I recently recalled Nvidia's rather strange reaction to the Gamers Nexus investigation into GPU smuggling [0]. Found it somewhat strange at the time how incredibly agitated the reaction seemed to have been, given Nvidia could sell the same GPUs for the same price essentially instantly without the Chinese market. Their reaction wasn't merely a denial, dismissal or even silence, but very irrationally sounding for a company of their size and standing.
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"...
Aren't open-weight models good for Nvidia's business? Chinese labs releasing models that people can run themselves on Nvidia GPUs creates more potential buyers of Nvidia 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.
It makes sense to me why they would benefit from chinese labs having more compute.
I’m not sure that Hardware has the same moat as Service/Platform.
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)
I don't think this is true. AMD's hardware, on paper at least, offers the same or better performance than Nvidia. Eg the Mi355x vs B300 is close. The former released before Nvidia's GPU.
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.
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
Nvidia is king of circular financing. peak accrual earnings include non-cash items and demand Nvidia is funding itself. On a cash (real actual reality) basis the multiple is 33 to 50
I wish for US to win the Chinese race if there's one. I would agree that the Chinese getting access to GPUs, building models, making them open weight and also sharing has really pushed the American labs. Without Chinese models, we would probably be 1 year behind where we currently are. Competition is a healthy thing. This competition has increased intelligence so fast and created ridiculous demand on hardware. So it's been great for Nvidia and their stock. I don't know what Jensen knows nor do I believe he could have anticipated how the field would play out. Whatever happens, it's been one heckuva ride for him. Unfortunately there are many people that would love to get into his position, the pay is going to be delicious...
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.
In my opinion it is the open weights that are pushing as much in tandem. Without them it would be easier between the top labs.
They must have a large enough gap between OW to justify that extra cost. A business owner may prefer to be happy with 8/10 AI output rather than spend 5x more for that extra 2 points
Why do you wish for US to win? I think it's a quite scary moment if I, to be able to work, need to pay a hefty tax in tokens to a few big American corporations instead of having a server in my cellar with a few GPUs I control or having a healthy ecosystem of competition serving the models we need daily.
While yes, they also have interest in open weight, it does increase their market after all, I'd be surprised if that was on the same level, given they are extending mass credits to US frontier labs and neoclouds on condition that they'd purchase their GPUs and even provide revenue guarantees.
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.
> Chinese labs releasing models that people can run themselves on Nvidia GPUs creates more potential buyers of Nvidia GPUs
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
I'm pretty sure they would prefer to have a diversified line of products with customers willing to buy them. Should apple just stop selling everything except their most expensive iPhone, because it's expensive and popular?
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!
Eh, I have seen their past reaction to reporting they didn't like, such as the HUB DLSS blacklisting and the like. They can be petty, yes, but the reaction to that documentary felt very different, that was another level entirely. It sounded weirdly personal, which is even more suspect given sanctions are a legal issue where even a company with a rather contentious relationship with media would normally launder each reaction through legal.
If it's not due to a love affair (which is now public), and not just working for PRC out of ideological readons, it might be some kind of secret pressure, some kind of a secret hostage situation, so serious as to force a CEO of the world's top company to act so recklessly.
He made a strong case that the sanctions harmed his long term ecosystem lock in play.
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.
When you have a fixed supply (which GPU production basically is), the more demand the more you can charge and the more you can make. It’s not about finding buyers, it’s about creating even more demand so you can ask more than ever for the GPUs you’re making.
The U.S. blocking advanced chip sales to China has ensured China increased their efforts to someday no longer need them.
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.
China already makes GPUs that are good enough, even if they are slower and less efficient than the NVIDIA GPUs.
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.
Which METR report? The one about Anthropic's acceleration rate for improved benchmark results, that put the value at anywhere between 1.1 and 3x per year.
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.
Covert actions in the interest and by the request of a foreign power is spy craft. If you do this openly, then it would not be called spying, it is done all the time; sometimes it is called diplomacy. If you hide the fact that you are working for a foreign power, you are a spy.
It is not a necessary condition, but it is sufficient.
China or any other country is not required to follow the U.S.'s laws. If they don't see U.S. rules to their advantage they may work around it.
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.
Folks here tend to forget US laws are just that - US laws. Mostly done to benefit US and nobody else. Its not like US respects any European laws, does it.
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.
I’m not sure if you haven’t followed this story or if you’re constructing some kind of specious argument that the only evidence you’ll accept is a personally signed letter from Xi Jinping. I’ll assume the former.
* 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 have a very strange definition of spying if you preclude the Chinese government using an operative to sexually compromise the world's most influential tech leader running the world's most influential tech business into breaking US laws to materially benefit China to an almost unprecedented degree.
I think you've made up your mind on this matter and you're not going to let reality get in the way.
This is not a courtroom. Jensen has been very open that he wants to be able to sell his chips to China. As of today it comes out that he has had other affairs.
Jenson may have knowing broken the law. Perhaps the law will have its way with him.
My point is simply what I said at the beginning of this thread: "In effort for us to see clear eyed."
I don't have a horse in this race, but from a US perspective it makes sense to ban chip sales. This is an arms race and any advantage however small makes a difference.
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.
I agree with you and I find it sad. I grew up during the last Cold War. Dario Amodei often writes in new Cold War rhetoric. Is this really the best we can do as humans?
The USA has already shown it will remove its soldiers and military hardware from east asia when a certain middle eastern country seems to require it more. Taiwan should study and meditate a bit on what happened to South Korea.
Name a single technology where the US sold to China and China remained reliant on the US long term for it in recent times. Just a single one would do. That would make me believe this theory that keeps being repeated.
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...
Your reply comes off a bit rude and not within the tone expected on HN.
First off, China is not my enemy. I am a humanist (at least try to be).
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.
> 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?
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.
This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market, when China has more active iPhone user than the whole US population.
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.
It's not the same. Nvidia is way more buyers in the US than they have product to sell. Apple doesn't have a problem keeping supply to meet their demand, and so they need to find additional markets.
It's kinda bad business to fully pull out of a giant market, with a massive customer base, because of a major boom cycle in your product.
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.
it's worse than just that. in this case it creates an even stronger incentive for a domestic chinese competitor to rise up and as soon as a chinese competitor can offer a similar product to what nvidia is offering, then nvidia's clock is already ticking. its probably too late already
It's existential for Nvidia. Jensen understood that the longer he can freely sell to China, the less opportunity/incentive there is for Chinese companies to produce their own silicon and compete head-to-head with Nvidia.
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.
If you're z.ai in 2025 with $10 million to spend on GPUs, what's better:
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.
> If you're z.ai in 2025 with $10 million to spend on GPUs, what's better:
> 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.
> Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.
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.
Yes it is Chinas MO. But it probably possible to influence their timing and/or degree. I do not thing they have anywhere near replaced western/Taiwan x86/ARM CPUs, for example?
> There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions.
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.
Exactly, it is the same thing in Hong Kong, Japan or South Korea or any other nation in the region. Just like how they used to smuggle iPhone into China. It is a hidden distribution network that has long established.
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.
I think there are a lot of people who want to bring him down. His competition - AMD, Broadcom, Google. OpenAI and Anthropic also have advocated for banning chip exports to China because of Chinese lab LLM competition. Then there are both Republican and Democrats who likely support the views of OpenAI/Anthropic.
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 seems to have broken the law. That should have consequences. That he cofounded the company should not matter. Neither should it matter that many rich people get away with breaking the law in other cases.
IF Alice was a spy, and IF he was blackmailed into selling gpus to an ally of the CCP, thus breaking sanctions, he did break law. But both of those are a stretch atp
It’s not about that, it’s about the cloud compute loophole of export restricted chips. NVIDIA sold billions worth of chips to Megaspeed, a Chinese company spin out in Singapore founded right after the export ban. Neocloud Megaspeed rented most of their compute to Chinese companies like Alibaba circumventing the sanctions. The investigations didn’t find any wrongdoing per se even if it’s very obvious that the whole Megaspeed operation is Chinese state orchestration. Labelling Alice as a spy put an immediate hold to all of this.
The thing is that at this point, even if this was all a plot to take him down, it worked! Can't go back to the information not being public.
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.
> We can't be so gullible that we think this wasn't deliberate right?
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.
To be fair this is the kind of thing the media and the public love to follow. Public powerful figure, sex, spying, political and business schemes, and additionally most retail investors being exposed to NVDA, it has everything. Doesn't mean it wasn't coordinated at first to get it in the spotlight, but there is no need for that now I think.
He's a strong advocate for gaming. That's why he started Nvidia in the first place.
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.
They stopped manufacturing the 5090 even under Jensens control. And no the 5090 die is only 750mm squared big, a B200s die is 1628mm squared. That is more than twice the size of a 5090.
as nvidia goes into making purely big-business hardware, some other player will arrive to provide the chips to the masses. then, the researchers will use this mass-market hardware for research, supplanting nvidia itself.
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.
> This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market, when China has more active iPhone user than the whole US population.
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?
>There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions.
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...
The whole affair circus to distract from the export control circumvention is another example of "It's a big club and you ain't in it". In which you is all of us non billionaires.
> This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market
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.
No need to author a grand conspiracy, it's likely exactly what it looks like. Jensen like to dip his pen in all sorts of ink and China used a honeypot to blackmail him.
China has all the incentive in the world to disrupt a major US AI firm to slow the US down.
> I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
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).
If he was actually a victim, it would be gross negligence on him and/or his board. CEO's at $100B market cap companies should be undergoing regular, advanced training on spearfishing as well a due diligence on such large chip deals.
I wrote this elsewhere, but right after they fire JH (he's lost all credibility on anything China going forward, and that makes it impossible for him to remain CEO), the board needs to cycle themselves off and get people who can handle the scope of a company like NVDA. The complete lack of real governance and what appears to be any succession plan is squarely on this board.
It's obvious that it was on purpose. He's been involved for years with the Megaspeed spy, he knew exactly what he was doing and where the GPUs were going.
I've been watching them for some time now and i must say they do pretty good coverage of the crazy tech world. They def don't shy away from deep coverage and chasing of the truth.
