Why not just sell to not-sanctioned entities, ensure compliance to the best of your abilities and otherwise keep your head down? Again, wasn't like they struggled to find buyers for their chips.
Considering Megaspeed, I now see this in a very different light. Him cheating is personal and I wish the affected members of any family of a cheater the best, but not relevant for us outsiders.
Being honey trapped very bad securities wise, but he'd be a victim (and evidence for why we shouldn't discount Mistral in the frontier lab race [1]). If sanctions avoidance went all the way to the top, that is hard to negate even for a board that is interested in keeping him. At that stage he was neither honey trapped nor "merely horny"...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
[1] https://time.com/archive/7146565/hollandes-popularity-goes-u...
I am not entirely sure I buy the Spy thesis. And Alice's husband knew this all along. Which makes the whole thing more doggy.
And Jensen's view isn't wrong. There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions. Not when they are the second-largest economy and still rapidly advancing. There are better ways to handle this, one huge ban isn't one.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
Finally, because he's of Han Chinese origin, I bet they thought they could get the media to coordinate a narrative around him that will force him out. Of course, he sort of made it easy to pin something on him.
There are a lot of Game of Thrones going on in AI. Everyone is jockeying. Everyone has different incentives. Super high stakes game.
He's operating in a highly charged political environment in which his credibility is a key asset. He can't effectively advocate for NVIDIA's interests if his credibility is damaged.
And this goes directly to his credibility on the most politically charged issue of all: The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China, and NVIDIA's role in it.
I agree it's a tragedy for NVIDIA, he seems to have been exceptional as a CEO, it's just too late now.
This one looks highly coordinated with multiple mainstream media outlets piling in.
They could have easily just waited a month or two and let this all just go away.
As far as I can tell, most of the reports were just recounting factual information. The narrative was already there. The media didn't create it.
This X post makes a lot of sense: https://x.com/antfeedapp/status/2120454507448651933
What do you mean by "this"? One thing I agree with is that we knew about this story for months. I've read about Jensen's affair with Alice Huang and her ties to the Chinese government at least five months ago.
The thing that triggered the current reporting was the new sourcing about U.S. intelligence findings that came out in late October. So mainstream news started reporting on it once they had sources they found trustworthy.
The confusing thing, though, is not that the story suddenly became big, but why it didn't become big much earlier.
I recommend watching it if the power of media interests you.
I think whoever is next will not always have the affinity for gaming. Any finance person who looks at the unit economics of gaming would conclude that they should allocate next to no chip supply to gaming GPUs.
An RTX 5090 is the same die size as a server GPU.
nvidia got their strong position in AI now by providing CUDA to researchers who couldn't afford their own supercomputing cluster. and now the entirety of machine learning revolves around CUDA.
once you fixate on the business and lock out the masses, you instantly elect to become a fossil like IBM.
An RTX 5090 is a reticle sized chip.
That’s what I think it’s going on… the “allegations” are ridiculous at best. He is the most “normal” of the bunch by a long short.
Like, internal Nvidia KYC policy changed per Huang to facilitate GPU sales to Megaspeed.
Whether or not he realized it, cared, or was aware and doing it on purpose, he was acting as an enormously powerful lobbyist and influencer on the US as an agent of China.
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."
This isn’t about right or wrong. If he knowingly broke the law he should be punished.
What the fuck are you talking about - it's obvious this guy broke the export bans - the affairs are just a media circus to distract from that fact - not only should he be ousted he should be going to jail if there's any sort of legal system in the US left...
Absolutely. Since the midterms, many politicians see going after Jensen as a way to appease the pitchfork mobs of anti-AI/data center voters (it doesn't matter if that position makes no sense).
You can get like 200% margin on selling GPUs to PRC smugglers in Taiwan. It's a very busy industry with lots of players so the margin gets spread around. Recently a big ring of them was busted and sent to prison here so most people try to have as many middlemen between them and the guy that puts it on the boat as possible, because apparently the prison sentence is quite long.
I had someone offer me 10x whatever I bought for (not even MSRP just whatever I paid) for "as many GPUs as I could get my hands on." I asked hundreds? Yeah. Thousands? "Can you get us thousands???" It's fuckin nutty.
This is exactly how it played out, too, which is why Huawei chips have started taking inference workloads in China and we're now starting to see them in training too.
1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?
It's a no-brainer. If there were no export controls, Nvidia would be taking all that oxygen out of the room. Chinese chip efforts would be put back by at least 5 years, and probably more like 10.
Sure, they might get there eventually but Nvidia would still have that lead when they do.
> 1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?
Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.
There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China. You can't bait them into acting against their own interests by giving them stuff. If the harm to the domestic chip industry would really outweigh the benefits, the CCP would issue the order and no-one would buy the Nvidia chips and that would be that.
Clearly untrue, because many companies are using the gimped H20s and the full H200s (both legally imported or smuggled) despite official government policy being silicon-self-sufficiency. It's a bit more complex than "CCP issues order and everyone immediately falls into line".
> There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China.
I'm not saying it "hurt China", I'm saying there's a fine line to tread between supporting Chinese AI models now, at the expense of the Chinese silicon industry in 20 years' time. The US export ban forced the issue and took the alternative off the table.
Do you know how difficult it is for a company to expand their business to new markets? Do you know difficult it is the build up a customer base in a market?
This isn't just doing addition and subtraction on n GPUs/year. This is business. We wouldn't have so many businessmen if business was that simple.
There are a few major differences. Apple's devices aren't under export control so Apple takes no risk selling. Nvidia had to take legal risks to do this.
On the stock side, Apple devices are almost never supply constrained. Nvidia's never get to sit on the shelf. Nvidia can jack up the prices to the sky and still not keep up with demand.
Between these 2 things, the risk to sell to China looks like more than only profit motivated.
So was Huang playing along as part of some other US-Chinese plot?
Was he a pawn, or go-between, in US-Chinese relations.
Maybe the cheating was a cover, or pawn with benefits?
Is it so unreasonable to expect American tech companies to 'ignore' the market of a country that is supplying materiel to the countries that America is currently engaged in a proxy war, and actual war with?
If not, exactly what would China have to do for this to be a reasonable expectation, and something that we would expect American companies to do under their own volition?
Pretending there was no China revenue in the books?? That's an insanely huge financial lie
China has all the incentive in the world to disrupt a major US AI firm to slow the US down.
The question you have to be asking is why was the memo leaked now and what political game are they playing.
In terms of ousting him - I know nothing about him as a person - but he has lead Nvidia for 30 years during which time it has wildy succeed in not an easy market - whatever this is about, it's not about competence.
Which suggests the formal assessment is it wasn't - they were investigating Megaspeed for sanction busting via chip smuggling, happened to notice the affair, and found nothing concrete.
Note sanction busting by buying lots of Nvidia chips and renting them to Chinese companies is perfectly legal ( and very lucrative ).
So that's the evidence about the security situation.
The real question is why leak the memo to the press now - and I don't pretend here to know the answer - but if you think it's about suppression of some serious espionage event I think you are wrong.
Where is the evidence that nobody in the security services did not know ? There is already history where Security services are not independent, and stuff that will be investigated depends on the current gouverement, what the timing of the leak seems to suggest.
Wake me up when that changes to actual spying.
Also turns out this wasn't the only affair the CEO had and it's not suggested the other woman was a spy.
Has it crippled their AI charge? No. Hindered perhaps - but things like the rental loophole show how stupid it was.
What is has done is supercharge the internal chinese chip market ( which has endangered NVidia's global dominance ).
For example:
I don't think it's good for Nvidia if everyone has to go through a few labs APIs to get access to AI inference.
It makes sense to me why they would benefit from chinese labs having more compute.
The main competitions US labs are facing, are from one another at this point, not from open weight models. If anything, the competition from new entrants in the west (Meta, xAI, even Google if you think about it) has pushed things even faster, but regardless, I don’t see how OpenAI and Anthropic would have been any slower if there were no open weight models.
That is something they simply cannot do with Chinese entities. Allegedly smuggling GPUs may be feasible, but that'd probably ruffle to many feathers in both the US and Mainland China, especially as we know they will pop a bubble to their own (temporary) detriment if it gets out of control as seen with Evergrande a few years ago.
Beyond all of that, would that juice be worth the squeeze? Bypass massive sanctions, risk your companies future and standing on the global stage just to provide foreign labs with your GPUs illegally and create a comparatively negligible added demand for your accelerators when compared with the (predominantly) closed-model-labs? That seems very high risk, very low reward in my eyes.
Nvidia would rather sell those big interconnected gpu racks than individual GPUs.
> I don't think it's good for Nvidia if everyone has to go through a few labs APIs to get access to AI inference.
Maybe but isn't a business customer better for Nvidia than regular customers? They buy in bulk and commit to multi year purchases. Bonus points for circular deals
Would that not perhaps hurt their product ecosystem? What if people decide they don't want so much of one product, and would actually like to buy some of those cancelled products at some point in the future? I guess they'd have to go to a different company then!
Their P/E ratio is lower than in 2020 (before AI got rolling, and way below their 2023 peak.
If anything - based on current sales alone - NVDA is undervalued.
If (it’s a big if), NVDA get leapfrogged in hardware capability it will be trivial for the next generation of deployments to stop using them entirely (Google and Microsoft are already developing custom inference chips, as are others)
The same story goes back for years and years in consumer hardware too. AMD GPUs often had more raw compute capability, but fell short in actual game performance (or other applications).
Nvidia's moat is, at least partially, the software to make the hardware useful.
The hyperscalers are one story but research/consumer/“Everyman” inference is likely very different.
i would like to, but won't/can't buy their overpriced crap -> they're losing a customer -> they're doing something wrong -> their valuation is just about 0 to me, ballpark estimate
Because a good exec plans long-term. Presidents and political parties in office are temporary. It takes much more to get a foothold in the market.
- https://www.youtube.com/@GamersNexus/posts 1 day ago.
I assume that "what they used it for" means "what they could do after they pwnt the computer in the TV". If that's what you meant, then _if_ there is at least one reasonably easy way to pwn the computer in that TV without really requiring interaction from the TV's user, then it's 110% fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the TV does out of the box and what it has the capability to do. Why? Because if it's easy to pwn, then it's likely to already be pwnt.
But. Even if there wasn't a reasonably easy way to pwn the TV, I'd say that it's still very fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the thing does now and what it can be made to do, because what it does tomorrow is up to the manufacturer... which has pretty clearly demonstrated that they give zero shits about the privacy of the purchasers of their consumer-grade TVs. Inevitably, the manufacturer will make the TV do everything it can do in order to continually squeeze as many pennies from that initial sale as is possible.
> People who care about hardware reviews have to go somewhere else.
You've probably missed the handful of videos where Burke is all like «We'd love to review hardware, but it's so damn expensive that no one can really buy it. Why spend time reviewing things that people can't really buy? So, we investigate this stuff because it's informative and important.»
But yeah, GN doesn't do many hardware reviews these days.
I also pray* that said reality has not breached an event horizon; blotted from the known universe, never to be seen again.
*figuratively
Why not CEOs at $73B market cap companies? And increase it with inflation?
In effort for us to see clear eyed, it would be good to stop assuming someone is a spy without a shred of credible evidence. Avoiding trade restrictions by routing them through another country does not indicate spy craft.
* US intelligence agencies reportedly monitored Alice Huang for over a year and concluded she was passing information directly to Beijing.
* A memo overseen by Marco Rubio reportedly concluded that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited her to gather intelligence on Jensen Huang and potentially influence Nvidia's chip exports.
* The FBI reportedly warned US lawmakers nearly a year ago that she might be supplying information to China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
In the spy world, this is about as close to irrefutable evidence as it gets. We know that any strategically important or large company in China requires Party members in positions of authority inside the company. The CCP exerts direct power over these companies in a multitude of ways. Megaspeed is a clear example of the kind of company they oversee. To assume anything other than Megaspeed being in clear cooperation with the CCP would be a rejection of everything we know about how companies operate in China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
I would not be surprised if Alice Huang and others were coordinating chip purchases through financing backed by the China government. But that's not spying. Thats just business.
I think you've made up your mind on this matter and you're not going to let reality get in the way.
My point is simply what I said at the beginning of this thread: "In effort for us to see clear eyed."
We've seen the results of this just this year when its turned out China has enough oil reserves to buffer the reduced output from the Iran war. China had been bringing in Iran/Venezuela/Russia oil for years despite U.S./EU sanctions. That's not spy craft. That's China looking after itself and not bowing to western hegimony.
Nobody apart form US has issue with current China - if folks in US are getting the idea from US media that whole world is on some jihad against China thats laughable - nope its just US, yet another failed effort that will backfire way worse than doing nothing, ie like Iran. We don't want part in that. China is not expansionist unlike russia, it doesn't have that desperate need to promote their regime and way of doing things on whole world and murder anybody rejecting it. This fearmongering is simply not working outside US borders.
Now in the past there were many gentlemen agreements between nations plus the risk of aircraft carrier group coming your way or getting kicked out of SWIFT network, but that has been overused recently so nobody cares that much.
NVIDIA is the undisputed champion of AI hardware because of the advanced chip node access ban, ensuring no Chinese competition in this area for years. In return NVIDIA was banned from selling their chips to China so that the US holds the state of the art in AI models as well. Selling chips through back channels is a betrayal, spies or not.
Their main problem is not the lower efficiency, but the limited capacity of production, caused by the fact that they cannot buy SOTA manufacturing equipment.
This will indeed slow them down for some time, but it is likely that sometime between 2030 and 2032 they will become able to use EUV lithography in mass production, eliminating the principal advantage of US companies like NVIDIA. After that, they will no longer be constrained by the capacity of production for GPUs and CPUs.
I consider rather doubtful that USA will possess advanced AGI before that.
Even with the smaller amount of GPUs that they can use, I do not see any sign that they will trail by much the AI research from USA.
They will build this capacity anyways, delaying them to 2030 would be a massive win.
I don't know what your definition of "advanced AGI" is, but if it's the target for a final "win" to the AI race, I think you need to reassess what the current capabilities really are, we're still in the infancy or toddler stages of AGI at best. You should also take a look at how fast Chinese labs are closing the gap, with greater efficiency compared to US labs.
The US mindset of abundance and "scaling laws" is not going to have them win the race. It's not a sustainable strategy.
Are you living in some parallel universe where china is reliant on the US for Teslas or something? They are even certifying their own commercial jet engines now.
Don't mistake china's reliance 40 years ago while purchasing US technology to what it is capable of reverse engineering now...
Yes, with or without approved transfer of tech to China, China will eventually catch up. Would you rather this eventual tech normalization happen through a process of growing animosity or respectful cooperation?
I don't have a dog in this fight on specifics regarding Nvidia chips. People on all sides will respond as they see fit.
False dichotomy. We have plenty of examples of selling tech to China which eventually leads to the opposite of respectful cooperation. I'm not anti-china but it has nothing to do with any of this. What was the point of bringing it up, it doesn't make your argument any more compelling. It's not within the expected logical standard that is expected on HN.
Let's get back to the original point that you made, which is parroting the idea that selling leading technology somehow prevents China from accelerating their pursuit of it. Do you have any evidence of that working? Or are you just parroting what Jensen has been saying because he wants to sell his hardware in the Chinese market?
I doubt that you actually even believe what you are parroting. Would you say that selling US stealth fighter technology to China causes a longer term reliance on the US and stops China's pursuit of stealth tech? If the US sold stealth fighter tech to China and asked China to pinky swear they won't do anything that is against the US interests with it, do you think China would respect that?
And since it seems paramount for you to bring up, let me make this clear: I'm not saying China is a bad actor here, it's just reality. There's no rational world where China has the most advanced time travel technology, the US is a half a decade behind, and China starts selling it to the US in the hopes that the US becomes reliant on China for time travel technology. It doesn't make any sense.
Sure - jet engines. China still can't replicate the material for turbine blade and has to buy them from other countries.
They've had decades from the first aircraft sales to do the R&D to make their own blades. They've failed so far.
NVDA stock lost hundreds of billions of dollars. Erased ALL gains from the last year, and there are at least four or five materially significant investor information, that NVIDIA should have disclosed as risk to investors and did not.
For a company with 4 Trillion in stock market value, this is an absolute wet dream for the lawyers who specialize on this type of lawsuits.
And its telling that even Trump basically refused to back him, and said the FBI is investigating and "he hopes there is nothing there..." what is telling, so there is a lot. So he is gone. Its just taking time for the board to find a CEO.
So the affair is going on for 3 years...and it was her husband that made the introductions [1].
