earlier in her career.
Huang was worth about $145 billion as of Wednesday’s close, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, nearly all of it from his roughly 3.4% stake in Nvidia. That figure doesn’t reflect Thursday’s drop: Nvidia shares fell more than 13% at the open, pushing the company’s market value below $4 trillion, CNBC reported. Huang’s fortune peaked at as much as $195 billion in May, according to Bloomberg.
More than half of his 922 million shares belong to a trust where he and Lori Huang are co-trustees, the Times reported, and she solely controls a separate trust holding about $5 billion in Nvidia stock.
Scott and French Gates each came out of their divorces with vast fortunes. Scott, whose split from Bezos was announced in 2019, left with about $38 billion. French Gates, who divorced Gates in 2021, received an estimated $25 billion in a settlement that was never publicly disclosed, The Independent reported.
Both have since steered billions into philanthropy. Scott has donated $26 billion through her organization, Yield Giving. French Gates left the Gates Foundation in 2024 with $12.5 billion for her own work.
George Rush, who co-wrote the Daily News gossip column Rush & Molloy, told the Times that the Huang situation differs from the Bezos and Gates splits in one key way: this relationship has the potential to move markets and carry global consequences.
There has been no report of any plans by the Huangs to separate. Lori Huang did not respond to the Times’ request for comment. In his message to employees, Huang asked for privacy for his family, saying they bear no responsibility for his choices.
The couple’s story has Pacific Northwest roots. Jensen Huang, born in Taiwan, was sent as a child to live with relatives in Tacoma, Wash., and later went to high school in Beaverton, Ore., according to Quartr. Lori Huang also graduated from an Oregon high school.
The two met in the early 1980s at Oregon State University, where Lori Huang, then Lori Mills, was one of only a handful of women studying engineering, the Times reported. They were paired as lab partners in an electrical engineering fundamentals class, and Huang later told OSU that meeting her was “the most important, single event of OSU, and of my life.”
After graduating and marrying, the Huangs moved to Silicon Valley to work as chip designers. Lori Huang worked at Silicon Graphics, where she earned more than her husband did at LSI Logic, he told The New Yorker in 2023. Just before Nvidia’s founding in 1993, she gave up her career to raise their two children, Spencer and Madison, who both now work at Nvidia.
Huang has frequently credited her support. Speaking on a podcast in May, he recalled missing the kids’ karate tournaments while building the company and said she never complained. “That’s the gift that she gave me,” he said.
Lori Huang is president of the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, which had $9 billion in assets as of 2024, according to the Times. The couple gave $50 million in 2022 to launch a research complex bearing their names at Oregon State. Last month, the foundation gave the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design, led by Nobel laureate David Baker, nearly 7 million GPU hours of cloud computing.