I just recently unsubscribed, when it became their "thing". Their LG video was terrible at dividing what TV it did on its own and what they used it for. And they have like 4 "AI Bubble" videos in row, each 40m+ long, where new one adds at best 5 minutes of new information, over the previous. The GPU smuggling investigation was nice but they quickly went downhill from there, and instead of being side projects, it is now the main hook that brings people to channel. People who care about hardware reviews have to go somewhere else.
> Their LG video was terrible at dividing what TV it did on its own and what they used it for.
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.
It also makes sense. I've pretty much stopped watching actual hardware reviews because I've essentially given up on upgrading my PC any time soon, at least until the AI bubble pops. Why watch people review stuff I'll never be able to buy? I may as well watch people review Ferraris and Gucci bags at that point.
Being a victim doesn't make him less guilty in the eyes of the law. Even if a judge finds him to be 100% misled and honey trapped, they will still hold him accountable. If it turns out he expressly avoided sanctions and probably worse leaked military secrets then he might be going to jail. And possibly a small Nvidia top heavy pyramid with him. Anyone who followed orders will go with him, it's going to be more painful than "just" losing the CEO.
It was so important the security services didn't even bother to warn him when they found out about the affair. You can say 'suspected' spy about anyone. Classic spin language.
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.
Dude, are you kidding me? You have such a corrupt government for the last two years that they openly did insider trading and all the other stuff. I'm sure somebody was in the known and I'm sure somebody did investigation, there was also an article how a higher ups in the government leaked to Nvidia that there was some investigations and internally there was pressure to do nothing about it.
Eh? The point I'm making is if there was a vaguely serious security risk the security services would have told the CEO ( which is separate from 'taking action' ).
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.
> The point I'm making is if there was a vaguely serious security risk the security services would have told the CEO
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.
Think about it - after over a year of investigation the strongest thing you can say about Alice Huang is/was a 'suspected' spy - which is a phrase you can use about anything - I suspect you - therefore you are 'suspected'.
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.
Those are not the main issues. Only two core issues. The national security aspect, and the mother of all lawsuits by activist investors of NVIDIA, that the company, their current CEO and the Board is about to get hit by.
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.
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.
Someone mentioned that the 2nd affair was known about by the board for a long time, and this is pretty common in boards. They don't really care, they just keep it in their pocket until they need the ammo to fire someone. It sounds right to me, affairs are very hard to keep secret for someone that public, and then this news dropped right after the first one.
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.
> As bad as cheating is morally, we don't really know how his wife feels or if they had some open relationship type arrangement, [...]
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.
Having your house unknowingly bugged by a spy makes you a victim. Having an affair with a spy, in what now appears to be a broader pattern of questionable ethical behavior, not so much.
If your lover gets recruited by a spy agency you are a victim of spying.
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.
Yeah I mean they don't seem to care about the moral implications or view it as poor judgement like some people here say, or else they would act when they find out. They just see ammunition..
By the way that is an interesting insider trading question.
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?
The issue isn’t a moral one from a a company perspective, it’s a conflict of interests issue.
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
this is like a theory and practice situation. in theory this is conflict of interest issue possibly undermines objectivity and so on. in practice Nvidia thrives and the man is a substantial reason of this. removing him will be plain stupid from the point of view of the company's performance.
Why should we assume corporate codes are morally just though? I do not. In fact I would argue this is evidence that company codes are in a general sense draconian and/or disconnected from social reality under capitalism, etc.
Yeah, he should leave. Next earnings call is Nov 17, he needs to be out by then so that he is not a distraction (CFO could do the call).
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.
> who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy
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.
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.
Come on, there is a difference between a company having some Nvidia, and sleeping with a salesperson at a company with a massive conflict who wants to buy lots of your hardware and import it in China, possibly in breach of laws.
Do you really think this is the same as sleeping with a random person at a company which happens to use some Nvidia products?
People are using the argument that Larry Ellison, Brin, Bill Gates, and other tech moguls also did this and really didnt face major consequences.
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.
He shouldn’t be shagging subordinates or senior employees of customers, basically. In a way, the alleged spy thing is just icing on the cake; well-run companies won’t tolerate the conflict of interest even without a spy being involved.
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.
> 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...
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...
> who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy
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.
idk maybe successfully founding & managing (currently) BIGGEST technological company for 3 decades,
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.
Not really, there were other GPU manufacturers who aren't around any more and didn't get propped by those waves. There's no denying that the company was doing more things right than their competitors.
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.
Not really, they were casting about for these kind of opportunities since day 1 in the early 00s, and pushing it with GPGPU talks at universities in the 2010s. And eventually it bore fruit.
Jensen has absolutely made his own luck here. They were in the right place waiting for the right time for decades before it hit.
Here's why Jensen is critical to Nvidia as well as the industry:
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.
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.”
Pretty sure his criticality to NVDA is the fact that he founded it and has been its CEO for all of its existence. GPGPUs were entirely his vision. Back in 2008 when no one gave a shit about CUDA or GPGPUs he was the only one insisting that massive data processing on GPUs was going to be important for data centers. He kept funding that for another 15 years despite the target audience being niche scientific computing and the market not rewarding him for that. NVDA without him is going to be a different company. That’s obviously bound to happen sooner or later, but Apple without Steve is a different company than Apple with Steve. Could be better, could be worse, but it’ll surly be different.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this was a ploy to buy the Chinese more time. They are coming for the GPGPU game with early entrants like Lisuan Tech LX 7G100. They are still a few years behind but you know their tenacity and commitment to getting it done by hook or by crook. A few years of Nvidia stumbling in the woods is all thats standing in the way of China catching up and taking yet another industry away from the west (as if Nuclear, Batteries, Cars, drones weren't enough). The Dems will have an ax to grind and I guess unlucky Jensen is the first victim. If they kill this golden goose man oh man the history books are going to be brutal.
So when 98th woman births Elon’s 69th child we’ll draw the line and get him out as CEO? Or elect a Commander-in-Chief (twice) who F’ed porn stars while his wife was pregnant?
Why are you assuming your interlocutor is in favor of Elon or Trump holding their positions? If anything, one should assume he is consistently against all three men being in positions of influence.
fair, but I don’t see any other hot stories crashing a company over a horny CEO. funny how we bring in some moral high ground selectively. if we did this as a whole there wouldn’t be many CEOs or Presidents left in their position, no?
all three had explicit policies that CEOs violated. if nvidia has the same the ousting should be straight-forward. though I am sure Boards will find loophole in the policy (e.g. "she was not a direct subordinate") if they want to keep CEO around
>> Under Nvidia's code of conduct, employees are instructed to avoid actual or potential conflicts of interest, with "personal relationships" specifically identified as a possible source of such conflicts.
>> The code applies to all employees and board members and provides for disciplinary action, including termination, for violations.
>Why are you assuming your interlocutor is in favor of Elon or Trump holding their positions?
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.
Most CEOs are fired for this. There are some exceptions sure but there are always exceptions. In reality, an affair with a subordinate is an express ticket to getting fired in Corporate America.
Only if you get exposed publicly like Huang, and sometimes not even then.
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.
do they want Trump out because of his infidelities or for other reasons? even Evangelicals voted for him (twice) so I don’t think it is him F’ing everything that moves
I mean I want trump out for his infidelities as well as allegations of sexual assaults even on minors. I want him out for these reasons and more. I believe also lost the majority vote both times. The US elections being a convoluted mess with tons of corruption and Israeli influence is hardly a reason for why Jensen Huang shouldn’t suffer the consequence for his actions. I say fire him.
he definitely did not lose popular vote in 2024 though… I don’t have a problem if he is fired but questioning why same standard isn’t applied generally? if he is fired, do we start a country-wide crusade to oust every horny CEO?
I said majority vote not popular vote. I don’t blame you for being confused. If Jensen gets fired it won’t be merely due to his unfaithfulness. He put the company at risk by literally screwing a spy and allowing china to bypass export controls.
In American English "majority" can mean "plurality", it's a bit weird! [1] Saying "lost the majority vote" when you mean "won the election with under 50%" is bound to confuse people.
I know you're not making it up, "plurality" is a real word and in a technical context "majority" can be contrasted with "plurality". But even then you really wouldn't say "lost the majority vote" for someone who won an election (try searching for that phrase: none of the hits are people using it like you are).
The majority vote is being used often to indicate whether or not majority actually voted in a given President. In the USA however, majority vote win happens infrequently nowadays, only 4 out of last 9 elections with winner won a majority vote. so perhaps unfair to bring that up, the 2024 was an absolute blowout by USA's standards
Totally fine to want those people away from positions of responsibility too — I certainly do. Why assume people are arguing for an exceptionally harsh treatment here? (Even though, as the CEO of a public company whose influence on the future arguably outweighs both Musk and Trump, it would be merited)
People care for financial results (the recent 4% stock dip after the scandal means nothing, Nvidia does dips like that 10-15 times every year based on various news).
And almost all of big CEOs sleep with stuff or not-their-wives. Many do worse, think certain private islands...
If maybe Jensen set foot in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or another ME country they could stone him for adultery. Thank god we don't have these religious laws in the US -- well I hope we don't..
I, a shareholder who the board is supposed to represent, respect and trust him as a business person. I don't care for his private choices, but quite frankly I really don't care either. I'm not his wife. And I don't think any spy convinced him to sell more chips he is chips maxxing to the extreme all by himself.
> No one of character can respect or trust him anymore.
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.
A personal failing not a poor business judgement. Unless it can be shown that the company could have sold more GPUs if he had exercised better judgement.
A personal failing involving treachery made public lowers trust towards him, even in business situations. Should have been more upright or more discrete.
The two are not unrelated. Judgement is judgement, and a person who shows poor judgement outside of business is at risk of showing poor judgement in business as well. As indeed he did: the dude was banging one of his subordinates, something he would've known full well is completely unacceptable in American business culture.
+1. I know a couple who was working in a multi national. She was reporting to him. When they started dating she moved to a different department. Eventually they married, she left the multi national altogether and became a stay at home mom.
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.
They didn’t say every time, they said all the time - which is true. But as you said, it can work out if it’s disclosed and a person can move outside of the org chart of the other.