Trump, Rubio and the security community knew about this for at least one year, and knew NVIDIA was in all likelihood, engaging or tolerating criminal activity on violating export controls that come with a few years of prison.
Look at this [2] excellent work from Bloomberg. For Jensen Huang as a dual Taiwanese and United States citizen, to completely ignoring what is going in the South China Sea, the Chinese threats of invading Twain, and be so forthcoming on saying "China is not our enemy" like you see here: https://youtu.be/JW5s9Md4U2U?t=1058
While failing to disclose a relationship with CEO of the main company traffic forbidden NVIDIA GPUs to China, shows a recklessness that probably meant to side observers of the intelligence community, he had to justifiably be taken down.
And its telling this is a takedown from within the government and the intelligence community, because most is coming from the New York Times. They seem to be ahead of everybody else, and is well know it has always been a mouthpiece of the US intelligence community when they want to leak something convenient.
[1]-"A Mystery Businessman Introduced Jensen Huang to His Paramour. It Was Her Husband." - https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/a-mystery-businessman-introduced...
[2]-"The Rise and Reckoning of Jensen Huang" - https://youtu.be/JW5s9Md4U2U
Those statements sound different today, but I think they are both commercially reasonable desires and follow naturally from his very successful playbook over the last twenty years: CUDA built that company. Or at least got it to its first trillion.
The only person that should be able to fire him is their spouse and only of their mariage/relationship.
[1] the fact that a company policy says you can't do this or that doesn't mean it is a legal or enforceable policy depending on the juridiction
At the time I didn't think it would happen because of impact on Nvidia's stock price, but at that point we didn't know about his second affair - with Kimberly Powell.
I'd suggest this latest revelation makes his position untenable, especially if the board found out about the second affair via a source other than Huang himself. He should have spilled the beans on that when the first affair came out, not that it would necessarily have saved him, but withholding the information - if that's what he did - should condemn him. It's another serious lapse in judgement and a failure of integrity that is not befitting of one of the most powerful corporate leaders on earth.
Goodness knows how his wife is feeling at this point. Certainly makes his apology from a couple of days back ring rather hollow.
EDIT: The fact that someone like Jensen Huang - who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy as opposed to a nitwit - can somehow completely implode his life in almost the most ridiculous way imaginable does give me some hope that at least some of the troublemaker ne'er do wells that have wielded so much power over us all over the past decade or so might also experience some just desserts in the not too distant future.
As bad as cheating is morally, we don't really know how his wife feels or if they had some open relationship type arrangement, and it's not really material to his running the company because it's been doing very well during all of that. I don't think it makes much sense to fire someone over this, it's more like a power struggle with other parties vying for control.
Dating a customer and subordinate potentially undermines objectivity in customer pricing, customer chip access, promotions, performance, etc. That’s why it’s explicitly forbidden in Nvidia (and most companies) code of conduct
It isn't necessarily about morality if there are rules in place that all employees, c-suite or otherwise, are expected to follow.
I don't know Nvidia internal policy, but assuming their HR policies include such a stipulation it shouldn't be treated as a "rules for thee, not me for" situation.
If that's the case and she backs him up on this, then it's sordid but not cheating and _that_ part of the scandal can be overlooked, but espionage is a different matter.
What evidence have you seen that espionage has taken place? I've seen people speculating about espionage, but very little evidence to back this up.
The ethics of having an affair depend entirely on the relationship between the people involved. I can't pass judgement on that in general. Having an affair with customers or subordinates can be problematic, but I wouldn't call it unethical. In any event, it is completely separate from the spying allegations.
You didn’t get a tip or give anyone a tip. You are not the only one whose decision affects the outcome. However you choose to divest yourself of shares by selling them, and then bring it up.
I am not a securities lawyer or an expert on case law. But would the board member be able to file a Form 4 and sell shares, before their actions that may affect the company?
His public statement about hurting his family suggests they did not.
If I was in his position and I did, my statement would be something like "We're not monogamous, and we're both content with that arrangement. That was meant to stay private, and I'm sorry it came to public attention".
Then I'm just eccentric instead of an asshole.
Polymarket prices in a 32% chance of divorce by end of March which is about a third of his chances of getting fired over the same timespan, so...
WHO CARES. sorry, I don't meant to be mad at you. But we need to stop using the wisdom of the crowd when such crowd is... that crowd.
This is a common fallacy. Often being incredibly smart in a few areas leaves you incredibly naive in others. If nothing else, your success in some domains will lead to overconfidence in others.
To an extremely ignorant person on the matter like me, and genuinely asking, what has he achieved in terms of engineering and development, that makes you think he's smart? Or do you mean in the sense of knowing its way through business and politics? Idk I always find difficult to believe that people really think that CEOs are smart, when they commonly are not involved what so ever in any scientific leading or research, and just funnel money to a product that make them richer.
But I prefer to believe I'm wrong and would like to hear form the other side.
NVidia was at the right place at the right time, nothing else.
P.S. As a linux user I ascribe to the "FU nvidia" Linus' school of thought (because drivers) and I am happily running a Framework desktop instead of an nvidia rig. But credit where credit's due.
Jensen has absolutely made his own luck here. They were in the right place waiting for the right time for decades before it hit.
that's main driver behind the biggest technological innovation of humankind requires you to be quite smart, don't you think?
wtf
>terms of engineering and development, that makes you think he's smart?
yes, because only engineering and development requires smartness! Do you really think it is true? wtf
>Idk I always find difficult to believe that people really think that CEOs are smart, when they commonly are not involved what so ever in any scientific leading or research, and just funnel money to a product that make them richer.
If you really believe that picking what to invest is easy, then go ahead to the stock market - you should outperform it easily then.
what the fuck is this take :D
As a large shareholder and world's 7th [now 12th] richest person he would certainly retain a lot of power, even with a new CEO. Time to start his own personal VC firm or something.
There is some nepotism at Nvidia, those people are likely going to be very annoyed with him since their positions may not now be tenable.
TSLA's board also needs to do its job.
It's kind of hard for US techies to not have exposure to a company that accounts for >5% of the S&P 500.
Nvidia will do just fine with another CEO as they're deeply entrenched.
Had you said this maybe 5 6 yrs ago then yes, it would be firing the visionary leader before his vision was implemented
Nvidia is an extremely successful company right now. It was called the central bank of AI just a few months ago
It will be a pity to see the company go down because the board feels the need to pry into his private life.
Does he have to be a monk to head this company?
Have you checked with his wife that they are not in an open relationship, or polyamorous?
The security aspect is a totally different story, but the rest is his personal life and none of your business.
But not with his employees or staff at companies he sells to, he’s the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, being paid billions, it’s not a big ask.
Random low level managers in a supermarket have been fired for sleeping with their staff.
When former Intel CEO Brian Kraznich did it he was on the chopping block and they used as an excuse to fire him.
But Nvidia's board has a history of being favorable to Jensen-- he hasn't done much wrong and typically they will reward performance. First responsibility is share-holders but there is a lot of self-interest at play. If they don't fire him they could face action by government or get sued by shareholders, if they do fire him they deflate the value of the share holdings further.
Now that Nvidia has blown up so much they think they can do fine without him -- but it can easily turn into the next Intel. It most likely won't 100x in two years but it can certainly crash if there are poor decisions made. If the CFO is rumored to replace him, changing leader from a founder engineer to a finance person isn't likely to go well.
Do you really think this is the same as sleeping with a random person at a company which happens to use some Nvidia products?
That banging customers and execs is a huge conflict of interest and security risk. There is a good reason if C-suites typically bang escorts instead of their colleagues.
Mmm. Infidelity is very common. [0] What's fairly uncommon is getting caught in a way that requires the infidelity to be acknowledged. Just ask the French. ;)
[0] ...it's almost as if monogamy is an unnatural state of being for many (but definitely not all!) people...
failure of integrity is the operating mode for the most powerful corporate leaders on earth.
I don't know. Some people have too much power to be held accountable for their actions, e.g. Trump
Without Jensen Huang's vision, Nvidia might have remained primarily a graphics chip maker, and the deep learning revolution would not have arrived when it did. Long before deep neural networks took off, Huang backed the use of Nvidia GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computing, including the development of CUDA. In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used Nvidia GPUs and CUDA to train AlexNet, whose breakthrough performance helped ignite the modern deep learning boom. Nvidia's investment in programmable GPUs helped make that breakthrough possible.
The critical vision was that GPUs could become a platform for computing beyond graphics—and that Nvidia should invest in making them programmable before a large market for that use existed.
The board should punish Huang without punishing the industry and the nation. For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.
And anyway, whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.
This well researched video I endorse. Sure Nvidia was touch and go a the very start but beyond that, they were just locked in.
How Nvidia Won Graphics Cards - Asianometry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZqE6H-dww
More directly on topic, I can't help thinking this is also a question of "what have you done for me lately" versus "what are you going to do for me tomorrow". It's hard to doubt he and the company as a whole have executed a vision and reaped the rewards, but have they been planning and doing the groundwork for another act.
A nontrivial part of which is pumping up an infrastructure bubble with NVIDIA money. It wouldn't shock me if that very aggressive and increasingly questioned strategy plays a role in whatever happens to Jensen.
Why? There were the reason why NVIDIA GPUs became so successful at the first place.
Who knows whether Jensen's current leadership isn't generating today's CUDA for NVIDIA?
The situation only exists because regulators in the 80s-20s believe that hardware should be a sanctioned monopoly. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, and Microsoft were all involved. If it's not Jensen it'd be someone else, there is a good reason NVIDIA is called NVIDIA and not JENSEN. Jensen's leadership is as much resonsible for CUDA as G. W. Bush's.
> For Ms. Huang, there was reason to celebrate. Backed by wealthy investors in Shanghai, she had just restructured a company that would soon buy billions of dollars in Nvidia artificial intelligence chips. The U.S. government had barred Chinese companies from buying the advanced chips, but Ms. Huang had sidestepped this prohibition by creating a firm, Megaspeed, through a Singaporean shell company.
> Her close relationship with Nvidia’s leader also appeared to smooth the way. Four days after the ownership change Megaspeed was named a Nvidia cloud partner, giving it access to the coveted components.
If China was a national security threat, you’d think at least TEMU would be banned in the US. Instead most things in any store in the US are made in China. The restrictions are entirely political theater to score cheap political points as long as it has no impact on the day to day lives of people. Actually impose sanctions or tariffs or ban trade with China, and you’ll see how the “national security threat” angle immediately changes.
If China is the enemy then why do we have entire stores selling nothing but Chinese made goods in the US? Why is everyone running to China to manufacture anything? If China is the enemy the whole world is in bed with them.
All that talk about competition being good for the market goes out the window when it comes to China seemingly.
China adopted an intentional strategy where western companies for benign reasons of profit leveraged China’s immense human capital to produce products and lower costs for everyone across the planet. This was a win for many. China got to industrialize and lift citizens out of poverty, and companies across the world were able to deliver mass produced good (eventually high quality) for cheap. The United States for example was the champion of China joining the WTO.
But China because it’s a communist dictatorship restricted its market and began doing things that were long-term oriented toward depriving others of power and manufacturing capability for their regime’s private gain. For example today we see that China has over-built its manufacturing capacity (like it did with housing) and has used artificially cheap labor, unjust laws, and currency manipulation (among many other things) to prevent entry into their market while running companies from other countries out of business leaving them dependent on Chinese manufacturing. Prominently you can look at Germany today where sales in China have collapsed, and at home their vaunted manufacturing industry is going through what happened in the US in the so-called “rust belt”. The US has smartly enacted tariffs and other measures to protect its market to some extent from China’s strategy here.
So when someone says something like “all this talk goes out the window about competition when it comes to China” you’ve got to understand a bit more about how China has behaved toward other nations and the egregiously unfair trade practices it has enacted to understand why many countries ranging from the US, to Mexico, to Australia and of course the EU have enacted various restrictions and industrial policy to combat China’s embarrassing and poor behavior on the global stage with respect to trade.
That is equivalent to saying that the Chinese have been as good businessmen as the Americans.
"Embarrassing and poor behavior on the global stage with respect to trade" is a phrase that is equally applicable to USA.
For decades USA had succeeded by various means of bribing and blackmailing to destroy the local industries in many countries, based on the propaganda about a free global trade, forcing those countries to not protect in any way their industries that competed with US companies, because supposedly if they bought instead cheaper and better US products that will be a win-win situation, even if they become dependent on USA, but they should not worry because USA can be trusted as a commercial partner and will always provide those products in advantageous terms.
But in the recent years, USA has made a U-turn, and now it makes desperate attempts to protect its own industries in the same way that it had forbidden other countries to do and moreover USA has invented bogus legal theories that when any products that contain even a few percent of parts with a US origin are sold to someone, the buyers do not own what they have bought, but USA has the right to dictate to them what to do with those products, so that now everybody knows that USA cannot be trusted as a commercial partner and buying anything from it must be avoided.
The Chinese may have used many unfair commercial tactics, but this is really not something that Americans may criticize, because since WWII USA has been a champion of unfair commercial tactics, of which most Americans do not appear to be aware.
As an example, I have seen in USA comments that when NATO has expanded by incorporating many Eastern European countries, that was a favor made to those. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Those countries were forced to buy their memberships with many billions of $. They were blackmailed to accept in exchange for their membership to make contracts worth of many billions for buying products or services from certain US companies at greatly inflated prices, so certain well-connected US shareholders must have gained a lot of money from the NATO expansion.
This was a single example, but it was just typical for how USA has always acted in the global trade since WWII, by using any means possible to gain commercial advantages for its major companies.
If one subscribes to the theory that the only mission of any company is to make as much money for its shareholders as possible, and that the state should assist in this objective, one can see the behavior of USA as legitimate, but then the fact that China was clever enough to also ensure as much profit for its industries as possible is equally legitimate.
As non-American and non-Chinese, I dislike equally their dominance in the global trade. In my opinion, the only way that would benefit to the entire mankind is to not have the production of anything concentrated in a single country or in a couple of countries, but it should be possible to produce locally everywhere any of the products that a human needs, from food and clothes to electronic components. The advantages in avoiding excessive dependencies from others far outweigh any economies of scale of mass production.
A half of century ago, this was not an unusual economic model, e.g. many US companies were licensing their IP to local producers in various countries, so they could produce there things that had been designed in USA, instead of importing finished products and becoming dependent. Nowadays companies are much greedier, so they are no longer content with a modest revenue from licensing, but they want to milk all the profit that can be obtained by being the only source for the end product, without alternatives, so patents and the like are used only for preserving a quasi-monopoly position, by preventing competition.
USA and China are free to act in their own best interests, but other countries should make much more serious efforts to reduce their external dependencies.
Anything but actually stop having a complete dependency on China for their entire way of life of course because that would be too hard. So just do vague gestures to collect votes and move on.
As other states famously don't do things for their regime's private gain? (Even calling it "private gain" is arguably stretching it in the case of China, the other superpowers USA and Russia are certainly much better at the private gain part)
"Depriving others of power" other states definitively do whenever they can, and they're often better at it. Depriving others of manufacturing wasn't so much China did, as something it said "yes please" to and played along with. Manufacturing was offshored to a lot of other countries than China, this was something western leadership, for whatever reason, deeply wanted.
Obviously many businesses are working around this, but it raises questions about whether Alice Huang was actually a government spy vs someone doing shady import business. Why was her day job circumventing a government policy if she's a government spy?
Because geopolitics is a lot more complicated than leaving a group chat? This is like the inverse fallacy of Trump's take on trade deficits. Trade volume isn't the sum total of foreign policy.
> All that talk about competition being good for the market goes out the window when it comes to China seemingly.
I'm no fan of the "but muh free market" arguments, but generally competition is seen as good for the market only when it's "fair"...
Violation sanctions, and likely knowingly, is not good for Nvidia.
If a legally authorized customer later breaks the law, that doesn't make the supplier guilty of something they didn't do. It means the regulations and enforcement are ineffective. MegaSpeed has apparently been extensively investigated by both the Commerce and Justice Depts for some time and no charges have been filed so far. If the US Govt suspects MegaSpeed is a problem, they can add them to the blocked entity list at any time with no evidence or justification.
Frankly, I agree that someone in Asia has been diverting GPUs. But the US Govt has all the power here and can block anyone they want. If NVidia was knowingly violating export controls by back-channeling GPUs, that's serious jail time and personal fines up to $1M per card. These things have the same penalties for export violations as cruise missiles - and the same national security investigative powers. If NVidia was under suspicion, spooks have been reading all NVidia's company and personal emails and texts, tapping phones, bugging conference rooms, etc. If NVidia was knowingly subverting U.S. export controls, we'd be seeing arrests and perp walks not anonymous leaks about who Jensen's banging.
