AI chip giant NVIDIA was expected to fire its CEO as soon as Thursday over two alleged affairs, one of which was with an alleged Chinese spy.

Nov. 12 (UPI) -- The board of NVIDIA was expected to remove Jensen Huang as the company's CEO as soon as Thursday, following his admission of an extramarital affair allegedly with a Chinese woman whom U.S. intelligence assessed was a spy for Beijing.

Huang's pending ouster when the directors meet to consider his fate, sources told CBS News, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, comes after allegations emerged of a second affair, this time with an NVIDIA staffer.

It was unclear who might immediately replace a figure so closely associated with NVIDIA and has been the face of the company since it was founded in the event Huang is removed, but one possibility is NVIDIA Fellow Chris Malachowsky, 67, who co-founded NVIDIA with Huang in 1993.

Going forward, however, the company would most likely need to look elsewhere in Silicon Valley, or further afield, to find a candidate qualified to fill the CEO role permanently.

The development comes four days after the company launched an investigation led by a committee of independent directors into Huang's relationship with Alice Huang [no relation], a former executive of Singapore tech company Megaspeed International, but stressed it had "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised."

CBS News quoted law enforcement sources as saying the Justice Department had launched an investigation into possible breaches of U.S. restrictions on exports of advanced AI chip by Megaspeed amid concerns proprietary NVIDIA technology may have been transferred to China.

Megaspeed denies violating any restrictions on chip exports.

China has rejected the espionage claims, with the foreign ministry in Beijing calling the "so-called Chinese spy-narrative an entirely baseless" effort to slander and smear the country.

NVIDIA stock tumbled by more than 8% after the market closed Wednesday but clawed back some losses in pre-market trade ahead of the NASDAQ open on Thursday, with shares down 6.8% at $162 as of 6.15 a.m. EST, after ending Wednesday at $173.73.

The company is due to report earnings for the quarter ended Oct. 25 on Tuesday.