Good for you. You don't define the workplace culture we operate in. Any employer out there would fire you in a heartbeat for sleeping with a subordinate.
I think he can be disciplined without the company sawing off the branch it is sitting on. If Huang had been sued for sexual harassment then the bar would be higher.
It’s not just a personal failing. He was being used to bypass restrictions against an adversarial government. Why are people acting like he’s in trouble because he violated the boy scouts code of conduct? The restrictions on China have a national security angle to them.
This "China is an enemy state" story is a stale joke.
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.
It's interesting because they like apparently missed the part where in literal wars companies (ex. Ford, Alcoa) literally supply both sides and nobody broke those companies up.
Imagine if every high street in America had three stores selling Hamas-styled garden gnomes with "death to America :)" written on them. Obviously that does not happen, right? Because Hamas is actually an enemy of America. Since this does happen with China we can conclude China is not an enemy.
It’s difficult to talk about this stuff when starting from 0, but I’ll try to kick it off and leave it for someone else to wrap up.
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.
> 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
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.
so many sterotypos in a row. no wonder you people never learn and will fail before you even know. The freedom of press really create a generation of brainwashed people in the 'free world'
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Chinese policy is actually to ban import of NVIDIA cards. It's partly a "you can't fire me, I quit" thing and partly a "burn the boats on the beach" thing to fully commit to developing rivals domestically.
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?
> 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?
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"...
Export restrictions to China have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political capital. OpenSSL is a restricted export as a hold over from WW2 era of political theater for shit sake.
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.
The timeline of the Chinese spy stuff raises serious concerns - the Chinese company created the shell company and days later inked a massive deal with NVIDIA. There are federal sanctions against this... that's not a poor business judgement?
> 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 MegaSpeed (or any quantity buyer of GPUs in Asia) held all required licenses and met all U.S. export and KYC regulations, selling product to them was legal.
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.
This whole China ban is meaningless in my opinion because the ban is only on exporting physical GPUs to China. The US is OK with Chinese logging in to machines that are physically located in Singapore. Is there any advantage in sitting close to the GPUs, if not what is the point of this ban?
> The US is OK with Chinese logging in to machines that are physically located in Singapore
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.
>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
At this level, as he should know with the amount of scrutiny on public figures and hoe that they say and do can affect share price - ones personal actions can be business decisions.
Dating a spy is not poor judgment? And sorry, if you're running of the world's most valuable and strategically important companies, and if an attractive woman with hazy business connections appears out of the blue in your orbit, you really ought to entertain the possibility.
Wasn't it Anthropic or OpenAI that sent a warning about this exact possibility to regular employees?
Exactly! I said this elsewhere in this thread but why are we so willing to reward these executives with insane wealth and influence but they can’t be held to the same level of standards they expect from their own employees?
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.
It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company. We don't even know what arrangements him and his wife may have. But in the worst case, it's immoral and wrong but a personal issue for him and his family.
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.
He should have divorced first, as expensive as it would have been. Being a single/divorced billionaire playboy is understandable, being a married billionaire playboy is going to be messy.
> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.
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.
I'm talking about his other affair, with Kimberly Powell. I've amended the previous comment to say so because I guess people don't know he's had more than one.
And? I guess there's a few people on HN that are sleeping with their co-workers and their wives don't know about it and they're feeling a little guilty.
It’s more of a recent thing in the US too[1]. It started aggressively declining in the early 2000s (along with almost every other way except for online and bars). Though I think there is a general stigma in the US these days for “meeting at work” unless under certain circumstances, like 2 new hires hooking up, or 2 people at the same company but they don’t work together. Anything else and people are gonna start questioning the power dynamics and a bunch of things that make it not worth the hassle. Maybe it was the Lewinsky case, maybe it was the popularization of workplace abuse, maybe it is the bipartisan increase in judgement casting and virtue signaling.
Re: his wife, there is absolutely no way he would admit to some kind of open relationship thing in public, that would be even worse PR. Sleeping with an exec.. personally I don't care, this is incredibly common and there is no actual legal problem if there wasn't favoritism.
Why are you going so far out of your way to invent reasons why he secretly didn't actually cheat on his wife and to ignore the corporate legal risk of non-disclosed relationships that create conflicts of interest?
I just feel that personal misdeeds should stay in that realm, and also a ban on relationships in the workplace like we effectively have now has kind of been bad for our culture broadly... you can call it a "legal risk" but at the end of the day, if there was no favouritism then nothing wrong happened besides some form to HR not being filled out.
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.
He was duped into smuggling GPUs, violating sanctions, and risking US national security, which endangers the company. Ain’t just that he banged someone.
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.
I bet many other CEOs do similar kinds of stuff, but for some reason this guy got singled out. The hungry hungry hippos probably did it because they could seeing as he doesn't control the board like MZ.
Yep. His affairs cast a long shadow over his push for "restricting AI accelerators is bad, we should just sell all the GPUs we want to China".
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.
What's the argument that he was duped into doing it? He has plenty of incentive to want to sell more GPUs and broaden his customer base as much as possible, there's no evidence that sleeping with some Chinese lady that may or may not be a spy has anything to do with it.
So far I haven't seen a shred of evidence pointing to Alice Huang being a spy besides just her being a Chinese citizen.. and China has been explicit in instructing its industries to NOT rely on NVIDIA cards as much as possible and build their own.
Honestly given the amount of hysteria, disinformation and propaganda I've seen about China since they've become a credible rival to the US, I'm not inclined to believe this stuff without serious evidence.
This isn’t McCarthy waving a his latest batch of names in front of the camera. Journalists started sniffing around Megaspeed a year ago, noticing its business presence and purchase volume didn’t add up.
Megaspeed circumventing Chinese law banning imports of Nvidia cards is evidence against her being a spy rather than for. Why would a spy be working directly against official policy?
Yes, China has been pushing their tech companies to use Chinese GPUs.. which they've gotten push back from their ai companies, saying they're not competitive yet (which is true). And one of those AI companies -- Alibaba -- was the investor in Megaspeed.. which is where Jensen met Alison.
You don't think selling $7.5B of export controlled technology to an unvetted and unknown company, led by a woman who's former gig was TV news host, and who you also happen to be sleeping with, was poor judgement?
> It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.
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.
> It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.
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 point is he didn't behave rationally on one big really important point from a shareholder value standpoint. He didn't just sleep with someone and his arrangements in this regard are irrelevant
> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company. We don't even know what arrangements him and his wife may have. But in the worst case, it's immoral and wrong but a personal issue for him and his family.
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.
NVIDIA is one of the most successful companies in the world in large part because of Jensen.
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.
There should be harm to shareholders. If the US investigates and found that export control laws have been violated and fines Nvidia $X billion then that's harm.
Short-term share prices are not a good metric for anything. Shares were down significantly even before this news, and that was because of concern that datacenters will be banned by newly elected politicians.
You are definitely overselling him. If you are a hardware maker, you naturally want to sell to as many markets as possible. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith.
the only things the "AI industry" has done is price normal people out of computing, give justification for companies to lay people off, fill the internet with slop, contribute to centralizing capital, and add a transaction cost to everything people do with their computers.
i couldn't care less about the "industry" that focuses on profits or the "nation" that is more committed to overseas wars than providing basic infrastructure.
AI is strategic, so the government pays for it behind the curtain. Everything the government buys is taken out the hands of the poorest people. The rest pays more for what is left.
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.
> Huang backed the use of Nvidia GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computing, including the development of CUDA
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?
Nobody is irreplaceable. And this includes Jensen Huang.
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.
> In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used Nvidia GPUs and CUDA to train AlexNet, whose breakthrough performance helped ignite the modern deep learning boom.
didn't the very early deep learning frameworks use opengl and shader constructs? I recall reading something to that effect.
If my memory right, it was around time when opengl allowed programmable shaders to render to texture. It was limited to floating point numbers and very short programs.
Nope. These are inexplicable things that point to Jensen allegedly collaborating with a foreign actor and nation. The board should punish Huang and save our industry and the nation. Plain and simple.
Viewing people like this is unhealthy. Nvidia could have failed instead of 3dfx, and that it didn't involved some luck, not just the magical clairvoyance of one individual.
And anyway, whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.
The design of cuda is basically just brookGPU from stanford (supported by IBM, Sony, ATI, NVIDIA and DARPA), CUDA isn't so important beyond the fact that a hardware company can use it as a moat if they want to be anti-competitive. Google bought PeakStream, intel bought RapidMind.
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.
There's a nearly 20 year lead up to the current CUDA dominance including working with developers, but on the gaming side there's also a parallel with the dominance of nvidia's gaming tech versus how much ATi/AMD were able to get their tech to stick. Nv invested not just in capable hardware then throw it over the fence to leave developers to figure out, but software solutions easily integrated by others and engineer support to show off their hardware in the best light.
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.
> 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.
Back in 2002-2003 there were folks attempting to get GPUs to do non graphics tasks because of the amount of potential compute available. I recall running a sorting algorithm on a Radeon at the time. It wasn't quick but it worked.
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.
Nvidia made that idea possible by making GeForce 3 in 2001, we experimented with GPGPU because Nvidia already created the opportunity. And at the time, using a tiny specialized fraction of GPUs (of all things) for general-purpose computation was an absolutely ridiculous idea never taken seriously by most people, even us doing it.
He's an extremely skilled shovel seller, but let's not pretend he foresaw the reason for every hole being dug. Most universities taught CUDA classes way back. Did they also see deep learning and cryptocurrencies coming? Supercomputers did exist and where all about FLOPS and that was a legit market. Intel released their Xeon Phi cards around the same time. Ironically, while deep learning started with consumer graphics cards, it could have started on super computers and right now it's back to super computers anyway.
NVIDIA went nowhere for much of its history. Just look at its stock chart for most of its history.
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.
I feel like you're overstating NVidia's influence. OpenCL with AMD GPUs was also just fine around that time, we were all figuring out how much you could port and get a crazy speed up for not much effort. NVidia's ecosystem was particularly annoying to deal with on Linux. Maybe we'd have gotten AlexNet a year later without Cuda.
People arguing the technical and business merits of what Jensen brought to the company aren't getting how serious these allegations against him are.
