The scandal engulfing Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is no longer simply a question of whether one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful men had an affair with a suspected Chinese spy. It’s also a question of what the White House knew—and what it might have chosen to overlook.

Huang and Nvidia confirmed the relationship Sunday, following a bombshell New York Times report. Alice Huang, the woman at the center of the revelations, is an executive at Singapore-based data center company Megaspeed, a major customer of Nvidia chips. U.S. intelligence surveillance reportedly showed that she had been funneling information directly to the Chinese government.

What remains unclear is how much sensitive information may have been compromised, what Huang knew about the woman he was seeing, and why U.S. intelligence officials apparently failed to warn him about her suspected ties to Beijing. The answers could prove deeply damaging to both Huang and the White House.

“It was pretty clear to a lot of people that he would be a target of Chinese intelligence collection,” says Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, given Huang’s proximity to Trump and his leadership of a company that is “central to the U.S.-China AI competition.”

The admission of the affair also contradicts how Nvidia and Huang himself had previously characterized his ties to Alice Huang.

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