Lori Huang is the wife of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and the president of their family charity, the Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation. The foundation reported $9.2 billion in assets at the end of 2024. The couple met at Oregon State University, where they met as lab partners.
She is in the news because her husband put her there. On Nov. 8, Jensen Huang told Nvidia’s employees in a memo that he had been unfaithful to her. We found no public statement from Lori Huang, so this profile sticks to her public record: Oregon State, the foundation and the buildings that carry her name.
What Jensen Huang said in his Nov. 8 memo
Nvidia posted the email on its newsroom under the title “A Message to Our Company.” In it, Huang wrote: “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”
He addressed his family directly (“I love you”) and wrote that he hoped “our family will heal.” The memo ends with a request: “My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.”
The same day, Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation. It cited “recent reporting” that Huang had been “the target of a foreign intelligence effort,” and said it had no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets had been compromised.
NBC News reports that the New York Times and the Financial Times had described Huang’s relationship with a Chinese businesswoman. US agencies believe Chinese intelligence recruited her, the papers said, and China’s foreign ministry called that “unsubstantiated.” Our story on Nvidia’s probe of Huang covers the investigation and the stock reaction.
Lab partners in an Oregon State engineering class
Both graduated from Oregon high schools and met as undergraduates in Oregon State’s College of Engineering, according to the university. The pairing came in an electrical fundamentals class. Jensen Huang has called meeting her “the most important, single event of OSU, and of my life.”
He has told the story in public more than once. Speaking at a Hong Kong university in November 2024, he said the class had “250 students and three girls,” Fortune reported.
He was 17 and she was 19, then Lori Mills. His opening line, by his own account, was an offer to show her his homework. Fortune, citing Oregon State, says they married five years after they met.
Few public records describe her working life after college. Several profiles say she designed chips at Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s, but none we found cites a source. We could not confirm it from the university, Nvidia or any interview she has given. She holds no listed role at Nvidia.
President of a $9.2 billion family foundation
Her clearest public job is on paper. ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer publishes the foundation’s tax returns. They list “Lori L Huang” as president and Jen-Hsun Huang as secretary and CFO.
Neither takes a salary, and the 2024 return puts each at one hour a week. The returns go back to the 2007 tax year, and the IRS recognized the charity as tax-exempt in October 2008.
Its growth tracks Nvidia’s stock. Total assets were about $3.4 billion at the end of 2023 and $9.2 billion a year later. Most of 2024’s $5.9 billion in revenue was “other income.” The return explains that as mark-to-market gains on the endowment’s investments.
Oregon State says the foundation backs higher education, public health and STEM programs. It also funds community groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. Announcing their 2022 Oregon State gift, the couple said together: “We discovered our love for computer science and engineering at OSU.”
Where the Huang Foundation’s money has gone
The biggest recipient is one most readers won’t know. Schwab Charitable Fund, which sponsors donor-advised funds, took about 73% of everything the foundation paid out from 2022 to 2024. That money leaves the foundation’s books, but the filings don’t show which charities it reaches next.
All told, the foundation paid out about $283.8 million in grants from 2021 to 2024. In 2024 alone it paid $126.3 million, or about 1.4% of its year-end assets.
We built the table below from the foundation’s IRS returns and from Stanford and Oregon State announcements. Pledges appear in the year they were announced. The IRS rows show cash paid, so the two can overlap.
| Recipient | Amount | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stanford, Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center | $30 million pledge | 2008; building opened 2010 | Stanford Engineering |
| Oregon State, cancer research laboratory | $5 million | Before 2022 (year not given) | Oregon State |
| Oregon State, Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex | $50 million gift | Announced Oct. 2022 | Oregon State |
| Oregon State, all grants paid | $54.3 million | 2021–2024 | IRS Form 990-PF |
| Schwab Charitable Fund | $184.3 million | 2022–2024 | IRS Form 990-PF |
| The GE Force Fund | $27.0 million | 2021 | IRS Form 990-PF |
| Crisis Text Line | $13.3 million | 2021–2024 | IRS Form 990-PF |
| Mental Health Innovations (UK) | $3.1 million | 2022–2024 | IRS Form 990-PF |
| American Friends of Magen David Adom | $900,000 | 2023 | IRS Form 990-PF |
The Oregon State building that carries her name
The most visible part of her public life is going up in Corvallis. The Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex is a $213 million research building built around an Nvidia supercomputer. Nvidia’s blog gave those figures at the April 2024 groundbreaking and said it would open in 2026.
Payments to the university rose with the building. Grants paid to Oregon State reached $30.5 million in 2024, up from about $10 million in each of the two years before. Every grant is labelled “general operating support,” so the returns don’t say how much of that is the $50 million pledge.
The foundation’s 2025 tax return will show whether those payments kept climbing. Inside Nvidia, the board’s committee of independent directors has not said when its review will finish. For how much of the wider AI trade rests on Nvidia, see our explainer on the AI bubble.