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.
The amount of times the word “allegation” and “suspicion” and the way this soap opera is flowing around screams that its all smokescreen. We don’t even know if this women was a spy… even that is an “allegation”.
The facts are very scarce and yet this has been blown out of proportion.
On the contrary, the allegations are tabloid level nonsense. Jensen does not even posses any "sensitive info". He is just a ceo for a company that designs chips, something China has no trouble doings. What China lacks is the manufacturing knowhow of the most advanced lithography machines which will also allow them to manufacture the most advanced chips locally. Huang however does not have a single clue about that chip manufacturing.
A single clue really? I reckon he knows a decent amount about chip manufacturing. You know, as part of his role getting microchips designed and manufactured for thirty years. Ok he might not know the minutiae about the techniques used at TSMC but he’ll know a huge amount - he’s not just hand waving at subordinates getting them to deal with it. The fact that he doesn’t yak on about it shouldn’t be confused for ignorance.
He has access to all sensitive info, he's the chief officer! He would not have access to some sensitive unreleased, but the rest he's pretty aware. And he signs every deal.
What's so magical about selling to the USG that it should create some sort of obligation on the part of a civilian CEO?
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.
If you sell national security impactful equipment to the USG, you're in a special category, private industry or not.
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.
The claim that he sold massive amounts of chips to a restricted country as being "massively illegal" is absolutely false.
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.
This is the biggest problem with HN: people who make big claims without enough research usually get upvoted. But try saying something against, say, Rust, Apple products etc., and you’ll be massively downvoted by fanboys who think they’re superior to everyone else.
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
Yes. A lot of folks on here were initially thinking the issue with the Chinese spy was a sort of “oh funny how silly” type issue. For someone in his position with Nvidia a strategically important company for the US that’s a grave error of judgment. Add then yesterday revelations of additional indiscretions and this suddenly a growing pattern of incredibly poor judgement.
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.
They guy has been running Nvidia for over 30 years and has billions of dollars - what would make him want to sell out to China? What possibly could they offer him? You actually think she was like, "if you tell me secrets then I'll sleep with you"
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.
Like most office affairs its rarely if ever about that.
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.
Not sure about how the government or his company perceives 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.
But this is not the domain of the board, is it? Whether he put the national security at risk is up to US Government to decide. The moral side of the question is for the people involved to decide. For the board to decide is the company will be better off w/o him.
> The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
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.)
The relationship has been to a degree known to even the public for years, it's extremely unlikely that intelligence services didn't know about it until now and that they'd permit it if they'd consider it a possibility that Jensen could leak any important IP
> The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
Why? If he's that important then our own intelligence community ought to be doing counterintelligence, making sure he's ok, providing support to him and so on. This is not some random guy. Did we just forget to do that?
What’s the non-cynical explanation here which doesn’t involve Jensen having ruffled feathers he shouldn’t have?
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
I think you should consider the genuine do-gooders inside the federal government who wanted to blow the lid on this for a year but were blocked by the president. Now that he’s weak, they went for it.
> 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.
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.
Musk has 4 children with a neurolink exec that reported to him. She was also on OpenAIs board until 2023, where she fed him confidential info about the company
. The relationship has been ongoing since 2016, but was kept secret until 2022.
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.
Let's not forget that if almost anyone else did what Musk pulled with Starlink in Ukraine he would get a 5 am visit from counterintelligence at his house the next day.
The difference is that Musk is an actual oligarch and Huang is "just" a billionaire.
You're making the assumption implicitly when comparing to Musk that this should be fair or about morality.
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.
> 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.
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
Sadly, I hate to make it political.. but I don’t think left wing people can admit they are being mislead. Huge groupthink consensus motivations on both sides but it’s much worse for left wing persons.
They commit the sins of the religious more than they think
There are three forms of accountability here, that Elon and other newer tech founders meticulously calcified themselves away from
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.
Nvidia is one of the most critical strategic assets in the USA today, underpinning economic dominance and national defence. Leadership at this level usually operates under an implicit shield. Normal procedure would be to cover-up. A sudden loss of Nvidia's founder and CEO at this juncture is a blow to American strategic posture and a windfall to China.
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.
I mean main media outlets know that the public really has turned on billionaires so this is some meat to feed the readers (great ad rev). Someone from the administration leaking the information to a reporter for sure wouldn't be surprising without knowing how much it would blow up. Also many other viable theories too.
Perhaps they reached a conclusion that congress would inevitably discover this once real oversight happens, so they decided better to get it out now before Democrats are actually in control? It makes quite a lot of sense to do it now from that perspective. Who knows, maybe a presidential pardon shoe is about to drop as well.
I figured there will be quite a lot of people taking actions like this ... but nVidia was a surprise for sure.
Right exactly. Two months is a long time for this to blow over. It will be far outside the news cycle before anyone is called up to Congress. This is the safest time there will ever be to rip the band-aid off.
I think it’s factions within the GOP. Pro NatSec people wanted to get it out for a long time. Trump blocked. They agreed to keep a lid on it for the midterm to not embarrass Trump and thus hurt their side. Now they’re free to speak.
"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."
I am simply observing that at this level affairs are usually covered-up for the interest of the nation. This affair was covered-up for a bit, seeing as it was broadcast on Taiwan news in 2024, so something else changed for them to end the cover-up and broadcast the affair to America.
probably; reminds me of a quote by Chomsky making fun of postmodernists
> 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
A "windfall to China?" Jensen Huang seems to have been conspiring with Alice Huang to illegally sell high-end NVIDIA chips to China. That's a windfall to China.
Sure is convenient for everyone to spend all their time talking about the CEOs personal life than however many billions of prohibited sales have been happening here.
Kneecapping Nvidia in this case is absolutely a windfall to China
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.
2 affairs - one with a sub-ordinate and one is a foreign agent who got chip flow through to a sanctioned country.
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 am wondering if his public apology for being unfaithful to his wife (weird for it to be public, to his employees) is actually covering up for some corporate malfeasance.
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?
I was going to say that getting your children a job – even a good job – isn't generally a problem. But installing them as senior directors with million dollar salaries does seem like a bit much.
Jensen has successfully grown the company and thus he can be trusted to hire the best talent, even if they come from unusual backgrounds. Perhaps, they were hired because their insights from attending cooking school, etc are valuable.
It's a huge deal regardless. You'll be fired even as a CEO. As the above comment states, CEOs of Nestle, McDonalds, Intel have fallen once these things were uncovered. It's basically an express ticket to getting fired.
Yeah, but does it make sense? The CEO is responsible for company success. Firing them over sexual misconduct is a decision to prioritize non-profit related matters. Companies do this all the time because of political correctness, but it is strictly speaking optimizing for other things than shareholder value.
They were talking about "underlings" who have to "obey their masters" and supposedly don't matter, while those "masters" are not "fully human" if they let anyone impose rules on their "rule making". It is the kind of talk that makes you want to cover your drink.
I am merely saying, if you fire a CEO because of, say, him having a relationship with an underling, you are saying: "there are arbitrary things more important than profitability".
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.
Even in purest capitalist sense, romantic relationships cloud judgement and point at a possibility (inevitability?) that people in question (CEOs, managers, owners, board members) will do that again thus increasing the risk to the business.
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 read it as sarcastic pointing out the hypocrisy, and that they're fully in support of free will for anyone to pursue relationships they want at all levels. You could disagree with the latter, but the starting point doesn't seem like what you suggest
There is no law or really good principle that suggests that shareholder profits matter above aspects such as ethics; that is just a misrepresentation of something a famous economist said.
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.
His dick cost people hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value and this is about the worst case scenario outside of maybe a true sexual misconduct lawsuit coming against him. Like with your thinking taken to an extreme, if he murdered someone he should keep his title and run the company from jail because it doesn’t make him a bad engineer and we don’t want to bow to woke?
How does it NOT make business sense to consider firing bim here (outside of manosphere thinking)?
Having an affair vs. killing someone is materially different - one is legal, the other is not.
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.
For Intel at least, that CEO was fired because the board wanted him gone, because he destroyed the company. The relationship with a subordinate was only a pretext. If he'd been performing well it would never have been made an issue.
You are contradicting yourself. If destroying the company isn't enough pretext to get you fired but an affair with a subordinate is, then it's a big deal that would have been an issue regardless.
They needed a pretext because if the board publically confirmed how much damage he'd done to the company, it would hurt the company even more through investor and employee panic.
When has legal fallout from an affair with a subordinate ever destroyed a Fortune 100 company? That doesn't happen.
You are not making much sense. Was he destroying the company or not? What kind of destruction does not have obviously visible signs (to everyone) that can be acted on? What Kind of board sits down and decides that the destruction of the company is worth investor panic because 'it's worse than it looks'. What, are investors going to be calm as he destroys the company?
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's a huge deal regardless. You'll be fired even as a CEO
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 Gates while he was CEO of Microsoft and she was a newgrad developer.
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?
I mean—certainly if it turns into the kind of situation where the higher-ups can’t look the other way. It probably becomes a problem as soon as your supervisors have to think about it. It definitely becomes a problem as soon as it becomes their problem, or a distraction from what everybody’s there to do.
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.
It's difficult (impossible really) to hide such affairs indefintiely when you've reached that kind of status and notoriety. No amount of discretion will keep someone from finding out eventually when so many eyes are on you, so it's really just a matter of time till some sort of public disclosure.
It's only huge because it has been made public by a large amount of medias.
If you have ever worked in any companies, you'd know the shit going on at any layers.
> The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal
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.
Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion. The bigger issue is that he has shown multiple poor judgement choices and the board has to weigh if he is a larger liability than he is an asset at this point.
> Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion.
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.
Carly deserved to be fired, but Hurd was fired ostensibly for an inappropriate expense report (like expensing a date). Larry Ellison immediately hired Hurd, but HP sued.
Correction: Most US companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it.
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.
it's very common actually. One of my former managers was pressing an intern for sex, dangling a job.
Too bad we weren't hiring at that time.
Why are they doing this? Maybe the power is the point?
