Nvidia security chief's August exit draws scrutiny after Jensen Huang departure

A quiet departure that now looks significant

Nvidia's chief security officer left the company in August, and the move drew little outside attention at the time. According to TechCrunch, David Reber stepped down after four years in the role and seven years at the chipmaker overall. Two and a half months later, CEO Jensen Huang departed over questions about his extramarital relationships.

Reber said at the time that he was leaving for health reasons. In a late August post on LinkedIn, he disclosed that he had been diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson's disease more than two years earlier, writing that family and health had to come first.

His successor, Saša Zdjelar, came to Nvidia from the cybersecurity firm ReversingLabs after a year at Salesforce. Before that, he had a long career at ExxonMobil in Houston, leaving as a senior IT manager. Neither Zdjelar nor Reber responded to TechCrunch's questions about the transition.

The relationships behind Huang's exit

Huang's departure followed reports that began with a relationship with an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore data centre company that United States investigators suspect of moving Nvidia chips to China. Megaspeed has denied any wrongdoing. The reports later widened to include two separate relationships with Nvidia employees.

The New York Times reported this week, citing five employees, that Huang was involved with a vice president who reported directly to him. Reuters later reported a second relationship, citing two people. Nvidia's code of conduct does not expressly forbid such behaviour.

Some parts of the picture were known inside the company. Nvidia has said it regularly contacts officials. What remains unclear is whether any of this information reached the security team.

Why security teams struggle to spot this risk

Security specialists say affairs can create openings that foreign intelligence services try to exploit.

Retired senior intelligence officer Nicholas Eftimiades, who has trained more than 1,000 corporate security professionals, told TechCrunch that much intelligence gathering happens through ordinary conversation rather than hacking. That makes it very hard for corporate security teams to identify.

Eftimiades, author of a 2020 book on Chinese espionage operations, said security teams are often underfunded because they do not generate revenue. He said chief executives commonly respond to security warnings by refusing to spend beyond the minimum needed for compliance.

A narrow view of corporate security

Specialists argue many companies define security too narrowly. In an opinion piece in The Hill, Don Aviv of the investigations firm Interfor International and author Jeremy Hurewitz wrote that too many firms focus mainly on protecting facilities, preventing cyberattacks and responding to physical threats.

They argued that security teams should pay more attention to insider threats, including the cultivation of executives by foreign intelligence services, suspicious business relationships and attempts to obtain sensitive information through trusted personal contacts.

Eftimiades said some exposure is beyond any team's control. Speaking generally and not about Huang, he described a scenario where a chief executive complains about board resistance, revealing who the obstacle is. An intelligence service can then target that person's email and phone.

What happens next

Eftimiades said the tactics involved are not new, particularly for China, and that executives dealing with the country will say they have been approached. He noted that modern intelligence relationships often last years rather than weeks, unlike Soviet-era operations. He also pointed to IMSI catchers, devices that mimic a cell tower so nearby phones connect to them, as an example of technology that can support human intelligence. A basic version can cost about $1,000, he said, though government-grade models cost far more.

No one knows whether such devices were used against Huang, whose phone was presumably hardened so that compromises could be detected. Nvidia's board is running an independent investigation, and federal inquiries are under way. Those proceedings should clarify what the security team knew and whether it could have acted.

Eftimiades said he hopes the episode serves as a warning for United States industry, which he described as largely unaware of China's tactics. He estimated that trillions of dollars in intellectual property have been lost.