The public evidence around Megaspeed points to NVidia knowing and the government knowing that NVidia was doing it.
Whether the federal government chooses to arrest/prosecute the CEO of the world’s second-largest company is a different decision which is made at the level of the president. Trump did an interview last week where he said that he threatened an AI CEO with jail time:
"We said, 'Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give them a kiss good night,'" Trump added. "Because tomorrow morning, you're going to jail."
After saying the unnamed executive had "totally changed everything" after the alleged warning
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...
If you know the AI CEOs, Amodei is unmarried and Altman is gay.
They're not OK with it, they're about to pressure Singapore, Malaysia and others to ban this too. Why? Because they're a bunch of losers petrified of open competition.
But if what they discovered wasn’t usable in a prosecution, pressuring the board with his affairs isn’t unthinkable.
And this is an obvious example.
Except, it happens frequently and most of the time people ignore it. In practice, it is accepted most of the time.
I know another case when a lady working in a multi national cheated on her husband with her boss. Soon enough her boss had to “tackle a few challenges “ … in a different country LOL. The bosscame back to the Borg a few years later.
Who cares?
You cannot reduce a person to 'good judgement' or 'bad judgement'. It's a mix. And in this case it seems like the good outweighs the bad for both the company and its shareholders.
Wasn't it Anthropic or OpenAI that sent a warning about this exact possibility to regular employees?
Why do you think we always have to do those trainings every year about not taking supplier to strip clubs?
If you break the rules but bring in business you get to stick around. That's the actual rule.
Whether you think that outweighs everything else is a distinct argument, but the two things aren't mutually exclusive.
How can you tell? Sitting on the top of a huge self inflating baloon that goes up doesn't mean you are an excellent pilot.
If that was the case, IMO he wouldn't have come this far.
Was anything confidential leaked?
I'm not sure why Jensen is getting this kind of treatment.. did he treat people worse than Steve Jobs?
Would there be others who might benefit from Jensen not being at Nvidia?
But a Steve Jobs
Given what her job was, it’s hard to think that conversations were not technical in nature. Every action JH made toward China will now be examined, and he’s lost all credibility going forward. There really is no path to keep him.
The other thing this highlighted was the complete lack of governance which is the board’s job. So right after they fire JH, they need to replace most of the board with people who can handle the governance of a company of this scope.
Poor judgement is the kind of shit Zuckerberg or Musk do, and their poor judgement actually impacts the whole world in big ways, but they can't be fired because they don't give their board any control.
Jensen's management of NVIDIA has been good, and NVIDIA has generally been a great force for real innovation without much rent-seeking or corruption like the others. They haven't started messing with politics or trying to buy elections. It's kind of sad to see Jensen be the one we topple at a time of rage against corporate power when he's probably one of the better stewards.
In fact sleeping with a subordinate (look up Kimberly Powell) creates substantial legal risk for the company on its own, even without all the other stuff.
> We don't even know what arrangements him and his wife may have.
He apologized to his wife and said that his actions hurt her and that there was no excuse for what he did, soooooo, yeah we kinda do.
That argument doesn't hold water given everything Elon has done.
Heck Elon also slept with an exec. No one cared.
Separately, when I look around at all the billionaires and CEO's causing immense harm to the world, Jensen is near the bottom of that list.. Musk's tantrums have global geopolitical implications including wide cultural shifts, elections and deaths. An actual convicted rapist is president of the country. Many, many leaders cheering on death, division, racism, white supremacy, anti-vaxxing, it just goes on.
But we're all supposed to be salivating over firing this guy who has by most accounts been an incredible founder and leader over cheating or selling a couple of GPUs to China? I think it's just sad seeing this guy get punished given the amount of moral corruption amongst our leaders. I don't think this is a coincidence, the worst people are usually better at evading consequences.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/ho...
If you don't see how secret affairs with spies and employees impacts the company then you're being willfully ignorant.
It evidently does. You may think it shouldn't, that marital fidelity has no bearing on ability to execute as CEO, and you may even be right. But it's clear that most people disagree.
That is not a surprise. It's a known fact that these kinds of things become scandals that can hurt their careers and companies. That they nevertheless still decided to do it, is therefore a professional failure.
It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy in that way. People think it matters, therefore it does. Again, you might believe that it doesn't have a direct impact, and so people shouldn't think it matters, but still they do, and you have to act in the world as it is, not as you wish it was. Simple as that.
Wild take. To me, that isn't clear at all. Most people - including me - who simply don't really care aren't loud about it online.
It's like saying that obviously, everyone agrees that JK Rowling is a bad person that shouldn't be supported and needs to be boycotted. If your world view is made up of online forums that might very well seem to be the case, but in reality, the absolute vast majority of people couldn't care less about JK Rowling's political opinions, which is quite evident given the insane sales the Harry Potter franchise keeps pulling in.
The most likely scenario is that the vast majority couldn't care less about the Jensen Huang situation, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't care enough to demand he resign or be booted.
The evidence is their stock being down 8% since the news came out.
How else would you explain that drop?
Yeah, if it's just some rando at a bar, then yeah it's primarily an issue for the family. (besides the fact that it indicates honesty issues)
Sleeping with a spy is a direct threat to the company. The spy isn't sleeping with him because she likes him. She is literally doing her job, which is to compromise the company. The issue is not the sleeping around part. The issue is the spy being brought into the company part.
That was not the case here.
If NVIDIA doesn’t fire him, I have a feeling a lot more women from a lot of other companies may be showing up with various proposals.
Was it driven by this, as opposed to what everyone thought at the time: pure shortsighted profit-seeking? We don't know. But no one likes that it's even a thing to be concerned about.
If somebody you have any dealings with does something equally stupid, no matter the context, run. It doesn't matter how much you benefited from the cooperation, when somebody reveals themselves to have such poor judgement of anything, you must be aware that it's only a matter of time before he does somethig even dubmer which will cost you everything you gained so far and more.
jfc she was a spy and the new administration is going to smash nvidia for this
There are solid arguments for treason here... "doesn't affect the company", how blind are you?
There's more than one kind of shady person.
Yeah no. This doesn't even come close to treason. Treason in the US is incredibly difficult to prove, which is intentional.
Ahh, looks like the midterm results are still smarting!
I'd like some of what you're smoking. At best I could call him an artist, in the sense that "good artists copy, great artists steal".
https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/1s7sgg0/nvidias_jensen...
In this case, Fridman had offered Huang a very unusual metric for AGI: Could AI start and grow a technology business to the point where it was worth $1 billion? Fridman asked if Huang thought AGI by this definition could be achieved within the next five to 20 years.
Huang said he didn’t think that amount of time was necessary. “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI,” he said. He then hedged, noting the company didn’t necessarily have to remain that valuable. “You said a billion,” Huang told Fridman, “and you didn’t say forever.”Why did NVDA fare differently than AMD or Intel?
And almost all of big CEOs sleep with stuff or not-their-wives. Many do worse, think certain private islands...
Are there a lot of these types of people at the top?
Shit, can we even claim people gambling on stocks are "of character"?
There's a lot of gray here. I don't care that he chose to probably capitulate his marriage, but it does matter that he is somewhere between a honeypot buffoon or commiting light treason.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/majority definition 1.c
Doesn't matter if he is. He presents it as some kind of big issue that "No one of character can respect or trust him anymore", which even if true had almost zero impact for all other CEOs doing the same and worse.
Otherwise nobody gives a shit and it happens all the time. 1. Larry Ellison had several affairs with employees. Elon Musk with at least 1 reported by WSJ. Eric Schmidt. And those are just the biggest profile tech ones.
>> The code applies to all employees and board members and provides for disciplinary action, including termination, for violations.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/report-nvidia-ceo-had...
Seems pretty clear cut
Secondly, no one sane defends our pedophile president so not sure why you bring that up as supporting fact.
> In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used Nvidia GPUs and CUDA to train AlexNet, whose breakthrough performance helped ignite the modern deep learning boom.
They got a major upside due to two things that happened outside of NVIDIA: Crypto currency and AI, both of this found GPUs to be the best available technology to retrofit. Most of the initial work in retrofitting GPUs to these workloads happened outside of NVIDIA.
So, it's not Jensen but the Crypto and AI that propelled NVIDIA.
The idea was out there and Nvidia leaned into it first. GPU compute was going to happen regardless, but credit to Nvidia they actively developed it seeing its future uses.
Very well, but backing CUDA is an old decision that has paid off and will continue to pay off because Nvidia has operationalized it. It can and will continue to run without Jensen Huang.
> The board should punish Huang without punishing the industry and the nation. For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.
What sort of punishment is this to somebody who is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars?
This simply shows how the real tax is government spending, not how it gets the money. It can "tax the rich", print money, or take debt, but when it spends, it takes your computer, your fuel, your house, your car, your furniture, and your food.
That wouldn't really punish him. It makes no difference if you have 10 billion dollars or 90 billion dollars, your life is the same.
That's less than a slap on the wrist.
I dont like this crummy idea that you can do no wrong as long as stock price increases.
stopped reading
You can say (rightly) that he has vastly contributed to NVidia's success. Well, he's been well compensated for that to the tune of almost $200 billion. Will the company fall apart without him now? No. No, it won't.
Also, if they fire him today, nothing will really change for a few years anyway. The short-to-medium plans are already locked in.
Oh no he will no longer be able to afford anything and everything he wants and only be able to afford anything and everything he wants.
Great punishment. /s
I’m a gamer and I want my fucking GPUs back.
The US Government is using NVIDIA chips for all sort of stuff across all classification levels. Subsequently, Jensen has deep relationships within the government that warrants additional scrutiny.
Him authorizing his company to sell massive amounts of chips to a restricted country is massively illegal, but companies work around that and have since forever. Doesn't make it less illegal, but that's only a small part of the problem.
The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
It's really about fairness. Us technical salespeople take training that tells us all of the ways that deals with restricted countries happen and how we will immediately get fired ten ways to Sunday if we forego that to close quota. Also, normies with clearances tell their partners stuff they shouldn't. Stuff they think isn't really sensitive since it seems so minute. This isn't bad until said partner spills at the wrong place and wrong time. That's how normies get sent to prison for treason. Loose lips sink ships and all that. [^0]
Getting fired -- WHICH HE ABSOLUTELY SHOULD BE -- is the least of his problems.
[^0] Examples:
- https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/retired-us-army-officer.... Army officer leaks secrets through dating website to sound cool; gets six years
- https://www.foxnews.com/us/pentagon-leaker-jack-teixeira-rec.... Leaked secrets about Ukraine war through Discord to sound cool; gets 15 years
- https://www.westernjournal.com/ex-cia-officer-accused-leakin.... CIA officer leaks stuff to journalist girlfriend; gets 10 years
NVIDIA is licensed by the United States government to sell GPUs to China, and they do so at a rate well under their licensed quantity.
Read up on 91 CFR 1684 which directly contradicts your claims.
Your most important argument is categorically false and completely unresearched.
Your subsequent claims also have no basis: you cite a bunch of cases in which people leaked sensitive information as equivalent to the Jensen case, where the affair was with the CEO of a customer they were legally selling product to, and where we have no evidence that any leaks occurred.
My understanding was the Megaspeed sales weren’t classified as sales to China. Nvidia circumvented those requirements.
That takes the cake, I personally avoid anything Apple posted. There is much cult (and personality cult) involved it doesn't makes for any sensible discussion
Why? If he's that important then our own intelligence community ought to be doing stuff to fight espionage - doing counterintelligence, generally just making sure he's ok and providing support to him, etc. This is not some random guy. Did we just forget to do that?
If we're not doing that, then are foreign countries just after all of our important people? Forget sexpionage - what about hacking their computers? Do we have zero ability to combat any of this, whereas other countries can do whatever they want?
It appears almost certain now that he’s finished. The lack of any succession planning (which also is too looks like more poor judgment) appears to be the only thing now slowing down his removal by the board.
On the plus side we might start seeing a lot more modded 5090 with 96GB of ram
The facts are very scarce and yet this has been blown out of proportion.
Maybe I am wrong :-) time will tell.
if you fire him, he can go work for China. Or he’ll go work for Elon. I just have this feeling you aren’t explicit with your implicit motive.
Non-American here. Isn’t it your goverment’s/CIA’s job to detect Chinese agents and conduct counter-intelligence. Individuals (CEO or not) can’t do that. I heard that they already knew for a long time (as they must have). Then this becomes a hit job with political/business motivations rather than a serious national security issue as promoted to the public. Why don’t you all talk that obvious angle instead? 50s Red Scare rhetorics or a 70s James Bond narrative is politically more appealing I guess.
But we live in 2020s. We live under constant surveillance today. All national secrets are in digital environment (not on a microfilm in a CEOs leather jacket). Also Chinese spies, who require a visa to enter US, can be easily tracked the moment they get in touch with any VIP.
And for the sexual/marriage life of individuals, suddenly everyone goes back to 50s standards. (Note: This is extra interesting because I heard there is a “sex cult” attracting high profile AI engineers in SV. And everyone seems ok with it. But that’s probably another honeypot operation.)
A lot of people with ulterior motives want to throw him under the bus, don't buy into those narratives so easily. Use some common sense first.
Mostly its about being treated nicely, talked nicely and all by the opposite gender. Even successful people have serious marital strife, where their partner makes them feel really bad, no matter what you do for them. Its just a part of marriage.
People deeply crave for love, affection, being wanted, cared and being talked to nicely.
There you see are deeply sought after needs of the human soul. Im guessing you are willing to trade something for it.
But most spouses take deep offence with these 'emotional affairs' reason is simple, the whole reason why anyone even gets into one is because the person with whom they are having the affair is by definition better than their spouse in this regard. Its being given live feed back that you are a bad person. People have trouble sleeping in the night in any story where they aren't the hero.
That hurts, people often fail to see how their own actions would have led to this. And some people even consider their spouse suffering through their abuse itself as a sign of love.
People are irrational, and marriages are hard.
pretty much how it went down
i’d sleep with him too if he sold me a billion dollars worth of gpus I could sell on tomorrow for 2 billion in the US or 4 billion in China
If you have a CEO doing that, you need to fire them.
The latter is a question of how centralized modern AI-based computing is. And to me that is almost a fight between good and evil.
A marriage between an Anthropic/OpenAI duopoly and the national security establishment is a marriage made in hell.
Remember, Huang isn't an army officer, or someone in intelligence working at the Pentagon, or a CIA officer.
Surely he gets to do what he likes. You are not at war with China. Treason is not relevant here, nor are graphics cards some sort of ultra-secret domain. What NVIDIA does is easy, it's just that the package is not so easy to reproduce, what with it having many aspects, from software to chips and fast interconnect.
Do you think the USG doesn't hold the CEOs of Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, or Northrop Grumman to higher security standards than Delta or Ford?
And I think it's hard to argue that in 2026 Nvidia is not designing and manufacturing national security impactful equipment.
Elon regularly gets away with way more morally (and perhaps legally) egregious stuff and yet he has increasingly cemented his position. Partly through indirect leverage from his companies and partly from buying access to power directly.
Even Sam managed to stage an employee revolt to stay in control.
For founders of companies perhaps the lesson keeps repeating itself - keep control of your companies no matter what.
I’m not sure this is good for shareholders and the larger AI ecosystem either. Corporate governance is obviously important especially for mature industries.
But Jensen has consistently demonstrated ability to keep Nvidia alive during dire times and eventually delivered the biggest profits in corporate history.
Edit: some cynical explanations:
1. China hawks in tech and admin wanted him out
2. Nvidia competitors found oppo research too juicy to ignore and sequenced a set of destructive reporting
3. People in AI found Jensen’s grip of the supply chain too annoying and wanted to loosen it somehow
4. Internal politics / someone wanting Jensen’s job
5. Some combination of the above
That ship has sailed.
Huang has a problem now because his ability to advocate for NVIDIA in a politically charged environment is damaged.
He can't be an effective CEO for NVIDIA if there's a plausible (even if unproven) suspicion that he's on a geopolitical adversary's side.
He was very strongly advocating for selling to China before this. At that point, it could be understood simply as him looking out for NVIDIA's business interests. Now, there's doubt sowed in everyone's mind about whether it really was just that.
Maybe you don't care, because you think selling to China is the right thing to do - fine, there can be different views on this.