Isn’t it a conflict of interest to be sleeping with your direct reports? How does that play out in performance reviews? It’s definitely a massive HR problem
Mammal world has also worked by killing another mammal with food you want if slightly hungry. Yet, for some reason, people don't question why murder is illegal whenever someone gets convicted of homicide. Selective appeals to evolutionary history are an empty argument.
That's where the "disclosure and reassignments" come into play - you can date a direct report, as long as you let the company know they should report to someone else from now on.
> ...and a ban would be considered legally impermissible.
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.
The US also does not allow banning relationships, but employers are not required to employ both persons in a couple. Europe restricts many aspects of people losing their jobs, is a more salient aspect of the legal comparison.
That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.
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 an open weights model proponent so obviously I am intrigued and glad that Qwen exists (though at the moment I personally use US-trained open weights models — Muse Glimmer, Gemma 4, and I am testing Nvidia’s own Bolt —because they better fit my requirements).
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.
> That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.
> 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?
The law is one thing, and shouldn't discriminate on CEO status. but the decline of "cancellations" for various infractions of political correctness is definitely a positive in my book
I'd love statistical evidence that "cancellations" have decreased under Trump. As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
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.
> As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
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.
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.
Page, Brin, and Schmidt all dated Google employees. Gates married a Microsoft employee. I’m not sure if any of those folks dated direct reports, but does it really matter when you’re the CEO? Not condoning this behavior, just saying that there’s precedent for it not significantly impacting careers of execs. The spy thing is a another thing entirely.
Page and Brin have controlling voting shares of Alphabet, so they can't exactly be booted by the Board. Gates met Melinda 40 years ago and many things happened 40 years that would not be acceptable today.
> I'm glad others agree that his infidelity is a complete nothing burger. Moralising about this is wrong and is a purity spiral.
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.
> 3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
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?
That was my understanding too. The spy part makes for a good story, but if she came out and said "Hey, I'm a spy for China. Want to share something of value to the state?" it would make her a terrible spy, so I'd assume it's really about poor judgement.
Him being removed for sleeping with a spy would not necessarily be intended as a punishment for sleeping with her, it's a self defense mechanism to prevent the spy from continuing to have access to a highly placed, compromised individual
This is a bit like saying "I didn't know passeordstealer.baddies.com was a phishing site when I typed in the company's password for the bank, so it's not my fault all our money was stolen!"
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.
Current evidence suggests he didn’t even do a prelim background check. His mistress worked for Chinese state television prior to the role she assumed through which she was introduced to him.
> 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”.
A piece of speculative but interesting information: the FBI didn't give Jensen Huang a "defense briefing" which would warn him that he was being targeted, despite them knowing Alice Huang was a spy a year prior (memo circulated in May by the state department). Apparently this is very atypical.
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.
You literally only think shes a spy because the US Propaganda machine says so. There's no evidence of this.
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.
Isn't the fact that her company is alleged to have smuggled a ton of banned NVIDIA chips into China a lot worse than the fact that he slept with her? Infidelity isn't good but nobody will arrest you for it. Sanctioned goods are a different story
The person you replied to is not making a moral judgement. The reason it is bad for Nvidia that he slept with her is the leverage she had over him. The impropriety is just an issue for his family.
> 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.
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.
You have a due diligence requirement to ensure that whoever you sell to obeys export restrictions. You can't turn a blind eye. This is actually called "self-blinding". It works kinda similarly to KYC/AML (Know Your Customer / Anti-Money Laundering) requirements in financial services.
That’s… a take. The fact the only problem you have with him violating export controls is that he got caught isn’t really nuanced. It mostly just points to you not having a moral compass.
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.
So this is something I kinda agree with Jensen Huang on. Let me explain. The US export bans to China in this space take two forms:
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".
The idea behind the export controls is that by 2030 we’ll have some sort of superhuman intelligence and it’ll be impossible to catch up. I spoke to Biden’s ai advisor and that’s what he told me. They know China will catch up but are betting it’ll be too late for them by then.
That's just fan fiction. The only way it's too late is if there are no limits to AI scaling in the universe. Otherwise, China will be able to catch up.
The only other way is that these people want to go war with China as soon as super intelligence is invented.
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.
There are a lot of Game of Thrones type of stuff going on when it comes to chips and AI.
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.
3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
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.
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 think you've made the assumption that I'm assuming something.
>>> 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.
> Either he's easily manipulated. Or he's a predator. Either way... not someone you want as CEO.
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?
You can argue about what the word "spy" really means, but even the source you quote thinks she's an asset for the Chinese establishment who was working to secure access to Nvidia chips for Chinese users, in contravention of US sanctions. A terrible terrible person for Jensen Huang to (literally) be in bed with.
The details are relevant if you care about the story. If this were flipped, it would make a difference if she was working for the CIA, the state department, or Intel.
> If this were flipped, it would make a difference if she was working for the CIA, the state department, or Intel.
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).
Your opinions are just that, but not really nuanced.
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.
Such weird takes. Selling shit is bigger deal than destroying your family?! Fuck money, take care of your family, your lives! Family > geopolitics. Everything trickles down from there
> the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
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.
he was not particularly popular at the end of his first term. mainstream right was not pleased with the bad optics of january 6, young right was not pleased that MAGA became MIGA and "build the wall!" became "build what wall?". the early days of COVID fascism happened under him as well. it's fairly obscure lore now, but he'd lost all that deplorable alt right support that supposedly got him nominated and elected in the first place. for example: https://www.newsweek.com/richard-spencer-joe-biden-trump-mag...
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.
I don't think it will happen for ideological reasons. Despite his lack of respect for the decorum of US democracy, most others have too much respect for it to start putting former leaders in prison.
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.
The US political apparatus has a lot of unwritten standards that are followed out of tradition. While people might vehemently disapprove of how Trump has pushed or blown past those limits, doing the same thing to achieve accountability might set a new lower bar for those traditions, rather than restoring them.
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.
A lot of pretty words to give a dressed up version of "yes". That's what you're saying: Yes, it's a good thing if a US president can murder, rape and pillage without going to prison. Where do you sraw the line? Raping 10 children? 100? You're making it sound as if there isn't one.
> 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.
Yeah, in some hypothetical situation where a leader is directly involved in a violent crime, sure, I don't think there would be any issue drawing a line there.
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.
I strongly doubt any American top leader will ever go to prison. That's something that gets decided by American top leaders, who are very aware of what happens when you open that Pandora's box: look at countries like Taiwan or South Korea, where it seems like basically any government position ends in a prison cell.
This is fixed by enforcing the law. Defeatist logic like this serves no purpose. Said country delivered a large electoral defeat to that person a week ago.
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.
Just putting it out there, but he might not be the best role model to try and emulate even for a ruthless company. Especially now that the laws might at last be enforced against him.
I'm sure the fact that Trump owns tons of NVDA was of _absolutely_ no consequence when the Department of Commerce granted them the ability to sell their GPUs to certain Chinese companies.
> the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
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.
> The fact that he cheated on his wife isn't particularly relevant
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.
> Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail.
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?
> 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.
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.
Jensen is not as far as any of us are aware, a spy.
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.
Yes I especially want that to apply to congress, judiciary, and police, even more so than corporate CEOs! People in positions of higher responsibility, should, you know... be more responsible. Police and people in power should break laws less often, and be more trustworthy, and less selfish than average. They are in a position that requires a higher standard.
This reminds me of when people complain about a lack “freedom of speech” but what they actually want is freedom from the consequences of their speech.
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.
You've left out the worst parts of the scandal, which involves the US government investigation into the Megaspeed being buried after a large contribution was made to the White House ballroom fund. This website has a pretty good summary https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-nvidia-scandal-no-e...
>3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
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.
Sources connected to US intel have gone on the record to say that they believed her to be a spy, going so far as to have the Secretary of State brief the President directly. They don't bother the President with things like this unless they feel the intelligence is strong.[0]
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.
> lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status
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.
> 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)
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.
It breaks my heart that so many people will excuse his infidelity as irrelevant. We need better leaders to set examples for the youth. This current crop is so slimy and distasteful.
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..."
It does end, because people lose their jobs for office affairs all the time and rarely if ever for parking tickets. There’s no moral inconsistency there, not all bad behavior is equivalent.
Not many, because we have principles of that kind of morality not being applicable. Double parking beside fire hydrants isn't universally celebrated though, is it? I look down on that kind of thing, you might be the same yourself.
Other countries and cultures formalize infidelity, Americans just haven't bothered doing so yet.
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.
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?
Yes and no. I think the board knew about the smuggling and now that it's out they need to sacrifice the CEO. Probably, they still trust him but that does not matter here, saving the company's valuation and trying to evade fines is more important.
> other than the lack of a prenup meaning she owns half his stock
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).
If this had happened at a more recent founder-led tech company, the board would have far less practical independence
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)
I think even if NVIDIA were founded recently, it still wouldn't have such a share structure. The companies that do have dual class shares are software companies that can grow significantly without raising a ton of capital. NVIDIA being a hardware company, that is a lot harder to do even today.
The theory is that if an investor is under no compulsion to purchase shares that entitle them to no say in governance, so if they do so, they only have themselves to blame.
Anthropic are planning a bizarre share structure that strips any voting power from shareholders. They will have a single special founders share, held by some new entity owned by the founders, that has 51% voting weight. 1 share to rule them all.
This is kinda huge; my layperson view is that Jensen has been responsible for their long term technology strategy, which requires deep understanding of so much outside of the business domain. I'm not exactly thrilled that they are "eating the world" (hf purchase had me bent out of shape, for example), but they've undeniably executed on some long term complex shit. Who could take his place?
I wonder about Tesla. The Cybertruck was Musk’s baby and I wonder if the company might be better off with someone a bit more balanced at the helm. They might have needed Musk’s outsized personality to warp the perception of electric cars long enough to get the mass production rolling, but now maybe someone more amenable to regular incremental improvements rather than another big bet on AI and Humanoid Robots. Spin that stuff off to another company and focus Tesla more on their core business.
They have (had?) talented engineers, they may have a future as a decent car company if they didn't keep getting pulled into 20 directions by their 5 minute attention span CEO.
The trillion dollar valuation would be gone for sure.
