Nvidia's security chief quietly left in August. Two and a half months later, so did Jensen Huang
David Reber stepped down as Nvidia's CSO in August, citing his health. TechCrunch asks what, if anything, Nvidia's security team knew before the Megaspeed and affair scandal broke.
David Reber spent four years as Nvidia’s chief security officer and seven years at the company overall. In late August, he posted on LinkedIn that he was leaving, and framed it as a health decision. “This wasn’t a pivot I had planned. But I know what needs to come first: family and health,” he wrote, disclosing a young-onset Parkinson’s diagnosis from more than two years earlier.
Nobody outside the company had much reason to read that post twice. Two and a half months later, Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO, and the timeline around his departure now makes Reber’s exit look different in hindsight.
The two and a half months in between
Here’s the order of events TechCrunch and other outlets have reported so far.
In August, Reber stepped down and Saša Zdjelar, who’d spent 17 years at ExxonMobil before stints at Salesforce and the cybersecurity firm ReversingLabs, took over as chief security officer and head of product security.
| David Reber (out) | Saša Zdjelar (in) | |
|---|---|---|
| Role | CSO, 4 years (7 at Nvidia total) | CSO and head of product security |
| Background before Nvidia | Not specified in Reber’s posts | 17 years at ExxonMobil, then Salesforce, then ReversingLabs |
| Stated reason for the move | Health: a young-onset Parkinson’s diagnosis | Not stated; didn’t answer TechCrunch’s questions |
| Public comment on the Megaspeed timing | None found; departure framed as personal | None; didn’t respond Thursday |
More than a year before that, Nvidia’s top lawyer was already fielding questions from the government about Megaspeed, a Singapore data center company U.S. investigators suspect of funneling Nvidia chips to China, the New York Times reported earlier this month. Megaspeed has denied wrongdoing.
On November 7, three House committees asked Huang to explain a Chinese intelligence memo tied to the Megaspeed matter. On November 8, Huang admitted to an affair with a Megaspeed executive, the relationship that triggered the board’s investigation. The Times and Reuters then reported separate relationships with Nvidia employees, including a vice president who reported to him directly. On November 12, Huang resigned.
Zdjelar didn’t answer TechCrunch’s questions about the transition or what the security team knew. Neither did Reber. Nvidia didn’t answer either.
What a security team can and can’t catch
TechCrunch’s framing is a fair question, not an accusation: Nvidia’s own security leadership changed hands in the same window its legal team was already engaged with the government, and nobody has said whether those two things ever talked to each other. Nothing public connects Reber’s departure to Megaspeed, and his health explanation, backed by a specific diagnosis, is on the record and consistent with what a person leaving for that reason would say.
What’s more interesting is what retired intelligence officer Nicholas Eftimiades told TechCrunch about why this kind of risk is hard to catch at all. Foreign intelligence services collect most of what they want through ordinary conversation, not hacking, which makes it hard for any security team to flag. He’s trained more than 1,000 corporate security professionals and says security teams are routinely underfunded because, unlike sales or product, they don’t generate revenue. His line for how executives usually respond to a security team’s budget request: “not a nickel more than compliance.”
He also made a point that applies beyond Nvidia. Companies tend to define security narrowly, around facilities and cyberattacks, and under-invest in watching for the slower kind of risk, like an executive’s relationships or business ties that an intelligence service can work for years. Don Aviv and Jeremy Hurewitz made the same argument in The Hill: security teams need to pay more attention to insider threats and the cultivation of executives by foreign intelligence services, not just firewalls.
My read: the TechCrunch headline asks the right question, but there’s no evidence yet that the answer is “nowhere.” A quiet, health-related departure in August and a scandal in November can be two unrelated things that happen to sit on the same calendar. What would actually answer the question is whether the board’s independent investigation, or the House committees’ inquiry, asks Nvidia’s current and former security leadership directly what they knew and when. As of this week, nobody had.
What I don’t know: whether the board’s investigation includes interviewing Reber or Zdjelar at all, and whether Reber’s diagnosis has any connection to his departure timing beyond what he said publicly. I found no reporting on either point, and Nvidia hasn’t addressed it.
A note on sources: I read TechCrunch’s report in full, including its sourcing to Eftimiades, The Hill op-ed and Nvidia’s code of conduct. The New York Times and Reuters reporting on Huang’s relationships is cited through TechCrunch’s own report, since the Times original is paywalled.
Related: our November 8 post on the board’s investigation, our November 7 post on the China spy memo, and our November 12 post on Huang’s resignation cover the rest of this timeline.