But, a lot of influential people very much do not hold that view, and he needs to be able to effectively communicate to them also.
> Maybe you don't care, because you think selling to China is the right thing to do - fine, there can be different views on this.
> But, a lot of influential people very much do not hold that view, and he needs to be able to effectively communicate to them also.
Yeah I think that makes a lot of sense. He could've underestimated how paranoid the admin (and the government) is about China and overestimated how much leverage he had with his board, customers and the admin.
I'm also generally surprised to see few people in tech and admin batting for him, considering he's supposedly a relationship guy.
edit: I realize I'm wrong on the last part after browsing X
They commit the sins of the religious more than they think
First
The board. Elon and his brother are the board, and some sycophants. They are also heavily weighted shareholders.
Jensen doesn’t have that.
Second
The wife, who also is entitled to significant shareholdings. Musk avoided that, and major shareholders are already in trusts, his private foundation, his donor advised fund, and just outside of any future marriage to begin with. The market doesn’t care what a disagreement with his partners mean
Third
The state, and the product. Elon sells cars and it isnt the backbone of economies. The rockets and starlink do pursue waivers or avoid sanctioned countries. Indiscretions were already paid for in the campaign.
So “canceling or not” masquerades as a societal view or tacit consent, when it is solely a matter of who your masters are and if they will stand by you or have any capability of a choice.
kinda weird China would want him out, considering he's been begging to sell chips to them
I'm not an Elon fan at all, but ... while he sure sleeps around, I have not heard he slept with subordinates, or Chinese spies.
(Also not batting for Elon, but you asked for reasons why people would care about this scandal more.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivon_Zilis
He kept a lot of his relationships secret, including offering to pay right winger Ashely S. Clair over 10 million/yr to sign an NDA that would prevent her from ever stating she had his child, until he got a position of impunity that thar unlimited wealth and political favors buys you.
The difference is that Musk is an actual oligarch and Huang is "just" a billionaire.
I think the real story is not the affair, which was already reported in asian media in 2024, but what specific catalyst broke that protective shield and made continued containment untenable.
Do we even know thats the end of this? This is only whats public at this point... It doesn't feel like the end of it but more like beginning to middle.
I'm trying to figure out who pushed this story through or if this is just bubbling up naturally.
I figured there will be quite a lot of people taking actions like this ... but nVidia was a surprise for sure.
Midterms over, major loss of power for faction Huang seems linked to
Distillation getting harder
Anthropic IPO
I think a new regulatory regime is coming.
But "whatever" happened to make them count.
E.g. Jensen angers some important people. Or someone decides NVIDIA has too much market control. Etc.
If not exporting to Singapore, it will be exported to more countries that have more opaque business practices.
Kneecapping Nvidia in this case is absolutely a windfall to China, by allowing them time to catch up in semiconductor technologies
This, right here. I'm no fan of the "CEO as god" line of thinking but given the past few years there's a strong indication that having him as CEO is going to produce a better outcome than the opposite case.
standing on its' head your statement reads as :
"If the US doesn't allow government intervention into the business dealing of important private entities during times of scandal, to protect lies and initiate cover-ups, then China will win."
do I interpret that correctly?
> Some of what appears in it sort of actually makes sense, but when you reproduce it in monosyllables, it turns out to be truisms. It’s perfectly true that when you look at scientists in the West, they’re mostly men, it’s perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields, and it’s perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures. All of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truisms. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.
not 100% the same, but many have made careers out of writing simple ideas that can perfectly well be conveyed with ooga booga language (or alternatively "few word" like that one guy from the Office), using instead flowery impressive-sounding prose
1) The fact that he cheated on his wife isn't particularly relevant, other than the lack of a prenup meaning she owns half his stock (4% of the company).
2) The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal (although improper and opens up potential quid-pro-quo lawsuits)
3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
4) The fact that there are allegations that he was aware that they were selling illegally to China is a huge deal.
5) Even though those export control were arguably bad, the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
6) There is definitely a demonstration of lack of judgment (getting caught selling to china rather than maintaining plausible deniability), (sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort)
7) Despite all of this, in theory he would arguably still be the most profitable CEO (if he doesn't get charged with a crime, AND if there are no other issues to discover) in the medium term, but where there's smoke there may be fire. Does this raise the odds of circular financing and other shenanigans?
Most companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it, and for good reason.
It's a big enough deal that former CEOs of Nestle, Norfolk Southern, McDonald's and Intel were either terminated or resigned after similar relationships were uncovered.
In Europe, workplace relationships are considered a private matter as long as workplace peace doesn't suffer, and a ban would be considered legally impermissible. Europeans manage it with disclosure requirements and reassignment, not bans.
This is factually incorrect. It is entirely legal for companies in Europe to restrict relationships where one party is a direct subordinate to the other. They can also legally require disclosure of such relationships.
This is common because these relationships can create significant conflicts of interest.
As someone else in this thread noted, the former CEO of Nestle (a Swiss company) was fired because he had a relationship with a direct report that he failed to disclose, and the former CEO of BP (a UK company) resigned because of a similar situation.
Disclosure allows for people to be reassigned so that they're no longer in a subordinate position.
The researchers who coined the phrase eventually realized it only applied to artificial packs in captivity, not the wild.
He had an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy, who it appears smuggled potentially billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips into China. And now he is alleged to have slept with an Nvidia executive who reports directly to him.
If he had slept with a waitress or his friend's wife, he would survive this. Instead, he chose to have exactly the type of indiscretions that get you fired.
CEO of a public company answers to the Board. CEO of a private business do anything they want until caught.
I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive. People say he got balls of steel, chilled in his data-centers and other funny things. Shareholders are stupid. That guy's been running the firm long enough that being removed would disrupt the business so much, that shareholders piss onto their only firewood in winter. Just to be politically correct, or what's the purpose of removing him, what need does it fill? Just reveals reactive, chaotic and unstable business practices.
3) Most things speak against her being a spy and no spy would be this amateurish either. Most people think she's just enriching herself with a structured deal profiting her a lot and whoever pays most for her deals. If nationalism is involved for China, or just greed, we really don't know, but we can assume that she's surely sympathetic to China.
Jensen is just a like-able person who loves the good things in live "in full", food/sex/woman/drinking/company. I'm sure he didn't care about her business as he's a billionaire and has a lot of things to do, than caring about a crappy broker and her structured and layered shady deals.
I am aware that there’s a tension there, but the fact that I am glad the Chinese open weights models exist doesn’t change my mind about what Nvidia will almost inevitably have to do about Jensen Huang (or my own view of him in the scenario where he is supposedly naive about espionage!)
I suppose it colours my judgement about his actions re: Megaspeed if they were indeed a deliberate attempt to push availability of GPUs to Chinese customers to the limit; Singapore-washing is not something I am personally that troubled by.
> I think it's stupid to remove such a successful CEO, the public perception of him is still quite damn positive
If you think being a successful CEO should mean that you can do whatever you want, it seems that you look at Trump's America and...like what you see?
And people generally seem to be arguing and trying to destroy the lives of the people they disagree with at a higher rate than ever.
Has the right cancelled anyone? Like, a single person?
The biggest thing I can think of was a single episode of Jimmy Kimmel, lol. Which came from an incredibly bald-faced lie, on regulated public TV, about a high-sensitivity murder that had just happened.
https://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/index.php?title=List_of...
I mean, how could you forget a washed-up rockstar shooting cans of beer because the beer company inked a sponsorship deal with a trans person?
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/kid-rock-shoots-bud-light-...
Amazon and Apple were cancelled?
> tried to
Yeah I think this is the key thing. Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.
You can read, right? The list has sources:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/donald-trump...
https://www.inquisitr.com/candace-owens-apple-boycott/
> Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.
Yeah, they've been too busy grifting, running crypto scams, selling pardons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_allegations_during_...
https://americanoversight.org/investigation/corruption-in-th...
That doesn't imply that's a good and healthy way to run a society.
While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long time ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.
Not to mention another friend of the admin whose crimes in DOGE might need investigation.
However, his second term has been a lot different than his first. The first term had mostly just allegations of personal misconduct. The second term has been marked by a much more organized and systematic dismantling of the administrative state in illegal ways, which has been a lot more impactful.
I don't think we want to end up with 57 supreme court justices at the end of this, and a Korean-style tradition of the presidency-to-prison pipeline.
I think it is probably better to have a system that can restore/maintain a socio-political focus on professionalism.
> I don't think we want to end up with 57 supreme court justices at the end of this, and a Korean-style tradition of the presidency-to-prison pipeline.
Those presidents going to prison did a coup to stay in power or had their personal shaman run the country behind the scenes. Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.
> I think it is probably better to have a system that can restore/maintain a socio-political focus on professionalism.
Correct, which is why the law needs to be applied equally. That's the fundamental basis of the rule of law. Otherwise it's worth nothing.
But that isn't what we're talking about here -- we're talking about actions taken related to his official duties. That is an inherently politicized situation where even the textual rule of law does provide for special allowances precisely to discourage political opponents from abusing the rule of law as a political weapon.
> Of course you want a "to prison" pipeline for such cases if you're looking to stay a stable, welfaring country.
I think the evidence around the world shows that precisely the opposite is true.
Leaders do a lot of things and laws are complicated, lawfare is stupidly easy.
he would've never got reelected if the democrats of 2021-2024 resembled democrats of 2008. his reelection was a violently retarded response to the clown world antics of that era.
Not saying it will certainly happen, but there will be different people at helm this time, and his more crimes are out now.
Prosecutors "just" have to establish that the criminal behavior is not an official act, of which there are plenty such examples.
The fact that this scandal was leaked is a sign that the rule of law is returning.
They were bypassing natsec based export controls by making donations to the executive branch, and used the influence to bury a commerce investigation into the matter, from the available information.
He can sleep with who or whatever he wants. The Megaspeed story and how investigations into it were mothballed have every appearance of being a big deal even beyond Nvidia.
- William Penn & MLK Jr
I'm 50/50 on whether or not Alice Huang is actually a spy for the Chinese government, or rather just a social climber and opportunist. She certainly didn't hide her perceived closeness to Jensen Huang, and in fact actively flaunted it on her social media.
Furthermore, I think it possible if not likely that Jensen has had more than just 2 extramarital liaisons, and if more were to come out, then IMO that would actually shift the likelihood towards Jensen simply being a lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status, rather than being honeypotted by some Chinese intelligence operation.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/us/politics/trump-china-t...
I'll bet 100 dollar this is just about money.
A spy is someone that deals in obtaining and sharing secret information. They would be a spy if they used their information to obtain secrets on NVIDIA hardware and shared these secrets with others. There's no evidence I've seen that this happened. Someone buying NVIDIA hardware is not a spy.
I mean, isn't that the easiest guy to honey-pot?
The best HN comment I read on this subject was along the lines of "NVIDIA sure appeared eager to avoid those export restrictions, so does it matter whether she was a spy or not?" Maybe if he was handing over, like, chip designs or something, but there's not (yet?) been any allegation of that.
Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail, assuming his wife was not aware of his affairs. Anyone who knew that was happening would have had enormous leverage over him.
Even if no one actually did so it still demonstrates a massive risk.
Do you really want to apply that to congress, the judiciary, the police. Let's face it anyone in any position of trust, which turns out to be everyone in the end because homeless, unemployed I could be a witness to something.
So we just outlawed private consensual behavior of individuals. (Not outlawed, you just lose your right to keep your job or whatever, yeah sure right...)
Doesn't seem like an american Freedom to me but what would I know?
Plenty of jobs come with personal life restrictions. Work nights. Work on an oil rig. Work on an aircraft carrier in the ocean for months at a time. Everyone is free to not take those jobs. I don’t see why a “no affairs” clause for a CEO should be all that different. If you don’t consent to the rules, take a different job.
These kinds of paths to blackmail/extortion are literally what government background checks pressure test when hiring employees. So, yes, we do want to apply those to people in positions of trust.
I'm not clear why you claim this extends to everyone including the homeless and unemployed, that seems wrong to me. You can't blackmail a homeless person into violating national security.
Are you really claiming the homeless don't matter?
Even if you can do all these things then you must deny them the ability to testify in court because they could be blackmailed.
If you don't see how this goes I probably can't help you. Read a diversity of sci-fi? Read what life was like in the soviet union?
> Are you really claiming the homeless don't matter?
Towards being blackmailed against national security interests? Yeah I’d say the risk of that is low. The GP didn’t claim anything else
Perhaps trying to make sure there aren't morality based repercussions takes the sting out of future blackmail attempts on other successful businessfolk would be a better strategy for national security than, I dunno, briefing the New York Times and trying to make it as miserable as possible?
But sure maybe the CIA is just woefully incompetent, disorganised and accountability free in pursuing this national security goal of blackmail resistance. Or perhaps this is not the best theory as to what is going on.
There's a really, really good reason we keep this kind of moral judgement private, "between you and your rabbi" as Feynmann put it.
exceptions of course for the commander in chief
Jensen's job does not rely on having security clearance. There's no evidence he has security clearance is there?
I'll admit I haven't really been following this story, but I ASSUME he didn't know she was a spy? (Given a good portion of a spy's job is making sure you don't know they are a spy) So why is this an issue either?
How'd they figure out she was a spy anyway?
For sure he is the victim of an adversarial attack against him and Nvidia, but as the leader of one of the most valuable companies in the world in am industry where IP and company secrets hold huge economic value, then you really need to expect and anticipate that spies will be trying to infiltrate your org and steal your secrets. I think you can clearly say he has demonstrated bad judgement here.
Source: The Economist. (Paywalled) https://economist.com/business/2026/11/11/there-has-never-be...
> That she might be a Chinese agent would have been obvious to Mr Huang had he inquired about her background: before going into business, Ms Huang worked at a Chinese state-run broadcaster known by its unimprovable acronym, “CCTV”.
The FBI so far has not provided a reason for the lack of a brief, but one reason they might not provide one is they suspect the target is a willing participant.
As best I've heard, nobody knows that now. We have some rumors with absolutely nothing behind them.
That assertion makes no sense, yet tits the best interpretation I can gather from your odd comment!
Surely you mean something else?!
Even more interesting given his Taiwanese citizenship.
We are so one shot by hollywood movies that if a newspaper points at an attractive middle aged women, whos foriegn, and says shes a spy we'll all believe it.
There's literally nothing to prove this, not even anything suspicious. Its just the Trump admin, whos owned by Silicon Valley oligarchs saying so. Wanting to buy GPUs, even if its for China does not make you a spy. It makes you a business person.
I know Ill get another 5 downvotes for saying this, but its true. Zero evidence. Its the perfect story to kick off the war against Chinese open source models which have really put a damper on Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue.
If you allow your employer to control your sexuality you are not fully human.
Bill Gates met Melinda Gates while he was CEO of Microsoft and she was a newgrad developer.
Many such cases. Rupert Murdoch. Larry Ellison.
Maybe I would have worded it differently, but I generally agree with the grandparent poster. It seems rare that a founder would be ousted over this type of thing.
My guess is that the China dealings are the most important part, and that part is being undersold because it's actually illegal and puts both him and anyone with knowledge of it at risk of going to jail.
Bill Gates met Melinda ~40 years ago. It should be blatantly obvious I'm taking about where things stand today. Lots of things happened 40 years ago that would be generally unacceptable today.
The U.S government have known about this for a year. How serious would it be (i.e in terms of Jail time) for them to just give a warning and sit on it for a year?
When has legal fallout from an affair with a subordinate ever destroyed a Fortune 100 company? That doesn't happen.
Do you think a CEO is a King or what that they are destroying a company and that's not enough to get booted? CEOs get fired all the time. A Board certainly doesn't need an affair pretext to boot one that is actively tanking the company.
It matters for the very obvious reason that a less senior employee may feel pressured or may lose their job when the relationship ends, that usually office affairs result in other employees feeling compelled to keep secrets, that it may result in others losing out on promotions to the employee in the affair, that they often result in abuse of resources, because it opens everyone up to blackmail, that it’s a display of bad judgement and ethics, etc. etc.
It’s nothing at all to do with political correctness.
I am not sure it makes sense given why companies exist in the capitalist system. Stockholders, I'd think, on average care more about the returns less whether the CEO is a likable character.
The real problem is potentially illegal behavior, of course.
This ignores the direct consequences like "worse" employees getting promoted (affecting business) or put in charge, or like in this case, potential national security issues.
I'm sure Jenson knew sleeping with his direct reports was wrong. And that plenty of CEOs got fired for that. Nothing arbitrary about that.
How does it NOT make business sense to consider firing bim here (outside of manosphere thinking)?