He may not have predicted the specifics, but they didn't just happen to be there. Nvidia started work on CUDA in 2004, and aggressively iterated machine learning hardware and software for twenty years to get into the position they had for the boom.
It's really interesting to me how unaggressive Jensen has been vs. his peers about tighting up control over his company (even during the recent years when he had huge leverage):
- 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).
I think you're understating the difference between "an affair by a CEO" and "an affair by the CEO of a company at the center of a technology deemed as critical to national competitiveness and national security, with a spy for your most serious competing foreign nation".
When Congress starts having hearings about your affair, you have fucked up but good, as they say.
Had the frequented epstein island with underage children, nobody would have said anything, and even Congress would fiercely defended Jensen Huang and classify any document that has his name.
Is it though? I’m having a hard time believing that American billionaires represent Americans. The anti American sentiment that conflates Americans with Epstein is all too pervasive; it’s the new slur.
How about this all is some sort of theater for him to "peacefully" exit the whole operation and retire, given he not gonna be poor and is very likely to not go in jail given his role in making NVIDIA the company it is.
not married, but myself also does not sit on $trillions so I cannot even closely relate to his situation. besides his rock star looks definitely didn't scream family man, and guy seems to have been quite open about it. to further extrapolate my point - Musk, another of them peoples sitting on trillions, did already set some very definite precedents reg marriage and children. pretty bizarre stuff for the normie-looks of the guy, isn't it? now I can only guess what a hot rod such as NVIDIA CEO who's taking calls from POTUS can actually scheme about...
Instead he made his daughter Senior Director of Product Marketing, made his son Director of Robotics Product, and made his son-in-law VP of AI Infrastructure Growth.
Maybe his idea of asserting control is less about voting rights and more about family allegiance.
How many times would a company scenario need to run a double blind hiring + real time run of the hirees running the company for a period of time to have a statistically significant result to reject the null hypothesis that the people had no affect on the performance of the company compared to a sample of other viable candidates?
No, but he issued a press release apologizing for hurting her. While it's correct at this point to call his honestly into question, it's a possible clue.
I wonder how much of this is to do with how recent and explosive (relative to the history of the company) nvidia’s growth was. Like before the back to back booms of cryptocurrency and AI, the company was mainly selling products to gamers (iirc, their datacenter business was like 10% in 2019). It wasn’t that long ago that nvidia’s comparable companies were like… super micro and western digital, rather than Apple and Google.
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.
> super micro and western digital, rather than Apple and Google.
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.
I suggest reading Tae Kim’s book on the company. Unless Mr. Kim is lying - and he has no incentive to - NVIDIA is very much an extension of Jensen. His management shaped it to the core. It would survive his ousting, but not unscathed. Comparisons to Jobs & Apple are not unwarranted.
Amelio managed to make one of the greatest decisions in the history of American business and buy NeXT to get himself replaced by Jobs. How is that an unmitigated disaster? He could have bought BeOS.
Can you please elaborate on why? He seemed like a luminary from what little knowledge I have. (Very well spoken, wide domain knowledge, obviously made the right bets, etc.)
Nvidia focused on gaming for 20 years, made a ton of bets that didn't pan out (self-driving cars, set-top boxes, streaming, etc) and made unforced errors (Arm acquisition attempt). Nothing hints at him being a visionary beyond wanting to diversify.
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.
It didn't even start with AI, their exorbitant valuations go all the way back to the days of the cryptocurrency mining craze.
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.
CUDA is what they did right. That and they focused on developers (tooling, support, drivers) outside of gaming long before it was obviously a relevant market. Jensen does deserve a lot of credit.
They didn't just focus on gaming though. They've spent the last two decades making sure they're the obvious choice for scientific and engineering number crunching, by creating and continuing to invest in CUDA. Which is also why they have been an obvious choice for the AI crowd.
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.
The AI winter wouldn't have ended without NVidia cards. NVidia didn't benefit from the AI boom, they made it possible. CUDA is the be all and end all of the AI boom.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to try and get AMD cards working.
That’s an absurd statement considering Nvidia has been pushing CUDA since 2007. I doubt Nvidia was making a “bet” on set-top boxes as the next 100 billion dollar idea. It was simply gaming adjacent which was the main market for GPUs which is their business. Nvidia has maintained their position on GPGPUs potential for 15 years before they paid off. Literally no other company had that vision. If that was an obvious thing, where is Intel, AMD, Samsung, TI, or Qualcomm chips? They only had 15 years. It’s crazy to call it “right place right time” when they have been anticipating it for over 15 years.
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.
CUDA was just not that big of a commitment of resources honestly for a gpu company. It also broke even relatively early in terms of making money because of oil and gas. Jensen personally threatened to axe the entire project multiple times when we nearly failed to meet certain contracts.
I have no insights into internals of Nvidia, but it really doesn’t make sense to me how there is literally no alternatives that are even close to its maturity. I remember in the early days OpenMP and PPL being contenders early on, but I never heard about them after and only CUDA kept going. I was working on a graduate project in 2009 and I remember us looking into OpenMP and CUDA and going with CUDA because we found it easier to use. But also along with CUDA, only Nvidia pushed the whole GPGPU idea and AMD (and Microsoft to some extent) only paid lip service to the concept without any actual commitment like Nvidia did for a long time.
apple has a lot to do with it. Apple drove the early days of opencl, and pulled out some time in ~2012. Ian made a decision to cut opencl support at Nvidia at some point in time after that. Had apple actually made a proper GPU compute language standard after walking from opencl, it might not have been such a empty landscape. But alas, apple wasn't in the HPC business, which was the only place that actually made money from GPGPU.
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.
Is successfully maintaining product leadership in a lucrative consumer category a failure to you?... Their self driving car tech is used in multiple products and clearly represents a future growth area. They've correctly predicted market movements and trends, built or bought up all the pieces needed to offer complete solutions with leading performance.
There would be no AI boom without Nvidia, their cards were instrumental to making it possible, that's why they're so dominant.
Because that's not how organizations work. Especially not organizations made up of MSc's and PhD's, each with specialized knowledge that the CEO has no clue about. It's a myth that the person with the most power is also the most important.
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.
Seems like much more sane governance for a publicly-traded company.
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.
Agreed. This is almost certainly a key to Nvidia's success. A lot of tech companies end up shooting themselves by putting too much power into the CEO, so that when the MBA takes over it turns into a corporate pillaging operation. Cut back on staff, ramp up on prices, maximize shareholder value at the cost of sane long term business practices.
> A lot of tech companies end up shooting themselves by putting too much power into the CEO, so that when the MBA takes over it turns into a corporate pillaging operation.
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.
Wall Street rarely appoints CEOs, that's the job of the board. And those members generally get there via investment into the company (usually before it goes public).
The MBAs get there often because it's who the board picks when the founder retires.
The board is chosen by the shareholders in the absence of some arrangement to the contrary (e.g. the special class of shares), and for a large publicly traded company, the major shareholders are generally going to be large investment funds, i.e. Wall St.
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.
> Google did the super control way before Zuck did.
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.
> 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
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.
Only if you think the definition of doing well is shareholder returns. I think it’s time for a different way of evaluating corporations, like their overall benefit to humanity. In that lens Meta is not doing well.
If you're not a shareholder you don't get to vote. If you are, vote! If you can't, but you chose to be a shareholder, well I'm not sure what the complaint is.
That's the idealized version. In practice, there are millions of people who never "chose" to invest but because of index funds have a significant portion of their retirement savings in companies lacking any real governance or oversight from the board that ostensibly represents their interests.
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.
The parent comment isn't about dual-class companies, it's about the fact that many shareholders effectively don't get a choice in how the votes for their shares are cost.
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.
It's the counterfactual that is interesting. How well could this company have done in the other timeline where the founder didn't retain all that control?
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.
The counter argument is that active external governance can be bad for the long term prospects of the company. Optimizing for quarterly results, activists investors threatening and getting sweetheart deals that are good for them and bad for the rest of the company.
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'm imagining a world where you don't get to fuck up as bad as FB did spending multiple years chasing the Metaverse while letting their platform rot, relying purely on plateauing ad revenue.
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...)
Taco Bell is the most delicious, consistent, affordable, healthy, and fun national fast food chain. They deserved to win the franchise wars on the strength of the Chalupa alone. Baja Blast Mountain Dew is on the Mount Rushmore of soft drinks and Hot sauce packets are a staple in every junk drawer in America. Their discontinuation of Baja sauce and lack of post-1998 commitment to the Enchirito are their only sins (and God has forgiven them because He worked through them to create the Steak Grilled Stuffed Burrito as recompense and was satisfied with such).
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.
A flat structure means nobody is a clear competitor with Huang for the top job. If Huang was able to get his way as was, adopting a more traditional structure would have just made somebody else a significantly more powerful #2. A lack of a clear successor might make the transfer of power rougher unfortunately.
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.
He's well compensated because he owns a lot of the company, much at much cheaper valuations, right?
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.
Jensen cooperated with china well before the affair. I'm pretty sure her being a chinese spy did not change anything in his decisions. His position on China did not change for years. And he is right. As long as we export chips to china it's really hard for them to invest into developing their own chips from scratch. It's just too expensive. If that door closes they will be incentivised to go for it that much harder. As it is right now they are one step behind us but in the future this won't be the case anymore and since we don't have hardware manufactuing experts in US it's just a matter of time we'll get surpassed. Sure we can bet on AI to overcome that but it's way easier for china to get a software stack going then for us to get hardware manufacturing back.
Jensen effectively is Nvidia, and is likely the only person that truly knows the company - this is what ties him to his place and of that doesn't ensure it I don't think anything else would. Almost all significant successes Nvidia had were results from direct action from him, and he truly knows the tech
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.
As another comment thread brought up, his children are both working pretty nice sinecures, which would have been huge negative press during any kind of corporate governance struggle. I don’t think it was even widely known, I was a Jensen fanboy and I just now learned about it.
Well, what makes me little dissapointed is instead of focusing on issues and topics that really matter, we discuss who f*cked whom.
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.
I'm talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as published in his landmark paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" that appeared in Psychological Review in 1943.
