Where was Nvidia’s security team?

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Nvidia’s security chief quietly left in August, and now that CEO Jensen Huang has stepped down over his relationships, including one with an executive at a company suspected of funneling chips to China, a former intelligence officer says it’s the kind of leak that runs everyday conversations, which most corporate security teams are poorly equipped to catch.

Outsiders had little reason to notice when Nvidia's longtime chief security officer and head of product security stepped down in August. Just two and a half months later, CEO Jensen Huang himself left the company over growing questions about his extramarital relationships — starting with an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore data center company that U.S. investigators suspect of funneling Nvidia chips to China, then widening to reports about two separate affairs with Nvidia employees.

At the time, David Reber, who spent four years as CSO and seven at Nvidia overall, said he was leaving for health reasons. "This wasn't a pivot I had planned. But I know what needs to come first: family and health," he wrote on LinkedIn in late August, disclosing that he'd been diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson's more than two years ago.

Reber's replacement, Saša Zdjelar, previously spent 17 years at ExxonMobil in Houston, leaving as a senior IT manager before spending one year at Salesforce and several years at the cybersecurity company ReversingLabs. Zdjelar didn't respond to questions Thursday about the transition or what the security team knew.

Nothing public connects Reber's or Zdjelar's role changes to the Megaspeed matter, but it seems fair to wonder what Nvidia's security team knew about the government's scrutiny of Megaspeed and about Huang's relationships, and whether anyone raised concerns. Reber didn't respond to questions Thursday. Nvidia also has not answered our related questions.

Not all of those relationships are the business of the security team. Relationships with subordinates typically fall to HR, legal, and the board. But an affair with an executive at a company under federal investigation is a different animal. (Megaspeed has denied any wrongdoing.) Security specialists say affairs can create vulnerabilities that foreign intelligence services look to exploit.

Catching that kind of exposure isn't easy. The way intelligence services collect information, much of it…

So…

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