With his penchant for designer black leather jackets and status as one of the richest people in the world, Jensen Huang is used to being treated like a rock star in his native Taiwan. There's even a word for it: 'Jensanity.'

So when a nubile young fan asked the boss of chip giant Nvidia to write his autograph across her chest at a technology trade fair on the island two years ago, he was happy to oblige, even as – pen poised to scrawl his name across her bustier as the cameras clicked – he wondered aloud if it was a 'good idea'.

Many may now be asking whether the same thought occurred to him before he started an extramarital affair with a glamorous young tech business executive who the US government now says is a Chinese spy.

The revelation sent Nvidia's shares into freefall. But the scandal represents a rare misstep by a man who dreamed up the business that would turn him into 'the Taylor Swift of tech' in a US roadside diner where he had once worked as a waiter.

Born Jen-Hsun in the Taiwanese city of Taiwan in 1963, Mr Huang was five when his father, a chemical engineer at an American air conditioner manufacturer, decided to move the family first to Thailand and then the US after visiting the country for job training.

Despite not speaking English, his wife taught their two boys ten new words she selected every day from a dictionary in preparation for the move.

Mr Huang was nine when he and his brother finally moved to the US in 1973 and lived with an uncle and aunt in Washington state as they waited for their parents to join them.

But Jensen and his brother ended up at a very tough Baptist reform school for 'problematic' children in Oneida, Kentucky, after their uncle, a recent immigrant himself, signed them up for what he thought was a thoroughly respectable boarding school.

As their parents had sold nearly all their possessions to pay the school fees, however, they had no choice but to tough it out.

Young Huang was not only assigned to clean the lavatories but was mercilessly bullied. 'The kids were really tough,' he recalled. 'They all had pocket knives – and when they get in fights, it's not pretty.'

Despite the relentless persecution, he developed a passion for computer games and table tennis, excelling at both and even becoming a national ping-pong star in his teens.

'I loved that sport, but I never loved it more than academics,' he once said and he went on to study electrical engineering at Oregon State University.

It was there Mr Huang met the woman who would become his wife, Lori Mills, who was his engineering lab partner in class. He says his 'killer' pick-up line was offering to show her his homework.

The couple married in 1985 and have two children, Spencer and Madison, who both now work at Nvidia.

After earning a Master's degree from tech hub Stanford University, Mr Huang had his light bulb moment while celebrating his 30th birthday with two friends. It was at a branch of the diner chain Denny's outside San Jose, California – where Mr Huang had worked as a dishwasher and waiter to help pay his way through university – that the trio came up with the idea of starting a tech company.

Founded in 1993, Nvidia – which Mr Huang says took its name from the Latin word for 'envy' – initially devoted itself to producing high-end computer-graphics hardware for video games.

When it went public in 1999, it was valued at $562million, a fraction of its current market capitalisation of $4.3trillion (£3.2trillion).

It wasn't until around 2016 that Nvidia's founders made the momentous decision to concentrate their efforts on becoming the world's foremost manufacturer of programmable Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), the powerful computer chips that are essential to train and run AI systems.

Mr Huang – who owns 3.6 per cent of Nvidia – is now estimated to be worth at least $150billion (£112billion), which puts him eighth in the financial magazine Forbes' list of the world's richest people.

He owns a modernist mansion in San Francisco for which he paid $38million (£28million) in 2017, a 7,000 sq ft house near Nvidia's headquarters in Silicon Valley and a sprawling holiday home on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

When Time magazine named the 'Architects of AI' as its 'person' of the year in 2025, Mr Huang was one of the group of people it honoured.

But following this week's revelations about Mr Huang's private life, 'Jensanity' has taken on a rather different meaning.

The man who likes to boast that his company has ushered in 'the next industrial revolution' has been humbled by a very old-fashioned deception.

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