I am not debating the spying, smuggling angle here; but it this was just the affair, its a decision by the board, whereas if he run over an elderly lady at a crossing, its no longer a choice - law is law.
Btw, re: ad hominem 'manosphere' or 'woke' whatever. I have nothing to do with either.
By the time it’s public knowledge and reflecting on the company, yes, that’s a failure—and the failure of discretion is probably closer to the board’s clammy little hearts than any particular fluids (or allegations of favoritism) that may have been swapped along the way.
While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.
I agree with you on the first and second point. Perhaps you can argue it's in bad taste to have an affair but the private matters of adult lives should be of no interest to outsiders.
I wouldn’t call this particularly nuanced, certainly if they were sold to intermediaries not subject to the export controls (Singapore)
More [1].
They were married years before he founded the company, and lived in California, a community property state. And they got married right out of college. Unless he somehow knew that he would start a company and got a prenup that says "if I start a company it's all mine", a prenup wouldn't matter anyway (and would probably but null and void anyhow).
Since US counterintelligence has known about the relationship since late 2024, they would be completely incompetent if they had not:
1) taken measures to ensure that she did not get US secrets,
2) collected information on Chinese priorities and methods for acquiring AI hardware, and/or
3) fed misinformation to the Chinese.
1. ASML (a Dutch company) is not allowed to sell EUV lithography machines to China; and
2. NVidia is not allowed to sell their best GPUs (made with those machines) to China.
This is all done under the auspices of "national security" and the vague hand-waving notion of "military applications". China is rapidly developing EUV on their own. I kinda expect this to be commercially producing chips by ~2030. Other people believe it will take a little longer.
So what's the problem? By banning the sale of chips to China, the US has inadvertently created captive domestic demand for Chinese made chips because Huawei (etc) cannot buy Western made chips. This is really kickstarting China's lithography efforts because anything they produce has billions of induced demand with no competition from foreign imports.
That is I believe Huang's argument: we should be selling the chips but not the lithography. I agree with that assessment. But Us foreign policy really is just blinded and can be summed up as "China bad".
Frontier labs (and Nvidia) have started using AI in chip development.
AI that requires frontier chips to train (or you steal chain of thought and try to distill…which has mixed results).
That in turn becomes a flywheel for developing domestic supply chains for chips.
See the latest reports for super intelligence takeoff. They (again assuming the timelines are semi correct as it’s all guesswork) show takeoff significantly before 2030.
The worst thing you could do is allow China to accelerate their domestic chip development via giving them access to chips needed to accelerate the AI flywheel.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc do not want Nvidia chips to sell to China because it makes the GOU supply constraint even deeper to American companies and it increases model training/inference competition.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of these players worked behind the scenes to try to oust Huang.
The only other way is that these people want to go war with China as soon as super intelligence is invented.
I'm as big as an AI bull as anyone here but we still have physical laws. Everything is a sigmoid.
She's alleged to have been an 'intelligence asset', which is not the same thing as a spy (assets are not agents). Assets are often just good sources of insight and analysis, whereas agents are tasked with active deception and exfiltration of information. Jensen Huang is arguably an intelligence asset; I'm sure he's given informative briefings to spooks on the state of the world, albeit not necessarily knowingly.
A related question to this is whether Jensen Huang even has a US government security clearance.It's not obvious to me that he's privy to any government secrets, even if the US regards Nvidia as a strategic asset. To pick up on your point 4, he might have been knowingly violating the law, a problem for any CEO. But if he's not definitely violating sanctions and is instead just chasing profits, that's considered the norm.
To be frank I think this is a storm in teapot because there have been rumors about his affair floating around since last May, and if the US government has known for at least that long and hasn't intervened or arrested him it's probably not that big of a deal. I can't help wondering if it's a case of the current US administration trying to look tough after the President suffered a humiliating election defeat.
Even reading the history of European nobility, it is amazing how often you'd come across married nobles who didn't even live in the same city as their partner, and who openly had mistresses or young handsome men hanging around all the time.
I've also talked to Chinese business men who lamented that they are expected to have an overseas girlfriend, almost as a sign of status.
And hell, Saturday Night Live has been joking about rich old ladies and their love of hiring pool boys for literally decades now.
My point is not to normalize cheating, but rather that all sorts of arrangements have existed throughout time and different cultures and instantly saying "he's sleeping with someone who isn't his wife!' doesn't mean that person is devoid of morals.
This kind of morality is between you and your Rabbi. We are allowed to look down on it all we like. It has no relevance to law or keeping your job because if you allow this kind of thing to have relevance it never ends. Rank selfishness comes out in so many ways.
"You got a parking fine, your social conscience is clearly lacking..."
Hard to estimate it precisely but less than 1% is likely to be accurate, no?
Is it true?
1) This is a huge matter of character. If you cannot be faithful to your wife, what makes you a faithful leader of a company? There is also the issue of respect: when a leader is morally compromised, the people he is leading lose confidence and respect in him.
2) Isn’t there something of a power dynamic issue here too? He has a greater responsibility to use his authority and power as a superior to not abuse that authority, and committing adultery with an inferior is a huge problem.
3) On what basis is this a huge deal and the previous two are not? Where’s the nuance? It’s just arbitrary.
4) Well yeah, it looks like he was complicit in breaking sanctions. It’s no longer an arms-length deal.
5) Again, why are the first two worth shrugging shoulders and this one is not? It’s no big deal, people cheat and break the law all the time.
6) That sure undersells it. It underlines the stupidity of sin, and the sinfulness of man.
7) I can’t argue with that.
Or is the evidence right over there next to the evidence of WMD?
I know some people believe anonymous govt officials but I kinda don't so if there's actual evidence, let's see it, or note the the doubt legitimately exists.
It seems a very odd thing to be briefing newspapers about rather than the very many other, seemingly more useful ways of using that information if it is true. How does everyone feel about the CIA briefing the New York Times in general to seemingly get a CEO removed? Who takes responsibility for making that decision?
Whether he would be the most profitable CEO is absolutely irrelevant. The guy is literally facing prison time if he can be directly tied to the violation of those sanctions. If the board takes more than about 30 seconds to come to a conclusion they should probably all be replaced as well.
https://fortune.com/2026/03/19/supermicro-arrested-founder-s...
Or just... not cheating on your wife
> sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort
I really don't like Jensen but I think this actually shows decent character! Sleeping with a femme fatale is rather romantic.
Not to mention that Nvidia has a huge stake in the ai space being a backstop to a bunch of players in all its circular financing deals.
Either he's easily manipulated. Or he's a predator. Either way... not someone you want as CEO.
There's no scenario in 2026 where sleeping with a boss or subordinate is acceptable behavior for corporate leadership.
And... look, I get it, and maybe you can write it off as just something that happens in the real world.
But the fact that he would do it, also screams, "This is someone who thinks the rules don't apply to him."
Which again puts him squarely in the "not someone you want as a leader" category.
I don't think you can reasonably argue that their relationship must have had a significant power imbalance or what have you if you can't even decide which direction the power imbalance went in. Why is it impossible that the relationship was, all things considered, on roughly equal terms?
>>> Or he's a predator.
>> the woman is 42...
> In general, adulthood does not confer an immunity to coercion.
I'm only responding to the idea that one must be young to be victimized by a predator, which is silly and false. I am not, however, supposing anything of the sort is what happened here.
1. Cheating on his wife when that will likely significantly change the ownership of the company is a big deal;
2. Here's where I disagree most. A married billionaire CEO sleeping with an also-married subordinate is a huge deal and that alone warrants an ouster. It creates huge legal exposure for the company;
3. The biggest issue with the Chinese spy is he's wealthy enough that this shouldn't happen. I'm sorry but you can afford corporate security who can vet the people you're involved with and do so discreetly;
Huang hired Heller (a crisis PR firm) a year ago. It seems like he knew something was coming and possibly failed to inform the board. Ok, that's more grounds for termination.
I too am reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
I very much doubt it stops here.
On one hand I firmly believe that if a rule is stupid you have no moral obligation to obey it. There might still be consequences though, however unjust.
On the other hand so many rules can be in place for years because people just don't obey them so their stupidity is mitigated to the point of invisibility.
The tl;dr is she slept with Jensen in return for large benefits for her Husband's company.
Her actual role in this doesn't have a real good direct translation to English.
Because those are independent from each other in a way that the corresponding institutions in China are not.
Every large Chinese company is under the direct control of the CCP. Working for a large Chinese company means you are working for the Chinese government in the same way as a state department employee (very differently from someone working for Intel, at least if they haven't individually received a National Security Letter).
That is absolutely a huge deal, I have no idea why you don't think it is. That is the kind of behavior which anyone in an American workplace knows is not tolerated in the slightest and would lead to firing. The fact that he did it anyway shows he has shockingly poor judgement.
Not knowing doesn't make it any better!
Judge not, for in the measure of your judgment, it will be measured to you.
Desire is the enemy of happiness. To abandon sorrow, abjure want.
We are all in wanting. Our want is lesser than the needs of our partners, our friends, and our world.
I pity you.
I'm glad others agree that his infidelity is a complete nothing burger. Moralising about this is wrong and is a purity spiral.
The Chinese spy thing and illegal dealing with China are far worse but they should be investigated properly.
He shouldn't be ousted from the company he built to be the biggest company in the world because he cheated on his wife.
Huang himself said his infidelity hurt his wife and his kids. The people rushing to normalize this behavior are elevating sexual freedom above family obligations. Those people are wrong.
Well...
to what extent do you believe his public and almost entirely content-free apology letter ( https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company ) reflects his personal thoughts?
Dual-class share structures have become the defacto standard for founder led companies, giving founders disproportionate (even majority) voting power.
Someone like Zuckerberg effectively controls the board and would be extraordinarily difficult to oust against his wishes (absent some exceptional legal intervention or a decision to step aside)
1 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthropic%27s_corpor...
2 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OpenAI_corporate_str...
So much for theory!
Remember all men are created equal.. except in reality they werent, just ask the Blacks, natives, Chinese and all the others.
Even today how many average Americans can call the President and have a chat even once ?
Humans need someone to be accountable to, even if it’s just some guy walking behind you saying “memento mori” twice a day.
That figure raises to about half if you include all officers/directors.
[1] https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Lowry%20-%20Buck...
One of the greatest failures of Nvidia's Board was in failing to push for a successor. (Musks' companies face a similar risk.)
SpaceX has Shotwell to cushion the blow. Tesla will obviously crash into the cellar the moment he OD's or gets thrown in jail for pedo shit.
The trillion dollar valuation would be gone for sure.
It’s not like Jensen predicted it
Ok AMD had some financial woes, but it also has made a lot of less optimal technical and business decisions that were entirely unforced errors.
Are you implying that Tim Cook should single-handedly run the worlds largest, highest throughput global supply chain? Like the screws of the Mac mini, the walk throughs of thousands of factories all over the planet, the coordination of fedex and UPS shipments of 100M units in a single day for just ONE of their products? Coordinating the DHL shipments to Germany? Sourcing the supply of the sapphire crystal glass? Coordination of mass producing the 3nm silicon at TSMC and the C1 modem in Shenzen? All Tim Cook. All by himself.
Seriously, i hope this was just a joke that landed badly. Cause oh my god, man.
Do you know how many parts go into all Apple products ?
Its a very large number, nobody at Apple could possibly know the requirements or reasoning for why one is selected and another dismissed.
It would takes years just to read thru the entire list and understand the engineering choice for each one.
> Sourcing the supply of the sapphire crystal glass?
Do you know how many different types of glasses there are and all their physical properties and costs and suppliers ?
I dont know but im pretty sure it would take a long time certainly more than a year just to get the contact and technical details and possible samples from each supplier.
Getting that sample is just the start. Gathering requirements, understanding testing methodology and equipment and many other items requires a very large team of engineers of all kinds.
There is no way a single person could do just this one task.
Its simply not possible for a single person do the glass and screws and we have only started.
As i said before Apple has thousands of highly skilled people because it requires all of them. You are dishonouring their skills and efforts by pretending its all Tim.
I'm just parroting what is typically said about him in the business press as part of a non-serious joke here.
I'm not an Apple fan and don't really follow his career.
That said, Apple makes almost 3 million dollars of revenue per employee, so I don't know if suggesting they hire too many employees really lands?
Bad things happen when you concentrate all praise on a single person, let me remind you of the Iran war.
- His board setup is ... odd. He isn't Chairman of the Board (a role over 50% of Fortune 100 CEOs apparently hold). He seems to be responsible for Nvidia having a wierdly more egalitarian structure (all directors including him, are equal, with a designated lead independent director)
- His compensation (~$35M, primarily stock) is ... not up there with other tech CEOs
- He doesn't seem to have ever pushed for super-voting rights (he only has like ~3.5% of the company), but I guess that's hard to change once you IPO
I kinda wonder if this ends with him taking a month off, spending 12-18 months transitioning to a successor and ending as the chairman of the board or some such. He really does seem vital to the company (and thus the stock price).
Honestly this arrangement (total comp aside) is how it should be for all these companies. When Facebook went public the dual class structure (and Zuck retaining voting control) was a big point of contention.
You're describing the opposite scenario. Generally it's the founders who get a special class of shares which allows them to retain control over the company even when they own <5% of the stock. Without that the company becomes controlled by Wall St. who appoint the MBA to loot and pillage.
The MBAs get there often because it's who the board picks when the founder retires.
The main thing the special class of shares does is make it hard for them to oust the founder when the founder doesn't want to retire. Once they choose to, they either use their special votes to choose a worthy successor, or they stop caring and you get the default MBA you'd have had regardless.
> Honestly this arrangement (total comp aside) is how it should be for all these companies.
It's difficult to say based on the actual data in the past 10 years. The companies with dual shares seem to do well if we look at the companies of the same sizes.
The scenario in which dual-share structures can be a problem is if things don't go well. Specifically they greatly limit the shareholder's ability to protect their investment by removing the CEO. That's why it's considered poor governance.
In the end it comes down to leverage, Zuck famously didn’t sell early so people were pounding down the door to invest when they finally got the opportunity.
I understand Zuck made many failed bets but he had a few big bets paid off. And those big bets paid off so well that FB is a $1.4 trillion company.
It's like people here are still stuck in school where you have to score A+ on every subject.
Fair, I just remember the backlash to the FB arrangement more I guess. At least in the case of the Google Class B shares control was split between the two, but still, in my opinion, wildly inappropriate for the purpose of public markets.
I may have an antiquated view of how the capital market should work given how long I’ve worked in the space, but I’m strongly of the opinion that going public should be synonymous with surrendering private/individual control of the company. The company is effectively spreading the risk of failure, and I think the average investor doesn’t appreciate or understand the voting vs non-voting differentiation.
Then again there is a monstrous amount retail participants in the market don’t understand and frankly the SEC has done (in permitting these sorts of listings) a poor job of executing on its mandate.
There's certainly a hypothetical principal-agent risk if someone holds voting power / control without holding any financial risk. In practice, holders of preferred voting power shares usually also have financial interests at stake, and thus are aligned with long-term financial interests.
Proposals that forbid holding control shares without parallel financial interests are more compelling than proposals to outlaw multiple share classes in public companies in general, but again, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find cases where having the law would force de-facto changes, and then the question becomes whether the law is worth its compliance costs.
It's not really surprising that companies that print huge amounts of money with fairly little need for funding do well.
When you buy a fund, you’re choosing its management strategy (including about votes). If you don’t feel a fund represents your interests well, don’t buy it.
Sometimes your employer gives you a list of a couple dozen funds run by the same manager, and if you want your employer to contribute to your retirement savings, those are the options.
Banning these super-voting companies from 401(k) and index funds would have deprived many low- and middle-income people of those superb returns.
But hey less competition for the houses and stuff, right? We don't want more average people to enter the upper middle class.
I'm not against forbidding index/401K funds from investing in those companies since many people deem those companies as "bad".
Many average people don't actively manage their funds. Based on the past data, they would've missed out on the benefits, but that's okay.
Having shareholder voting power is more important for them, I suppose. While I disagree, I might have voted for the ban. Because this would've translated to less competition for house and stuff.
Also having been more capital intensive and founded further back, Jensen had less sway in the early days of the company and may have put off using the growth to his advantage.
Well, bigger than that, but yeah. The early 2020 market cap for NVDA was ~150B, vs. ~1.3T for AAPL. They were the dominant semiconductor design house in an important but still fairly niche area of the PC marketplace.
Another theory is that Nvidia doesn’t want their ceo to sleep with business partners and subordinates?