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:
Sounds like he helped China get GPUs in violation of export controls. This puts NVidia in a tough place as keeping him as CEO risks broader legal ramifications.
it seems like this is the legal equaivent of smoking dope behind the McDonald's ..basically no one cares that much. The govt. could prosecute or make an example.,but whatevah. It's implicitly understood nvdia is a huge success and central to the US tech boom.
I think /u/jazzyjackson was referring to the US Government, who, there are grounds for thinking, did know something about all of this and immediately swung into action .... or not, as the case may be.
Really I figured nvidia has a legal team that evaluates how exposed they are to risk of running afoul of the US government. I ask because, ok the CEO was complicit, but should the company wash their hands of it and pretend they had no way of knowing? That it was only the CEO that was responsible?
But I ask out of ignorance, I’ve never been inside a Big Corp.
Large companies always have a backup plan in case the CEO needs to be replaced. What usually happens in these cases is that a new CEO will be named. That new CEO will focus on maximizing the company's earnings while neglecting the tech. And the company will be an earnings winner for the next few years.
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.
They need to fire him outright. The company needs to set the example that misconduct won’t be tolerated at any level. Keeping him on in anything but a transition capacity would be a mistake.
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.
I agree the corruption and conflict of interest stuff is the real issue here and is serious. I’m just criticising the hand-wringing over him banging some random woman (or women, as it apparently turns out), as if that is some unprecedented or shocking behaviour or worthy of a reprimand on its own. Most of the world left that prudish shit behind in the ‘90s.
> the hand-wringing over him banging some random woman
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.
I’ll give you a shortcut for the future, and I will be downvoted for doing so.
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.
Not a paragon but definitely a very capable entrepreneur.
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.
I think marital infidelity is shitty behaviour but I also think the main issue here is that this man in this job with this global significance thought this woman was safe to be involved with.
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 think it’s necessarily prudish, but in order to accurately judge it you need to know if someone’s ENM or not, and that’s more than most people make known about their personal lives.
Stepping outside of your marriage behind your spouse’s back is still scummy behavior.
AFAICT, (b.) isn't correct? The alleged spy works for a Singaporean company called "Megaspeed"[1], and while there is a conflict of interest argument, perhaps, "direct report" seems incorrect.
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.
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.
Not familiar with the details, I asked the ai overlords to gather up public evidence and give me a summary and... this feels like a very premature accusation. Unless you know something that isn't public, seems like we need to wait and see.
As people said about the Huggingface incident: if you see one ant in your kitchen, the best estimate for the total number of ants actually present is well above one.
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.
They were shipped to a sketchy Singaporean company that his Chinese spy-mistress worked at, and IIRC he tried to prevent investigations into whether those chips were being redirected to China.
The whole “Chinese operative” reeks of a grossly cobbled together smear campaign, spoken with the voice of a BW cinema newsreel from the McCarthyist era
Reducing this to “an unconventional sex life” is a weird and sort of stupid take when matters of global trade and export sanctions policy are concerned, but sure, we’re all a bunch of violent prudes over here.
Engaging in a relationship of any sort with a direct report (the second woman he reportedly had an affair with) is typically prohibited behavior. The imbalance of power between a boss and a subordinate in their report line just screams sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.
It's nothing to do with prudishness about his sex life and everything to do with his actions endangering the company.
Typically prohibited because it comes with the *risk* of sexual harassment accusations.
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?
This doesn’t bode well for Anthropic’s IPO indirectly, due to whole AI industry being propped up largely by Nvidia’s circular investment.
Also there’s likely a big overlap of institutional investors who are both NVDA and ANT investors and will now likely seek to dump ANT at the opening bell.
Short term, days or weeks, there will be panic. But the impact of the change won't really be felt for years to come. For the next few years, the company will be fine.
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
They can't even stop one company from selling physical chips to China, yet somehow they're going to prevent anybody from running open models? I don't know, it doesn't seem likely to me.
there will be divergence: US-aligned world (NATO+Korea+Japan and other vassal states) will bend over and agree to whatever regulation Department of Commerce/State is cooking to ban open weight (Chinese) models.
the rest of the world will be starved of GPUs and chipmaking equipment and chemical supplies for chip making
fall of nvidia is acceptable collateral damage, they are just hardware vendor. all their chips are made by TSMC anyways. And they can be replaced by OpenAI's inhouse chips or googles TPUs, made in the same TSMC factories.
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
If anyone can make chips like Nvidia, why isn't another company doing it already? Anything can sound easy if you reduce it enough, but I really don't see how it is that easy in practice.
Indeed, If the CCP stays stable long enough they'll (as a country) succeed at it.
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.
I don't see how this can happen, though. There are a lot of GPUs out there and open models have already been downloaded millions of times. (IIRC Deepseek v4.1 Flash has been downloaded nearly 2M times just on HuggingFace, just over the past month.) The NATO world already relies quite heavily on open models, in many cases served by Mistral and other local providers. China is also developing its own hardware -- Huawei isn't slacking -- and it's not that far behind. And I'd bet there's no such thing as a "GPU Level" block that can't be hacked away.
Such a move would also be transparently dystopian... though, in fairness, I suppose that makes it more plausible than it would otherwise be...
they will use National Security as a pretense to force everyone on "verified-aligned AI".
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
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.
This might rather save the IPO. Banned open source models will allow the closed source players to maintain power and recoup a larger part of their investment by driving up the prices.
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.
Part of me wonders if recent problems with AI (Huang leaks, OpenAI models hacking Huggingface), haven't been arranged by OpenAI in order to poison Anthropic's IPO.
This doesn't seem like a healthy move for the company's longevity. What else did Jensen do? It's a given that companies that size will be targets for espionage and leak information even without it. This one mistake is enough to end all the value he has-and would continue to add to nvidia? Feels like we're missing information about the whole thing.
Uhm ... yes? Screwing around is not a crime. That is something Huang should settle with his family. His wife may divorce of forgive him, but a divorce is not something that the company should fire anyone over.
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 also sold chips worth billions to her "mistress" and the chips probably went to China. So he did circumvent sanctions. Thats the only crime I recognise in this matter.
Allegedly. We will no doubt learn all about this from national security council operations this year. But we don’t know what happened or what he did or did not know right now.
These are Trump political sanction. NVDA is a multinational company out to maximize profits for shareholder. Selling to China should not be on any sanctions list. China is not the enemy of anything in my book.
Screwing around is not a crime, but he also isn't under threat of prison time. He's under threat of losing his job, because he has shown that his judgement cannot be trusted (he had two illicit affairs, one of which was with a subordinate). It's perfectly reasonable to fire someone from a leadership position for having bad judgement.
So he had an affair with a woman. Who cares. He's human. He's not a spy. This whole charade to dethrone the founder of the biggest company in the world is a joke. I hope the NVDA board are not stupid or they should all resign.
Jensen's been lobbying hard for years to get the government to allow selling high-end GPUs to China. It's his position that this will discourage local competitors from getting big enough to meaningfully threaten nVidia's dominance.
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.
The thing I don't understand is what is the real issue? Just the bad PR? I would kind of think affairs are pretty common, it's just this is public? I'm struggling to find anything where he did something bad business wise or compromised national security. Seems like Americans just love the sensationalism of affairs. Makes for good news I guess.
The woman he was having an affair with is suspected of being a Chinese spy, and she may have been using him to circumvent US export controls to move lots of NVidia chips into China.
but we don't have any evidence of that? also, seems the wrong person to target to do that right? He'd leave a long evidence trail trying to get people in the company to do that? I'd think if you wanted to do that you'd target someone further down in the operations side of things. So all we have is he had an affair with a possible "spy"? If he didn't know she was a spy, and didn't take any actions that circumvent anything, basically he just had an affair? Given intelligence agencies knew about this for a long time, and didn't tell him, kind of says they didn't have anything of substance and there was no real risk?
We actually don't, other than the U.S. government claiming she is. The timing of this seems quite odd considering the current government just lost an election, and has a history of blaming things on China.
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."
That would be problematic irrespective of him having an affair with her though. The real story then should be the circumvention of the export ban and the coercion of US officials, not the affair itself.
A CEO cheating on his wife doesn't exactly paint them as a trustworthy leader to partners, suppliers and customers. Even less so when he does it twice, with a foreign intelligence operative.
I kind of just assume this (affairs) is likely the case with a reasonable percentage of CEOs, and if he didn't know she was a spy, he was just having an affair. Also given all the photos, it wasn't even that much of a secret. I'm just struggling to see what he did wrong other than the affair. Given approx 15-20% in US have affairs not really out of the ordinary.
Can someone make the strong case for why he should be ousted?
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.)
It's come out that he was having another affair with a Nvidia employee as well, their vice president of healthcare. Having an affair with a client is one thing but having one with a client and a subordinate is maybe enough for the board to remove him.
So let me get this straight, there is now a grand conspiracy within nvidia and its supply chain network to avoid export controls? How exactly would that work? "Hey its Jensen, can you call John in shipping and send 16 containers of H200s through Myanamar to China?"
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
Reality, I suppose that most procuments is played along the line : this Singapore company claimed it was for their local legal entity, and here the certificate/contract they signed.
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.
Maybe more "Hey, sell to this new Neocloud I met with in Singapore. Sure, it's ran by Chinese nationals, no, I don't know who's workloads they're running, don't worry about it."
...which may or may not be a violation of the export controls but it violates the intent.
So because you, in your infinite knowledge of international smuggling, can't envision any method for evading export control, it must not be possible. Is that what you're saying?
According to the NYT[1], Megaspeed (originally Chinese owned) was registered in Singapore in 2023, allowing it to bypass US export bans. FOUR days after the re-registration, Nvidia designated Megaspeed a preferred partner, giving it priority access to advanced chips (H200). Seems a bit odd.
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
That $200 was a sort of formality; him buying his shares from the company as part of the incorporation paperwork. It has nothing to do with actual funding needed to run a business. Nvidia's first round of financing was 3 months later. $2M at a $6M valuation [1].
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
who cares where he named it, stan'ng for the Oligarchy is becoming a social faux pas, fyi
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?
There isn't enough discussion of how many controls needed to fail for Nvidia to smuggle billions of dollars of GPUs to Chinese firms in violation of export controls. The affairs with alleged spies is not even the most egregious failure of corporate governance.
