⚖️ Nvidia settled SEC crypto-mining disclosure charges: $5.5M

Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said Thursday that it had barred Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive, from returning to the country after finding she gave inaccurate statements to downplay her role at the company, per the Wall Street Journal's live coverage. The ministry also said she was not investigated for espionage, AsiaOne reported. That story has its own page here. This one goes to the paperwork behind Nvidia's name: in 2022, the company agreed to pay the SEC $5.5M over what it had not said about crypto.

Fiscal 2018: two quarters, one omission

"In back-to-back quarters in fiscal 2018, Nvidia failed to disclose that cryptomining was a "significant element" of its revenue growth from sales of chips designed for gaming, the SEC said in a statement and charging order."

Reuters, May 6, 2022, reporting the SEC's statement

That is the whole charge in one sentence. Fiscal 2018 ended in January 2018, according to the Motley Fool's archived explainer, so the quarters in question sit inside the first mining boom. The SEC did not say Nvidia sold chips improperly. It said the company did not tell investors where the growth was coming from.

2018: the knowledge question

Reuters, citing the SEC, reported that Nvidia's chips became popular for cryptomining in 2018. The regulator alleged that Nvidia knew this and failed to share it with investors. Those omissions, the SEC said, misled investors and analysts trying to understand the effect of mining on Nvidia's business. The company's answer, as recorded by Reuters, was legal rather than rhetorical: it neither admitted nor denied the findings.

2021: the throttle

The Motley Fool's Leo Sun wrote in an archived 2021 article that Nvidia had announced it would make its RTX 3060 gaming chip "less desirable" to miners by cutting its hash rate, a measure of mining efficiency, in half through software drivers. Sun cited Nvidia data showing revenue from cryptocurrency-specific mining products of $273 million in fiscal 2018 and $306 million in fiscal 2019. He added that those figures excluded gaming chips sold to amateur miners, and that the real share was "impossible to track and calculate." That is a single columnist's reading, not a finding. It does show why the gaming line was the one regulators cared about.

At Computex in June 2021, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang briefed journalists on, among other topics, the company's efforts to discourage miners from buying all of its GPUs, GamesBeat reported.

May 6, 2022: the order

On May 6, 2022, Reuters reported that Nvidia had agreed to pay $5.5M to settle civil charges that it did not properly disclose the effect of cryptomining on its gaming business, the SEC said. The firm did not admit or deny the findings. A spokesperson for the Santa Clara, California, company declined to comment. The Reuters report names the civil penalty as the term it describes. MissFortune has not read the order itself, so any other requirements it carried are not stated here.

The figure is small by Nvidia's standards. Per CNBC, the company is now described as a $4 trillion firm, so the penalty is a rounding error with a paper trail. The precedent is the useful part: on record, the SEC once said Nvidia under-described a customer segment while the segment was lifting results.

November 12, 2026: the exit

Nvidia's board announced Thursday that Huang had resigned as president, CEO and director, effective immediately. CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO and Harvey C. Jones is the board's first-ever chair, per the company's newsroom. CNBC noted that Huang was not quoted in the release, and TechSpot reported no statement from him. The BBC reported that shares opened down more than 13% and were down about 6% by mid-morning in the US.

Investor claims are also in play. CNBC reported that Rosen Law Firm in New York filed a proposed class action on behalf of investors who saw their Nvidia stock fall. TechSpot says the suit accuses Huang and the company of misleading investors by concealing his relationship with Alice Huang. Those are allegations. The reports read include no response from Nvidia or Huang. The 2022 order and the new suit are separate matters, and nothing in the material read links them.

Nvidia reports third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Tuesday, Nov. 17, per the company. You will not need a subpoena to read what it says about its customers.