Which one do you think sounds more likely?
The fact that him staying is even a considerable possibility, although made much smaller by the second affair if it is true, is a testament to that.
Combining these roles is extremely poor governance, and it shouldn’t be legal but unfortunately it is.
I love Taco Bell though, so she is probably doing a good job.
I won't trust anything you say. I have seen what I needed to.
There are two actual taquerias less than 100 feet from where I am writing this comment that make food in a completely different league from Taco Bell (which is neither authentically Mexican nor gourmet). It is, however, a shining beacon of multicultural deliciousness and a bona fide American institution. I will not stand for Taco Bell slander and strongly encourage you to reconsider your stance.
Think outside the bun.
Doesn't have to be spies (which in this case is just conjecture anyway, and likely just trying to get him for political reasons).
When big changes happen, it's because multiple vectors have aligned. One isn't enough.
When Congress starts having hearings about your affair, you have fucked up but good, as they say.
That is The American Way.
Nvidia benefited from the AI boom by being right place, right time. And just yesterday, Mythos ported itself to AMD cards, showing there's no moat.
Self driving cars are poised to be huge, Nvidia simply didn’t have good execution or plan there because they focused on the hardware rather than data collection. Not sure how the ARM acquisition attempt was an unforced error. Data centers are buying Nvidia GPUs and AMD CPUs. Could have been Nvidia both. It was just in an unfavorable political climate.
I can't speak to why AMD is so massively incompetent or why they weren't a factor in driving a competitor.
A factor that might not be obvious is that in 2012 CUDA was mostly a commercial failure. Aside from some penetration into oil and gas HPC and things like physics acceleration in games, there wasn't much traction.
Beg your pardon? what does this mean?
https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-vi-gpu-co...
But as a counterpoint: AMD is very similar but hasn't benefitted nearly as much. They've been plastering "AI" all over their webpage for years, with little to show for it. So maybe there was something that Nvidia was doing right.
They've benefitted from being in the right place, but being there was not (or, not only) luck.
Compare to AMD which did not do that and has not had the same level of benefit from the AI wave despite everyone obviously wanting a competitor to create price pressure.
There would be no AI boom without Nvidia, their cards were instrumental to making it possible, that's why they're so dominant.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to try and get AMD cards working.
Instead of asking for elaboration ask yourself why you believe that the success of companies hinges on the qualifications of their CEOs? To the best of my knowledge no one has ever shown any correlation between CEO "quality" and company performance for a publicly traded company.
Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were unmitigated disasters.
Before that, he was known for spending most of his time, polishing his private plane.
He's been behaving like a sugar hyped child over the last 15-20 years imho.
Maybe his idea of asserting control is less about voting rights and more about family allegiance.
I think nepotism is toxic behaviour when you are talking about publicly quoted firms and especially one the size of nv.
Fiddling whilst Rome burns is not a good look and should be punished.
Huang's net worth is over $200B, high enough to be in the world top-ten. He has been very well compensated by Nvidia. Either he decided he has enough money at some point or his current compensation numbers are just marketing. The real numbers were clearly much higher in the past, if not presently.
I suspect he's going quietly because the scandals haven't finished emerging yet[1]. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if somebody has photos of secret Nvidia bunga bunga parties. I do find it interesting that Americans will tolerate lies, murder, and all sorts of other things from their highest elected officials but, if a CEO is revealed to be overly randy, he's got to go.
______________
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/kimberly-powell-nvidia-exec-...
For all the complaints about him you can't argue he hasn't delivered a lot of value. Lots of corp CEOs make more with falling company performance and valuation, because they aren't really paid for performance.
Lies are one thing, but murder?
He could've gave us seamless private cloud GPUs (basically let you run anything on any device, rent out your GPU to earn money, let you play GTA-6 on your phone...)
Could've had the true AI App Store
Could've bought OpenRouter (instead Stripe bought them):
Have not just cloud gaming but the true cloud App Store where Claude and ChatGPT are just apps
This way no terrorist can smuggle Jensen's physical shovels aka GPUs in a potato bag ;-)
But I ask out of ignorance, I’ve never been inside a Big Corp.
LLMs are seen by politicians as a national security issue.
Better models = better cyber offense/defense, etc.
We were already into personal liability for board members territory (and possibly GC) BEFORE the latest allegations.
He's out as CEO but he'll continue to be a force at Nvidia. If the new CEO is smart, he'll keep him in the company, but it will be hard since Huang will be seen as the company's leader and it will be very hard for Huang to act any other way.
Recent trend is quite the opposite. What's Tesla without Musk selling pipe dreams ? Pretty sure there is 0 plan for replacement.
Huang expected to run the company well into his 80s, with no clear successor.
The bigger issue is the conflict of interest stuff, but until that’s proven this is a horrible look for NVIDIA if they actually go through with it.
The no-going-back issue is the corruption. Jensen corruptly quashed an investigation into Megaspeed. He then quite clearly expected Republicans in Congress to back him, which is why he only came clean when forced to.
His board must think he's a lunatic. They have every right to know if he's having an affair with anyone (because marital infidelity is a personal corruption issue that is rarely not a problem when it's a CEO, since carrying off an affair usually involves suborning staff in some way). But this? Madness.
I don't care about it. But I do understand folks who are dismayed to see someone who many of us–myself included–saw as a bit of a paragon until a few weeks ago turning out to be a total shithead.
He was never a paragon.
I'm disappointed in him as a business person, not in a some moralistic sense but because he's clearly very smart and capable yet made himself vulnerable with these two dumb mistakes. In his position there are a lot of external interests who want leverage or control over you.
Don’t look to billionaires if you’re looking for paragons. They all fail basic ethical checks. It’s very easy and convenient to not look for these failures. But, inevitably, when somebody starts looking hard, they find them.
Stepping outside of your marriage behind your spouse’s back is still scummy behavior.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_Huang_spying_scandal
Regardless of that, the comment above still seems correct, and a sibling comment points out that (as a rather new development), that they are separate women.
one was a direct report, one was a spy
Considering the current administration and the amount of corruption by trump and co, I feel like not following the rules is too simplistic an explanation for being targeted like this.
The second one will get you fired just about anywhere.
Affair of a CEO with a direct report and member of senior leadership? Kind of a big deal
Affair with a Chinese intelligence agent? Quite a big deal
One affair was a mistake. Two, with a spy and an employee, are a real failure of responsibility -- and those are just the ones we know about.
I don’t understand you Americans; you live in a disproportionately violent society, tolerate all sort of abuse and manipulation, then will scream hysterically at anyone having an unconventional sex life.
It's nothing to do with prudishness about his sex life and everything to do with his actions endangering the company.
But so does walking around in public without covering all body head to toe, indeed some countries ban women from doing so, just to avoid having to deal with aroused strangers.
Simple risk aversion or trespassing on personal freedom?
Give me a fucking break.
There are gravely important matters to focus on in the current state of affairs that affect us all, our kids and future of human kind, but we got somehow trained to waste our focus and time on mere noise every single day.
ETA: It's nice to see all the incels downvoting this lol.
Not that long ago, it was accepted that sex - f*cking - was at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - basic physiological needs.
This is, of course, true for men.
But it is incredibly inconvenient for feminists.
So what did we do? Well, we just got rid of it of course.
And now here we are.
The bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are things you need to stay alive. Without these things you die:
- Food
- Water
- Shelter
- Sleep and rest
- Air and comfortable temperature
As much as men (and not exclusively men) like sex, they don't literally die without it.
You would do well to read it, bearing this whole saga in mind.
But if that is too much for you, Wikipedia has a tl;dr:
"Maslow's hierarchy places sex in the physiological needs category, alongside food and breathing." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#...)
"appeared in Psychological Review in 1943."
I consider 1943 a long time ago.
But nothing turns on this. Feel free to replace "Not that long ago" with "Previously".
There are a whole host of ideas we thought "previously". And then we learnt more and improved as a society, and now we don't think them anymore.
The fact we thought it previously and don't now is kind of evidence that we've moved on from that idea.
This premise is most likely incorrect: https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-state-of-the-ai-economy
If anything this should impact the IPO only to the extent it affects the production of new compute capacity, because it is clear that is the #1 thing they need to scale revenues.
The coup of Jensen Huang was precisely organized by the same large institutional investors.
They want NVIDIA to lock-up firmware and prevent any open-weight models from being run. Everyone (at least in US/NATO/US-aligned world) will be forced to use Anthriopic/OpenAI or some other US based closed source model.
Open models will be banned at the GPU level.
This is done to cement the multi-trillion dollar valuation of the AI labs and prevent AI bubble from popping due to customers using free open-weight, instead of pay-per-token closed models
no biggie if their valuation will deflate a bit just like Cisco did in 2000.
pure-software business like openai/ant, will be protected and their global market will be protected
Not because they care about the rest of the world, they care about their own domestic market/sales though.
They successfully re-invented half of modern consumer tech inside China already, the the US closes a market, it hurts them for a few years then they close that gap.
For decades it's been "Yeah they closed the Gap on X but we have Y" then "Yeah they closed the gap on Y but we have Z" and Z starts to look pretty uncertain.
At a certain point you have to realise that with enough capital and people you can do the things that the other people with enough capital and people are doing, there isn't really any secret special "America has to be the tech leader" sauce, there wasn't when the British where the world leaders or when the Italians where or the Middle East and back through history.
Exceptionalism eventually kills your lead.
the rest of the world will be starved of GPUs and chipmaking equipment and chemical supplies for chip making
> US/NATO/US-aligned world
NATO really barely exists anymore as a consensus mechanism, it doesn't make that kind of policy or have that sort of policy influence, the "US-alignment" of the world has never been weaker, and the genie is really out of the bottle on the technology anyway.
Might have worked if they did it suddenly and all at once a decade ago.
I don't think anyone thinking that is possible has thoroughly understood how much soft power the US has lost in the last decade.
invoke Nato article 5? or loudly complain to see a manager?
Is this actually technically possible?
Such a move would also be transparently dystopian... though, in fairness, I suppose that makes it more plausible than it would otherwise be...
if Uncle Sam has not approved your model, it will be illegal to run it as a AI risk.
Americans have swallowed even worse limitations on their freedoms, so nobody will even notice that, because all notices will be sent to hyperscalers, neoclouds, and other large operators of GPU farms
He risked his future, the value of his company and shareholders to commit adultery.
What else is he doing? How can his word be trusted? Who else is influencing him? Do people have blackmail from such encounters?
All fair questions to ask now.
There needs to be an else?
The fact that he slept with a suspected Chinese spy is not a crime either. Now, if he has enabled industrial espionage, helped circumvent sanctions or broke other laws it is a different matter. But marital infidelity seems insufficient as a cause to fire a CEO of a highly successful company.
I did not follow the story much, so might be missing some important information.
He's not being prosecuted; the legality or not of his actions is meaningless.
> His wife may divorce
Which could be awkward for NVDA if there is no prenup as I've seen reported.
> But marital infidelity seems insufficient as a cause to fire a CEO
If that infidelity opens you up to blackmail, it definitely gets up there as a fireable reason.
where are those epstein files, by the way ?
While there's nothing inherently incorrect about this position, the affair with an alleged spy means that he, personally and uniquely, cannot advocate for this policy without seeming compromised. Ironically, if nVidia agrees with him, they have to fire him.
Who cares? Consequences have actions, and hopefully that's not just based on which choice is gonna make someone the most money.
Only accusations and suspicions at present, possible evidence in the future.
I don't have a deep understanding of the events, but my superficial impression is that China set up a shell company (Megaspeed) in Singapore, and put this woman in charge of it. She then persuaded Huang to engage in intercourse of the physical and commercial varieties. I get the impression he may have convinced some US officials to look the other way, to not dig into the affairs of the "Singaporean" company. That's where he may have strayed from "sucker" into "co-conspirator."
Open Weights and American AI Leadership https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-L...
I’m not deep into this story, but my initial reaction is that marital infidelity doesn’t seem like a strong reason to oust him, aside from him possibly being compromised by an international spy. Haven’t other successful leaders continued to lead after having their affairs exposed?
(And no, I don’t believe what he did is morally excusable for the record.)
Then Nvidia's general counsel contacted the commerce dept in 2025 to ask about a smuggling investigation into Megaspeed and whether the U.S. was involved in Singapore's detention of Alice Huang. Direction for this likely coming from Jensen.
Align that with his active lobbying of Washington officials to loosen export restrictions to China specifically
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/100000011275138/nvidia-j...
Not really that complicated of a scheme! The main thing is that the sales people... they "know" this is likely export control circumvention but choose to not make a stink about it. Willful ignorance.
Often times these export control issues play out like:
- big deals made with shell companies
- most people involved are incentivised to play along and pretend to not notice the shell-ness of the company
- one person doesn't get the memo and is like "uhh... wait isn't this bad?"
- now that the phrase has been uttered, either cover ups happen or a bunch of other nasty shit happens
At this stage, there is no reason to not sign the contract to provide whatever they ask. DD done, risk management done, risk but acceptable etc.
So yes everyone is playing the game.
...which may or may not be a violation of the export controls but it violates the intent.
That's a pretty big "aside" for a very big company like NVIDIA.
> Haven’t other successful leaders continued to lead after having their affairs exposed?
https://andybyron.wiki/ is one half of the erstwhile internet-meme "Coldplay Cam Couple".
you answered your own question.
He's had the job since before GTA 1 started development.
[1] https://principus.si/2024/12/28/tae-kim-the-nvidia-way-jense...
This is another way of saying all the other people designing the chips, and everything else that goes into the company, are meaningless. The cult of CEO is out of hand
How much did he donate to the ballroom? Did he get the investigation by the government shelved because of that payment? What's the real story behind the 15% revenue share deal he did with Trump?
How corrupt has Jensen actually been?
We could certainly do with more competition in the space!
next move is navigating polycules.
I do think that "eventually" AI will be open-(source, weight, something) and most people will run at least some of their workload on their own hardware; but his leaving might delay that day considerably.
There are many more companies that signed the letter, see the bottom of this pdf
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/wp-...
(Taiwan. You guys have no idea how this is/will be regarded in Taiwan. and Japan. Where infidelity is baked into the culture already.)
Dems and their sympathizers are taking the rapidly descending Republic and pointing it nose down.
But a separate foiler is that Jensen and family have been preparing for a year for this exact scenario and succession is already planned five years out
I even wonder whether some elements within the Chinese government has a hand in it -- not (only) the mistress part but the ousting part.
1/ China is still interested in chips
2/ Chip exports to China will now (presumably) be under even more scrutiny
What would their motivation be to leak this info?
Maybe?
Over the next two years, Congress is going to haul in every tech CEO who licked Trump’s boots. I think Jensen tried to get in front of it and now journalists and institutional short sellers are digging up the dirt.
Financially it almost certainly makes sense to sell to AI hyperscalers alone; without Jensen, perhaps Nvidia shifts like Micron before them, leaving the lower margin consumer market to others.
I would figure Jensen for the type to "dance with the girl who you bought to the dance" type. A new CEO may lack that sort of sentimentality for the gamers/prosumers that made Nvidia.
To me, he had the good fortune of standing in the right place at the right time. He is no Steve Jobs, who almost single-handedly started the PC revolution and the iPhone revolution. This is not to deny his brilliance and business acumen, but I think too many people overstate his contribution to both the company and the United States. Of course I could be wrong so I welcome correction or alternative viewpoints.
Speaking of the US, Jensen has indeed become a liability. A compromised CEO is, of course, a liability to a national asset, and a politically toxic one at that. Nvidia is a business with sensitive political ties now. It can't afford to appear compromised in the eyes of Washington. Therefore, Nvidia's stakeholders must let Jensen go; otherwise, it will affect the company as a whole.
Assuming these decisions are attributable to him personally, then he absolutely deserves the description "visionary". That said, he's made plenty of other choices I don't like, and also invested in plenty of silly stuff that isn't panning out for them. I don't really think Nvidia needs a visionary right now. They have the best business in the world and they just need to execute. Regardless of whether he deserves to be ousted, the company will be fine without him for the next decade at least. So a stock selloff is silly.
The common argument is, well 'x' leader has had success in 5+ companies! Surely they must be excellent visionaries. Firstly, no single person in their lifetime can possibly launch/aid enough companies to success to have a large enough sample size to prove they are a factor for success. Launching 'x' amount of companies is great but its still such a small amount that it cannot really demonstrate anything. Secondly, once you have had success once, you gain connections, wealth, e.t.c. that only bolster further endeavors that you do even if they are pretty bad ones.
