Jensen Huang Promised Lori Mills He'd Be CEO by 30. After 41 Years of Marriage, He Admits an Affair

The first promise Jensen Huang likes to tell about Lori Mills was that he could get her straight A's. He was 17, she was 19, and they had been paired in an electrical engineering lab at Oregon State. If she did homework with him on Sundays, he told her, he'd make sure she got the grades. What he really wanted, he would later admit, was to spend Sundays with her.

On Sunday, November 8, Huang sent an email to the employees of the company he had built during their 41-year marriage. The subject was *A message to our company*. In the opening lines, he admitted he had been unfaithful. He wrote that he had hurt Lori and their children. Then he asked, in front of the people who worked for him, for the chance to earn back her trust.

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Homework on Sundays

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Huang has told the college story often enough that the size of the class changes. When he returned to Oregon State in 2013, there were about 80 engineering students in his telling. At a speech in Hong Kong in 2024, there were 250. There were always three women, and Lori was always the one he wanted to sit beside.

By 20, he had made her a more audacious promise. He told her he would be a CEO by 30, an argument, in his telling, for why she ought to marry him. Lori finished her electrical engineering degree in 1985, the year they married. Eight years later, Huang and two other engineers came up with the idea for Nvidia over a meal at a Denny's in San Jose. He was 30 when he co-founded the company.

The homework story outlasted Nvidia's early years, its rise in gaming and its transformation into the company at the centre of the AI boom. As recently as June, Huang was telling it on the Korean television show *You Quiz on the Block*. Five months later, he was writing about the same woman in an email that would be read around the world.

ALSO: READ | 'I Was Unfaithful To My Wife': Jensen Huang Admits Affair As Nvidia Board Opens Probe

The Life Behind the Story

At Oregon State, both their names are on the four-storey atrium of the Kelley Engineering Center. They gave the university $2.5 million in 2009 and committed another $50 million in 2022 to help build a research centre. The place where a professor paired two students at a lab bench became one of the places they gave back to together.

Their children took roundabout routes into the company. Madison went to culinary school and worked at LVMH before moving into simulation at Nvidia. Spencer ran a cocktail bar in Taipei before going into robotics. Each earned more than $1 million from Nvidia in fiscal 2026, according to The Information. The company receiving their father's apology is also where both of them go to work.

The financial records show another part of the life the Huangs built. Nvidia's May proxy listed more than 528 million shares in a living trust with Jensen and Lori as co-trustees. They started their charitable foundation in 2007 with Nvidia shares worth about $12.6 million. It reported $9.2 billion in assets at the end of 2024. On Sunday, Forbes estimated Jensen Huang's personal fortune at $162.2 billion. Lori has made no public statement about the affair, and there has been no public report of a separation.

ALSO READ: READ | Who Is Alice Huang? The Woman Linked to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's Affair and a $4.8 Billion Chip Mystery

The Name He Left Out

Huang's email did not identify the woman. The New York Times reported that he had acknowledged an intimate relationship with Alice Huang to Nvidia's board. Alice, who is unrelated to him, was a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data centre company whose Malaysian sister company bought at least $4.8 billion in equipment containing Nvidia chips. The Financial Times reported that a US intelligence memo described the relationship as romantic. US officials believed China's Ministry of State Security had recruited her to gather information and potentially influence Nvidia's push to sell advanced chips to China. Alice Huang did not respond to the Times' requests for comment. No public charges against her have been reported.

In late October, Jensen Huang told Bloomberg his dealings with Alice had been related to Megaspeed and were “completely normal and not unusual.” Ten days after the Times first reported the intelligence allegations, Nvidia's board opened an independent inquiry. It said it had no reason to believe national security or company secrets had been compromised and expressed confidence in Huang, who remains CEO. Three House committee chairs have asked him to brief them behind closed doors on November 18.

There is a date for Congress to ask its questions. In his email, Huang gave his wife no timetable. “I know an apology cannot undo what I have done,” he wrote.

For years, he told the story of how he persuaded Lori Mills to spend a Sunday with him. She has yet to say what she wants from him now.

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