Ofc, there are things an individual at the top of a company can do to make 'good decisions', but this is mostly just selecting the right people below you to delegate to (thus reading/spotting talent well) and listening to your data and people to get as much information as possible before making overarching decisions based on that. This is what I consider common-sense and what most people do in their day-to-day jobs all the way at the bottom of companies anyways, alongside all their regular hard-work (engineering e.t.c.). Upper management just has the luxury of only have to focus on the common-sense dull part; listen to incoming data, make obvious meta decision.
by being ousted from his own company and using his golden parachute while * being bought back*?
Did he circumvent export restrictions?
If not, replacing him would be a mistake for Nvidia. I also fear that it would endanger open weight models in America.
1. Hardliners angry about NVDA selling GPUs to China;
2. Board/Big investors want to get rid of him. They may think he is less important now that NVDA is clearly the top dog.
3. Political power trying to build up a case starting with him;
Anything else?
I hope he's allowed to do so. He now knows how not to get trapped into a tactically targeted honeypot, he knows the ins and outs of a GPU fab business plus he has all the connections.
This minus all the cruft and legacy overhead of a company as old as Nvidia. I'm now hoping he gets fired.
Because he can start a new company knowing everything that he got wrong the first time around, be able to hire absolute badass engineers who got fired from Nvidia because some Manager or HR thought they smelled wrong and was a hygiene risk, or quit Nvidia because they didn't like the work they were being assigned, be able to raise capital from investors who currently won't invest in Nvidia because of reasons, be able to strike new deals that hasn't happened because someone at Nvidia isn't letting them happen.
Nvidia is a very old company, not as old as Intel but close. Old companies build their own internal overhead you just cannot get rid of that would just kill a new company
And what do you mean by "the things he did wrong the first time"? NVIDIA was the most valuable company in the world at one point either this year or last year, and it's still in the top three. He did everything right from business perspective.
This is … oddly specific
Jensen has a very good relationship with Musk. I think he would hire him and put him CEO of Terrafab, of course only if Jensen is down for it as well.
Almost worth the time I wasted reading through the steaming pile of trash that all the other comments on this story are...
> Jensen Huang... also had an extramarital relationship with an executive who reports to him, according to five people who worked at the company.
2. Huang does not have the same control over the board that Brin and Page had. That doesn't make it "better", but it does affect the outcome.
To be clear, I am not defending Brin.
Building an Nvidia competitor would be a long, hard slog that almost certainly ends in failure for anyone including Jensen Huang.
They (NVIDIA) have tens of thousands of patents on their technology that would be hard to build around and commitments that lock up 60-70% of TSMC's CoWoS capacity.
Sure. After he's done responding to the Congress and various investigators and his family, something I suspect will occupy a good part of his next decade.
Does he? Plenty of serial cheaters out there getting caught repeatedly.
Those lawyers were hired by Jensen.
Ousting him is pretty much the worst case scenario for the company.
The thing is, this is just what's been reported. There's almost certainly more going on if 2 affairs are public disclosure. If there is a sexual harassment angle here as well, he's toast.
Honeytrap.
Reveal the information to a trusted journalist.
Destroy Huang's credibility.
Force his resignation.
Damage Nvidia.
China moves further in the AI game.
Game set and match. Sounds like this might have been China's real goal.
The breed of CEO's coming up in tech are monstrous in comparison.
I fear this is all political. Jensen was becoming too powerful.
This is basically the civilised US version of what China did to Jack Ma.
Won't the CEO be fighting 2 big fights - One on the corporate front burning through the AI races and second the impending doom of lawsuits and the sheer number of avenues this opens up, frivolous or serios, for any Tom, Dick and Harry working with Nvidia as an employee, vendor, partner or anything just wanting an extra piece of the Trillion dollar pie?
— Honoré de Balzac
I do wonder if Megaspeed and other shell companies have been monitored for over a year by the Feds where they broke export rules, failed to report to the Govt with the knowledge of several in the Administration... Everyone was making money on the side by allowing Jensen, Megaspeed and others profit off of bypassing export controls. Just recently a shipment of GPUs randomly disappeared as well.
If this all turns out to be true then removing him is a lot stronger than it seems and maybe in the long run fixing the bus factor problem will have been a good change.
Or, since nVidia is the central bank of the AI bubble, forcing him out kicks off a chain reaction that pops the bubble.
Should the board replace him or not?
It's easy to judge when you have no skin in the game. What would you think if you did?
Any Nvidia employees out there?
Iamgine you're a spy or a mistresss, would you appear in public with the high profile target?
So was Huang playing along as part of some other US-Chinese plot? He was a pawn, or go-between.
I'm not even sure he'd be able to threaten to sink the stock price by dumping all of his shares on the market at once.
It all unwound a few months later, much to my chagrin (and my lost stock options, obviously).
Recall that most bubbles do not pop due to one, key material cause. Instead, they pop due to adjacent troubles that, in turn, lead to cascading effects.
That was true of:
- LTCM failure (1998; Thailand and other SE Asian countries defaulted);
- 2000 market crash (dot-coms crash, then telecom crash of 2001);
- 2008-2010 financial crisis (mortgage backed securities); ... and so many others before these.
It's entirely possible that NVDA, despite earning $$$$, could unwind the circular funding within the ecosystem (the very crux of telecom market crash of 2001)
"Our kingdom for a shadow", or something. https://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardiii/richardiii.5.4.html
You can also argue that he wasn't aware n as far as he knew this was just a company in Singapore. It will be interesting how it plays out based on the facts.
That's a tautology, of course. And the board should have been doing its job handling the key man in question
It's most obvious in hindsight, obviously. Across the history of such governance debacles.
Jensen is getting thrown under the bus by the board because it both likely reduces legal consequences (especially now that democrats are a lot more powerful), and as an opportunity to gain power and place someone in the CEO position that is more controllable.
TPUs and AWS's Trainium seem to be at least in the ballpark of being competitive but does that matter at all?
2, China isolating Taiwan with an ongoing military drill https://www.reuters.com/world/china/taiwan-says-china-is-con... https://maritime-executive.com/article/analysis-china-s-nava...
3, Trump meeting Xi next week on the 18th https://www.euronews.com/2026/11/09/donald-trump-plans-to-me...
well, they do this like 6 times a year, it just usually doesn't make the news
Did he know she was a spy?
Did he give her any secrets?
Did he break up with her after finding out she's a spy?
Was she trained as a spy and sent to entrap him specifically? Or did she form a relationship with him, then get told by the Chinese Communist Party "Xi wants you to steal him some secrets from your boyfriend. This is an offer you can't refuse; spy for us or your family in China will be beaten, jailed or worse"?
Is he a victim or an asset? Is she a willing patriotic spy for China, or a victim of blackmail from the Chinese Communist Party? Has she been arrested as a spy, or did she make it to the Chinese embassy before the story broke?
My feeling is he shouldn't be ousted if he took the honey but didn't fall for the trap. OTOH if he passed her company secrets, that's presumably a fireable offense for anyone lower on the totem pole; it's only fair for a CEO to get fired for the same.
Hopefully this teaches the market to migrate away from proprietary CUDA and NVIDIA and their proprietary drivers.
From where I’m standing, China is the only world power ensuring that the entire world actually benefits from AI, by giving it away. They’re also underwriting and enabling the global transition away from fossil fuels while my country is doing its best to stall or reverse that progress. They are also not a belligerent in any current war of aggression, and to the extent that they are suppliers of weapons, appear to be providing them to countries acting entirely within their legitimate sovereign right to defend themselves.
Someone’s going to come along and call me ignorant or naive for saying “China are the good guys,” but let’s get real here. What are we talking about.
Separate dimension, these models seem to be distillations of the flagship models. That isn’t healthy for AI because it’s not forward progress. If they suck away revenue that would fund training the next model, then we’re cooked.
There's a different angle here worth listening to: https://youtu.be/IC3Kh40dEQY
Second, yeah long term this might set Nvidia back, but are we going to say that not only are there companies which are too big to fail, but now individuals can be too? They can violate international trade sanctions and get scott free because it might harm their company? What CEO wouldn’t then be incentivized against setting up a succession plan? Why wouldn’t adversarial governments target critical CEOs even more, knowing they are effectively untouchable?
Jensen objectively fucked up royally. I saw someone describe him as a victim in all of this. I’m sorry but I don’t see how it’s unreasonable to hold CEO’s in these key positions to very high standards. They’re rewarded with extraordinary wealth and influence, yet some seem eager to excuse them from the accountability that should come with that power.
EDIT: I assume the bubble will collapse into correction eventually, sooner is better than later.
NVidia doesn't need Jensen in the short / medium term - they are printing money. Unless we discover that all this circular financing was some kind of scheme.
We have 2 other companies though, Tesla and SpaceX, which CEO represents 90% of the valuation. That will be the real one.
I think this is one of those " the question is the answer" moments.
Going only on the one day point, I wouldn't recommend it for Nvidia.
2. Ian Buck as CEO (Inventor of CUDA, PhD, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing).
Right replacement could jump the stock 20%, mediocre replacement can drop it 20% from the current lows.
but tbh I doubt it.
It's often the Board of Directors that goes and the CEO retains control in the end.
Dorsey resigned himself, wasn't fired.
For me I feel like: There are wealthy people doing what Jeffrey Epstein was doing. And so by comparison, it makes other bad behaviors look relatively less important.
I'm just curious if other people have had that thought as well, and/or what else you think or have learned.
It is hard for me to see how the company that is currently turning silicon into gold with established production and software, more like a blue chip stock than a tech company, is going to be worth 20%-25% less just because the Ceo cheated on his wife.
The company is a money printer, and they really don't have to do much to keep it that way.
Desire is the enemy of happiness. To abandon sorrow, abjure want.
We are all in wanting. Our want in lesser that the needs of our partners, our friends, and our world.
He knowingly helped advance China’s AI ambitions against the direction of congress. He got caught selling 7.5 Billion dollars of restricted chips to china.
Also he cheated on his wife with some Chinese woman, which is a totally separate and unrelated fuck up.
If you seriously think he got tricked by some random woman who batted her eyes, you are out of your mind. He founded the fucking company, he isn’t some clueless executive. He’s also not senile and he doesn’t have dementia. This is the only viable excuse for him to use, but it’s complete bullshit.
Think about it: He betrayed his longtime wife, who by all accounts supported him from the beginning. He betrayed his company and its shareholders. And he betrayed his country (BOTH of his countries?) who specifically forbid the chips to be sold to china. He’s fucked
Its best to not assume anything in regards to their relationship.
That’s a stretch. He’s the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. Hearing that he had an affair, or multiple affairs, shouldn’t come as a surprise. The only person here who’s humiliated himself is Jensen, for having an affair with a spy. He was too high and mighty to take the simple route and pay for high end escorts who make you feel good for a couple of hours, and then move on with your life. No, he decided he needed to have a whole relationship on the side.
Nobody would have cared if he simply had a harem of mistresses.
I guess what I'm saying is, I'd be happy to be publicly cucked in exchange for at least a billion dollars.
A billionaire being fired is not that much of a big deal. There’s nothing in the world that’ll make them worry about what will be their next business jet.
As for him being good friends with Trump, it doesn’t say much. Epstein was one of his besties and he’s still dead.
(all sourced from [0])
Well, they had a spat in 2000 because Epstein was poaching Trump's staff but he remained a member until 2007 (or possibly longer, depending on who you believe.)
> They famously hated each other
In 2002, Trump said "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with." I don't know, it doesn't sound very "hatey" to me.
In 2003, he sent his birthday message of "A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret." Still not getting much "hate" from this relationship.
I'll give you, maybe, from 2007 onwards they fell out of friendship but even then it's not clear what actually went on.
Maybe once we get a fuller release of the Epstein Files we'll know more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Donald_Trump_a...
Before that they seem very much to have been friends.
Obviously, the affairs are a very serious issue, but the investigation needs to determine whether there were any security conflict of interest breaches
Let’s be clear: any abuse of power involving related-party relationships is wrong. Jensen should not get a “free pass” just because he’s Jensen. This is very serious.
Jensen’s leadership of the broader company is unparalleled, and replacing him would be nearly impossible. That step should only be taken when it’s extremely clear there is no other option. Even if the board does replace him, that brings significant risk, not just to NVIDIA but to all the other businesses connected to it. I hope a warning shot across the bow is enough for him to clean things up so everyone can get back to focusing on the work.
As for which way the board rules, the details are all that matter. When boards react emotionally, before a thorough investigation and before they have the full picture, they make bad decisions. They shouldn’t rush. They should investigate and dig into every detail.
Then make a decision. These decisions will carry enormous weight.
None of us really know the details. NVIDIA board: do your job and take it very seriously. Deliberately measure three times, cut once. Don’t spectate. The public likes/wants Hollywood drama, but what we really need is good corporate governance.
The Board–correctly–fears for themselves personally in a case involving Jensen's public and multinational corruption scheme.
This is going to be easy political win. Jensen's only saving grace is that he is in bed with Trump so he won't be sitting behind in prison cell.
There is a real corruption angle here that a lot of folks out west are missing [1].
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/answer-in-front-of-...
It’s just sex mate, it’s really not a big deal unless he giving favourable deals to his mistress’s company.
The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.
But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed" [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
They wouldn't be able to for anti-trust concerns.
Admittedly they might be able to get some people in the US to look the other way with sufficient beak-wetting but the EU would never allow it.
Who else is there who knows chips, knows GPUs and has an exceptional track record?
I'm scared about how this in turn shapes society.
You would do well to look at the history beyond the modern era.
More than a century of "do-nothing kings" who did not "soon find out about it".
Inertia and corruption are the default state. If we want nice things we have to be vigilant about letting power concentrate.
like sleeping Jensen Huang with an incredibly attractive Chinese agent that specifically showed traits he found desirable and exploit what ever weaknesses the Chinese spy agency could find about him to get him involved with her and divulge secrets in a SEXINT operation. Therefore Jensen is one of the worst people who are public figures.
I don't like CEO worship or tech culture (I know I am on hackernews but I am a developer and did like software development and related topics), but this take is crazy most people you know would probably take the bait on an operation like this even 'good' people.
And just take a look at the scum running things outside of Tech a lot worse then a moment of infedality, look at all western leaders you will probably find few better (or even equal) to Jensen. Jensen did not shape the shitshow you are seeing now (not saying he is not part of it), it was corrupt from the start, Just a worthless veneer of morality.
Don't morn your societies decay it was a cadaver from the beginning only by putrefaction will it become the soil to plant strong trees on.
And that "scum also exist outside tech" is just a whataboutism. It'd be a better discussion if you actually interacted with my arguments.
> Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point?
Was not trying to be dishonest but was meant to be what I felt you comment boiled down to, I will revise my comment to change the '>'.
> And that "scum also exist outside tech" is just a whataboutism.
What I was saying is not just that scum exists outside tech but that the society that created this tech culture and space is the curruption it's self and it's not worth thinking about as something to save but to replace entirely.
> This post was after a second affair, to me that's a moral flaw, not just someone exploiting him.
I am not saying it's not a moral flaw but compared what Trump has done Epstein, wars, etc. He looks like a Saint. It's pointless even talking about morality in the way you do when Trump and his weak cronies are in power. (and yes I know Nvidia under Jesen no doubt has benefit from this corruption). Infidelity is so common in are time but if only that was the worst of it.
What I was saying is not just that scum exists outside tech
I haven't found the answer. But I do know one thing from my (smallish) sample: the nice guy never let the money get to his head. He drove his own car (a VW Rabbit, ok, a nice one) and lived in the same house that he lived in when he started his company. And until the day he died he just kept doing what he loved without ever feeling the need to lord it over others. More like a Wozniak (who is the other 'nice billionaire' that I'm aware of but I've never met him).
Edit: I wrote about him:
A human being is so unlikely to be good on their own, pretty much all cultures practiced infanticide and child sacrifice and pederasty and only changed because a few hated these practices and forced them to stop.
But a lot of people the only moment they get to act in an unaccountable manor will act very badly. This is not all people but probably above 90%.
> During the conference, Nvidia executives were at a nearby hotel for meetings. Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell were seen being affectionate at the hotel. One bystander captured the interaction on their phone, three people briefed on the incident said.
> Mr. Huang’s security witnessed the bystander with their phone and sequestered them, the people said. They made the person an offer to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Well, at least there will be one way to make money after AI takes my job...
Jokes aside, I would expect we will soon learn there is more. Given that Nvidia was vouching for Megaspeed while exporting those chips, I still think there's a reasonable chance Jensen ends up in jail over this. Not large, but possible.
When I encountered this ( in much smaller, non strategic companies!) both parties took great care to hide their affair and appear completely professional in public. The fun and games were kept behind closed bedroom doors. I don't get it.
Some folks get a thrill from getting caught, too.
Do they offer $20k? $200k? $2M? He stands to potentially lose tens of billions over this.
(Whatever the wallstreet guys understand by this term)
Sen. Chris Coons says investigating Nvidia's CEO is top priority for Democratic Congress
https://www.npr.org/2026/11/09/nx-s1-6032682/senator-chris-c...
I'm not really making a judgement on Huang, but it seems others have done worse. It's making me wonder if there's something larger at play where people (i.e., other billionaires and CEOs and perhaps politicians) are unhappy with Huang.
It is absolutely impossible to know the exact details, but Musk has a history of shady deals (even having his companies bill each other for expenses), and so it's not much of a leap of faith that these moves are to absolve himself from lenders and investors by shifting debt around and moving losers into winners.
I bet that SpaceX will buy Tesla any day now.
Musk somehow weasles his way through lawsuits and gray areas and corruption and legal loop holes to just have his companies buy each other out when they start sucking, all on the teat of others and the government.
It would have to be a very good cause though, disliking him or ordinary bad business decisions won't cut it.
The board decides who is CEO. Zuck controls the board. Zuck cannot be fired unless he wants to be.
Why does he support Putin?
I’m guessing most HN folks are in the camp that believes modern, powerful HR orgs serve a crucial function in protecting and advocating for employees in boss-underling relationships like this, where the power dynamic of these situations demands that they not be tolerated.
So which is it? Do you make allowances and exceptions and become a vocal (or tacit) apologist for this dynamic in some cases, or hold to what seems like a reasonable principle? (Not just in Jensen’s case but across the board?).
If the consensus here slides to the apologist side that’s fine, but in that case can we all agree to defund “Big HR”? If they can’t establish and enforce a consistent rule of no sleeping with your reports, especially at the highest echelons, then what good are they?
And they probably asked him to do other things and he probably was either too naive or didn’t understand the magnitude or just didn’t play ball. So they threw him under the bus.
They waited till after the election to release this carefully.
As it would tank the economy before the election (like that would have had any more effect).
Hopefully this is how I hope would be written in some future Netflix docshow.
And the fact that he went on some long winded media tour portraying himself as some sort of hippie savior (“oh I don’t know where I live” “i love my wife dearly”) seems like a well setup “white washing” to try and cap this follow on news.
Otherwise the news as it reads sounds too stupid to be true Occam’s razor and all that.
1. Anthropic is IPOing at exactly the same time
2. Anthropic announced that they could destroy "CUDA moat"
3. The cheating was an open secret for years and it burst just now
4. The biggest loser in Chinese chip flow is Anthropic, and they are hostile to idea of OSS AI
weird coincidences all around :-)
It's kinda cool this guy is a computer nerd who is living like a rock star.
The guy had some consensual sex - so what? “Oh it shows poor judgement” Literally shut the f*k up… his judgement made NVIDIA the behemoth it is. Glad you get to backseat his personal life because judgement as it pertains to relationships is something you can actually relate to.
Removing him as CEO at this point in history is as the kids would say dumb af. Absolute garbage decision.
Looks like both Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia CEO have Single Instruction Multiple Threads (SIMT) architecture.
With his connections , he can start another one.
It's NVIDIA being sued because they defrauded investors by including illicit chip sales in their Q3 figures
We'll call it Billy and the Bubbleosaurus.
Depending on how Jensen takes it, this could be the catalyst to steer AI in a new direction. Companies will line up to scoop him up, if not fight each other to get him. He is the head of the most valuable company, he has the tightest connection to the US government, it won't take a minute before Mudita* becomes a new company being fast-tracked to the top.
* Opposite of Envy (nvidia)
It’s the Dot Bomb days all over again.
These things would be clear causes for resignation at any big corp
The extramarital affairs, while salacious, are largely immaterial.
The key issue seems to be not merely was he sleeping with someone who was not his wife, but rather, that he was sleeping with a Chinese spy who was rather essentially running a export smuggling operation to China in violation of United States law specifically crafted to recognize these Nvidia chips as sufficiently high-end to merit a national security concern.
And apparently, the United States government knew about it. But never told him they knew. What Huang personally knew is not clear, and is likely now to be subject to inquiry from a Congress that has also been turned upside down, ushering in a wave of AI skeptics while Huang was notable at the White House's "AI summit" for his almost singular bullishness. Howard Lutnick personally shut down an investigation, concerns from the CIA were not acted upon.
Donald Trump has seen people try to turn his life upside down given salacious scandals. Perhaps the President of the United States and Lutnick (among the well-heeled class known to have lied about their Epstein island connections) simply do not care, given both openly embrace Huang as a source of profit. It's also not clear the President shares the United States natsec consensus (what some of his followers term "the swamp") that actually sees Xi or China as a threat. After all, he plans to have what is likely to be another highly docile visit to the Chinese leader next week.
Put another way, it seems the federal government did not act as turning Mr. Huang's life upside down may have been calculated to turn the entire economy and their fortunes (both personal and political) upside down. Perhaps there is a backroom deal with China the President, Lutnick and Huang are secretly accommodating? I mean why would they not at least warn him?
The present irony is of course, for whatever aligned reasons that led to this hush-hush arrangement, the cat is out of the bag now. One wonders if the consequences this threatens to unleash in the present moment would have been mitigated if instead of trying to pretend it wasn't happening, the powers that be had acted with greater preemption. Perhaps so it goes. The best laid plans of this sort are often turned upside down.
moralism blocking progress once again
I do agree with anyone saying that this feels fishy as fuck. They can punish Jensen without firing the man who made the company. I'm sensing fuckery afoot or that the board is operating with a lot more information.
I don't see anyone accusing China of setting up such a trap. China always denies ofc, though all these scummy things eventaully comes out to be true, and by then everyone forgets.
But there's no real competitors still? Even for the medium term?
So AMD, Google are not "real" competitors?
Conspiracy theory, the affair news came out to bury this story lol
As soon as they baited Huang, it was all win-win for them. China would be able to either get access to secrets and/or chips they wouldn't have before, or they'd decapitate one of the most important companies in the U.S. The public outcry to this is exactly as planned.
Truly ridiculous and anyone with their pitchforks out needs to get a clue.
SMH
His crime is he put his junk in the wrong kind of spy?
Irattional things continue to be irrational i guess
I mean, that's acceptable these days isn't it?
From an HR and legal perspective, if Alice was a spy, Jensen was arguably the targeted 'victim' of a foreign intelligence operation. While it was certainly very dumb and negligent, it may not have been a policy violation or may only have been a violation of company policies like mishandling confidential information or not following IT security policies. Those aren't usually "Fire the CEO Now" things, while slamming the sheets with a direct report absolutely requires some kind of immediate action.
The real question is who wants Jensen gone? Because the first leak was clearly intentional and reportedly placed by 'senior White House sources', citing a confidential NSC report. Now the second leak of the inappropriate affair happens immediately after. This was a designed sequence. Both of the underlying events are several months old. Given the facts, I think the most likely source is 'China Trade/AI Hawks' in the White House (possibly the NSC). The reasoning being that Jensen has generally been trying to minimize restrictions on selling AI to China (which is, arguably, part of his job).
[1] https://www.facebook.com/ChinainAus/videos/nvidia-ceo-jensen...
Also to all the people saying how terrible this will be, would you really want someone running your company who can't keep his word to his wife? Maybe it is a quaint idea in 2026 but I think people who break their word shouldn't be trusted, particularly to be in positions of power.
What they care about is the US leading China on every militarily and economically relevant technology.
The hawks have long chafed at Huang’s position that we need to sell our best chips to China to keep them on the US tech stack. It’s very obviously giving them the ability to catch up.
Energy is the hard part, and US is deeply behind on that.
If I ignore the words, and instead observe behaviour, all of the actions I observe indicate the opposite;potential competitors are treated as very credible threats, even existential ones; and actions indicate that 'maintaining special access to hardware' and 'vying for regulatory capture to shut out competition' are major strategic goals.
(Folks run to blow whistles when they realize they're involved in something they may pay the price for isn't new.
Also, have you seen our IC? The days of the CIA running a competent conspiracy, if they ever existed, are behind us.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
She could have been his chess partner, and if he'd acted the same way on her behalf it would have been fireable. The sex is immaterial and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't read up on this or is selling something.
The sex is just the icing on top of the poor judgement.
When some dude's sex life quashes an investigation into Megaspeed, yeah, it becomes germane. (There are serious questions around Lutnick, for example [1].)
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/answer-in-front-of-...
I don't get it. Huang doesn't get to decide who chips can't be sold to. Presumably Huang wants to sell chips to everyone whether or not he's fucking them. Nvidia will always say yes to another billion dollars. It's up to the state department to say no.
If Lutnick was sleeping with a Chinese spy and approved the sale, sure throw him in jail. If Huang secretly bribed Lutnick to approve the sale, sure throw them both in jail. But that's not what we're seeing?
What am I missing? Seriously, ELI5.
You’re absolutely correct that we have no smoking gun in the public record. What we have, instead, is smoke. Lots of it.
> What am I missing?
"Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year.
The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.
But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed.
It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company’s representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case.
The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler’s interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident” [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
Maybe the board knows more, and that's why they are "preparing to oust" him. Or maybe it's about the sex scandal.
I don't have money in NVDA but if I did I would certainly want him to stay at his desk until we have the actual gun.
He caused Nvidia to violate export-control law. To help a Chinese intelligence asset’s company. He then corruptly quashed the investigation using Nvidia’s resources. Those are crimes.
> I don't have money in NVDA but if I did I would certainly want him to stay at his desk
I do have money in Nvidia. I want Huang gone. If he stays, there is a real chance the hammer about to fall on him destroys Nvidia as well.
That’s before the shareholder and supplier lawsuits extract billions from the company. Before states’ AGs extract more. Before the Congress lobs a grenade at a Silicon Valley that honestly doesn’t seem to get why this behaviour is contemptible.
This seems awfully handwavy. Civilians don't get to quash investigations.
The legality will depend on what we find under that handwaving, but I doubt very much we will find personal checks written to Lutnik.
I have to ask: If he hadn't slept with the woman, would you feel the same way about the whole affair? If not, why does the sex matter?
Correct. It's called corruption.
> I doubt very much we will find personal checks written to Lutnik
You don't need this to trigger undue influence issues.
> If he hadn't slept with the woman, would you feel the same way about the whole affair?
Yes. That seems to have blown open the scheme Jensen was running [1], possibly with the knowledge of the White House.
I'm flying from Silicon Valley to New York today. The bubble that has people publicly calling this a nothing burger is the exact reason Americans are furious and fed up with our tech sector's leaders.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/nvidias-disappearing-s...
That's why Huang doesn't get to decide whether chips should be sold to China. He can advocate all he wants, speech is cheap.
Wasn’t the swap drained in 2016 too?
Within weeks I saw the naked racism and left the whole party behind. Having learned more about Trump and Republicans since has been ... humiliating after decades of voting 'R'.
Wherever you land on your views in the future, being willing to question everything is a superpower.
Onward!
I can imagine people souring over lack of follow through on economic promises, or the naked corruption with your $coins, but from a racism/xenophobia/morals perspective, I'd feel like most of the signal was there in the 2016 campaign was it not?
The mask-off racism was just beyond the pale, and lead me to look deeper into his past and how he was starting to govern. It became obvious that he'd mostly cheated or lucked his way into fortune and fame.
> Morally I didn't expect him to personally be a paragon of virtue.
Lot of people respond with this, but honestly, that is setting up a straw man to knock down isn't it? No one claims that we should expect any politician to be a paragon of virtue but in terms of how they conduct themselves and the language they choose, there is still a reasonable bar that Trump blew past and set an awful precedent.
Now that's something I'd like everyone to believe, if I was the CIA.
Huang had an affair with a Chinese spy, as well as an affair with someone he manages. Either one of these would be grounds for dismissal at any company I've worked at. Committing both of these offenses shows appalling judgment by Huang.
Firing him seems like a very logical conclusion, not some CIA Illuminati bullshit conspiracy theory.
This scandal has felt like a litmus test for free market idealists vs realpolitik thinkers. Nvidia's board and Trump both knew about the spying allegations for over a year, allegedly. This is not a situation you can navigate with strong principles or a moral compass, you just have to follow the money.
Paraphrasing the apocryphal quote:
Anti-corruption never took root in America because the commoners see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed future CEOs.
This is up there with the most fireable things that have ever happened.
You’re looking for a conspiracy when this is a pretty straightforward story. Jensen’s credibility is shot. Of course they’re preparing contingency plans.
I've already heard stories in social circles in Silicon Valley from senior folks in the industry that they didn't share before. Not because they were hiding anything. But because it wasn't topical. There are a lot of scumbags, and there is a lot of corruption to go around right now.
The first story came from sources close to the White House, or something along those lines. Makes sense since it was a national security issue. The second story is internal to the company.
Very plausible non conspiracy explanation: after the first story came out the exec he was having an affair with was pissed to discover she was in fact the other other woman and went to a reporter.
If someone thinks there is not a lot of sex going on in the c-suite maybe you need to get out more.
Nvidia has a large market share, but AMD, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Qualcomm all produce AI chips... these are all American companies.
Apple has no product like the SuperPOD, or AMD's CDNA, or Google's TPU, or Amazon's Trainium, or OpenAI's Jalapeño, so on and so forth.
I expect shit show funnier than when OpenAI tried to put Altman with same result.
It certainly isn't something for Ronald fucking McDonald to have an opinion about.
"Having sex with a direct report" is not on that list of prohibited reasons.
But does that make it reasonable for hackers to think that drinking a glass of water is some kind of horrible offence, like some lunatics seem to think about workplace relationships? Which are one of the most common way that people meet and get married.
Does Nvidia have such a policy? Unless laws have changed, this isn't an issue as far as the law is concerned.
(Googling - seems they may actually have this policy...)
From what I've heard: Nvidia's operations is heavily reliant on Jensen. He's embedded in everything. Early in the pandemic, I interviewed with them. The recruiter said that pretty much every engineer at the company will, at some point, be in a meeting that includes Jensen. I spoke to a friend who worked there and he confirmed it.
(Probably no longer true as they've grown a lot since then).
He wasn't punished nor fired over it. It seems when a Democrat does something like this, everyone looks the other way.
There are many such cases, which makes the pearl clutching much less convincing.
Seems like this video and the first affair with the spy was a classic blackmail operation used against him as I said before [0] and Huang likely said no to the wrong person.
It is over.
jfc
We cannot glue ourselves to the backs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. We need to be anti-fragile and support a robust spectrum of AI inference being developed from all angles.
This would permanently wed us to a handful of vendors that will soak American businesses and innovators dry while their own products fail to reach the peak of what an open weights inclusive environment could lead to.
Source?
It doesn't matter who leaked what eveybody knew, the only think that matters is timing.
Training must not be allowed by normal people. The resulting models may work stuff out that they're not supposed to and that would be bad and wrong.
If the Chinese spy lady really were a spy, all the govt agencies would have known about it long ago, but chosen not to reveal it. The whole business stinks of manipulation and "don't interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake", and the salacious headlines are what's selling this Manufactured Consent.
Regarding the original person, whatever conspiracy may or may not have occured doesn't resolve the original problem.
> The State of Utopia is an AI-governed nation with goals that include acting in the best interests of all our citizens.
Getting rid of Jesen might be useful for the US AI labs, but what exactly would be the plan their. I can not see a benefit to them with this move, though I can not see any thing particularly negative for them.
The only evidence we have is Jensen drinking wine with this lady, I dont think him having drinks with someone is evidence he was participating in a conspiracy to circumvent export controls.
I dont really care if he jad an affair or not, but I think its crazy how easy it is to manufacture consent around the idea that he's a double agent by just posting picture of him being in the same room as someone.
Maybe more will come out, but there's no texts, emails or anything. Its just WSJ articles that had three pieces of legislation introduced alongside to ban Chinese access to GPUs.
Its also wild how people think having GPUs is dangerous. China isnt going to harm us with matrix multiplication lol. Now Huawei will build better platforms, constraints are the seeds of innovation. If I was the US I would much rather flood their market with cheep back-doored GPUs. Which leads me to believe these actions are all on anti-competitive measures on behalf of Anthropic, who's spent a boatload on political lobbying.