Controlling such high-volume products has never really worked, especially if you sell to other third countries. Plenty of western electronic parts show up in Russian weapons, despite export restrictions.
These are matters of degree, and I challenge you to find a comparable example of arms vendors having 20% of their revenues from vassal states of geopolitical enemies while also having their leadership be personally compromised. Makes sense why Jensen boasts about not having written contracts documenting his crimes when, e.g., he was going around Singaporean family offices raising money for Malaysian shell companies to place orders on behalf of China.
Considering that only Jensen has been pushing for anything close to open-source models in terms of AI vs the token merchants of OpenAI and Anthropic, it seems a really bad time for Huang to leave.
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.
Better hope AMD ascendant limits the main (only?) downside of alienating allies (once again, but from "our" side this time) for no upside whatsoever, not even rule of law
(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
Is there any reason why this will actually change the fundamentals of Nvidia's business so long as 5080s go for as much as a used car and the entire world wants H200s? Even if they lose an extremely hands-on CEO, they're selling a very expensive product with extremely high global demand.
Yeah I genuinely don't know either! I'm just very curious about the effect an ouster will have not on the stock price, but the business of designing and selling chips.
I wonder what happens to NVDA afterwards. People say Jensen is NVDA or at least he has a lot of controls over the company. I guess they finally found the right time (very bad midterm) and the right opportunity (mistress as Chinese spy).
I even wonder whether some elements within the Chinese government has a hand in it -- not (only) the mistress part but the ousting part.
I'm thinking the people behind trying to oust him are people who don't appreciate him likely knowingly violating export sanctions and putting the rest of the company and himself at risk of massive fines and criminal prosecution
I think it's worth even considering that if the allegations are true that the objective was to get Huang fired. Sure, he sold China chips, but they have their own homegrown chips now and the Chinese government have played a direct part in that.
There is no “they” in this. My read is the timing of all of this entirely down to the results of the midterm elections.
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.
It's not immediately clear that Jensen is as visionary and indispensable as some people claim. True, under his watch, Nvidia rose from a relatively obscure company to one of the largest companies in the world, and even a national asset. But it's really hard to believe that these achievements are due to Jensen's brilliance. Jensen didn't create the crypto mania that propelled Nvidia in the 2010s, nor did he create the current AI revolution.
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.
Yes, you're entirely correct. But you're also underestimating the people's potential to squander great opportunities like these. Look at AMD for example, they had a good head start over nvidia yet they haven't done anything remotely as good.
Under his watch? You mean the entire time from the very beginning. He built the company from nothing and you are not sure he is visionary and indispensable. can't make this shit up :)
Right - unreal to think the founder from the 90s isn't core DNA to nvidia. All the thread here thinking you can parachute in a CEO and nvidia would be fine.
You're not really addressing the point made above, that the things that contributed the most to Nvidia's valuation (crypto, AI) are not things that Jensen had much to do with.
You are really not giving the man any credit - I suspect you weren't part of the GPU era of video games and don't understand the roots of nvidia. That man hustled that company. You can't say things like "right time and right place" without being a little blase.
I don't know much about Nvidia's history, but isn't Jensen largely responsible for CUDA and the company's monopoly on machine learning hardware? It wasn't an obvious bet at the time that this would pay off, but Nvidia sure poured a lot of money into making their software stack so good that nobody wanted to even consider other options.
Jensen made basically two visionary decisions. The first was to promote GPGPU with CUDA across their entire lineup including consumer hardware. The second was to specifically invest heavily in supporting machine learning way before anyone else in chips cared. CuDNN came out in 2014, just two years after AlexNet. Three years before the transformer. Eight years before ChatGPT. Before PyTorch. Before TensorFlow. Other chip CEOs probably hadn't even heard of AlexNet in 2014. Even at the time I thought[1] AMD and Intel were crazy to completely ignore a market opportunity like this. They still haven't caught up.
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.
Plenty. But also I'm sure there were a lot of decisions he made earlier in the company's history that led to them being in the position to start the CUDA project. I'm less familiar with those. They were consequential at the time but now they only matter inasmuch as they allowed the company to survive until AI took off.
It still baffles me that most people don't realize how success in 'business'/'leadership' positions has almost nothing to do with an individuals skill/intelligence in leading/decisions but simply mere luck and timing. You could argue that to attain a high position in a company requires some level of shrewdness and intelligence though, but that is another game.
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.
It's #3 and shortsellers. There's no one who can lead Nvidea, like he does with his technical depth, connections and trust within the company. Getting rid of him will be a loss for all investors and board.
If Nvidia is going to fire Jensen Huang, my question is whether Jensen will be allowed to start another "Nvidia".
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
idk reading everything what is coming out it looks like he had much unlimited power to do whatever he wanted. so i dont buy that someone (even legal) was a hurdle for him.
That's not how the world works. Most of what NVIDIA does is protected by patents and trade secrets, not to mention CUDA.
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.
I don't think Jensen without Nvidia would be better, but he's uniquely suited to fund a company, raise an enormous amount of capital, jumpstart contracts and partnerships, utilize connections at the highest levels of the global economy, and attract talent across all levels of a new company. Very few people, if any, have the foundations to do this.
How is that relevant? You could claim he was a victim of a honeypot, but an affair with a report is an abuse of power. Any regular employee would be terminated within a day. A CEO in his position will take a little more than a day.
I used to be a frequent visitor to /r/nvidia ~15 years ago until ~5 years ago. Around 2020 it turned increasingly into a sort of stock price cult. The discussions were corrupted with people who felt like they had a duty to try to help increase the stock price. I'm seeing inklings of that in these sorts of threads. How are these people so unaware of standard corporate policy? This is like the stereotypical case that's presented by HR to new hires.
It's an abuse of power, but it's also an excuse to get him out. Fortune 100 boards don't make decisions of this financial magnitude because of ethical considerations. Some political wind must have shifted against Jensen.
> whether Jensen will be allowed to start another Nvidia
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.
He's still a shareholder. It is considered extremely bad form to start a company that competes with a company that you are still a shareholder of unless you have not been fired with cause. The only other example I can think of is Jobs. So it is possible but I would assume that post Jobs contracts were put together in such a way that it would be very hard to compete with the company you got booted out of and that you are still a shareholder of. I've signed a couple of contracts over the years just as shareholders and those already mentioned that if I had competing interests the deal would be null and void and I'd be liable, and for good reasons too.
He could pretty trivially divest or move his shares into a blind trust or something. This isn't rocket science, and furthermore it's not as bad form as you might think. It happens all the time with little repurcissions.
> he knows the ins and outs of a GPU fab business plus he has all the connections.
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.
He would absolutely be fired if he were in any role, but as CEO cofounder, it's hard not to attribute Nvidia's success to his leadership.
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.
Something very fishy is going on here. If NVIDIA suddenly closes down GPU sales to the general public after Jensen is gone then we know what is happening: the Altman/Dario/Musk mafia have gotten what they wanted: no more compute for open weight models for the general public.
Interesting to see what happens to the consumer, gaming GPU market.
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.
It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, and there seems to be quite a bit of evidence of a coverup and deliberate deception. It’s a liability problem; shareholders will sue. Heads will roll.
Isn't this just not only about the severity of crimes but the potential to withstand the legacy of whatever crimes that were committed that seems untenable to digest.
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?
This all looks like an excuse to force him to bend the knee. He is the only western tech ceo who is 1) a strong proponent of open weight models and 2) is highly critical of the chip sanctions on China because they’ve done the opposite of what they were meant to do.
Without knowing more this seems like the wrong move... The U.S. has the AI supply chain visualized incorrectly. The necessary manufacturing, raw materials and components all come from outside of the U.S. For nVidia to have decades of supplier relationships and manufacturing understanding, much of this was in the hands of the CEO more than other companies. Jensen has a lot of direct reports which is odd given the corporate structure.
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.
If the allegations of selling “trade secrets” are false. He should remain CEO. I am unsure that there is ITAR or real regulations here, is it really an AI war. If it was it would be best if they trained on American chips for America.
I would not be surprised if the woman is actually a CIA agent.
Since the government bought a stake in Intel, and 15% of Nvidia exports revenue, it has been clear that it want direct control of the industry.
My cynical view is that a lot of US IP has already gone to China through Nvidia. The US should probably now monitor AMD, its executives and its relationship with China (via Taiwan or direct), if any, just as closely.
He can just retire and live happily ever after. The mention to shareholders is pretty much the only thing a billionaire can’t do without getting in trouble.
The CEO works for the board. And the board really doesn't like when their company ends up on the front page of the WSJ for helping a Chinese intelligence agent traffic your company's own product in violation of US sanctions.
Fired with cause or stepping down (most likely stepping down)>Interim CEO named> Jensen flew too close to sun and got burned. Board investigations will put everything on Jensen and they will turn that chapter over. Much more information will come out. His wife I will divorce him as well. This whole thing is more political than anything else. Who leaked all of this is my biggest question. Nvidia should be fine in the mid term, but unstable in the short term.
I still recall, as a young engineer (1999) working in a high-flying startup outside of Boston -- bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of naive optimism -- I flew to Houston in late '99 to demo a fabulous optical networking switch to ENRON, all the while thinking why in the world would ENRON want to be in the business of networking. Ended up selling them a TON of very expensive equipment.
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)
That would be the first affair we learned about... there's another and that may change the calculus. Regardless, the proverbial tragedy, IMO, would be depending on the judgement or heartbeat of one guy (CEO or not) at such a scale.
You are wondering if the guy who co-founded Nvidia and was its CEO since its founding (over 33 years of leadership) and saw its market cap top over $4 trillion dollars “had a positive effect”?
he'll move to Taiwan, Taiwan will become part of China, China will move talent, Jensen will become the CEO of a new asian company and they will become a powerhouse in chip production in ~5 years
This is overblown; nvda is a mature company jensen has set the right bets forward so it's just a matter in who the successor is. In terms of revenue impact, assuming megaspeed accounted for ~20% of sales (rumored estimate) then game optimal move is to have OAI/ANT pick those sales up. We will hear about a transition plan probably around earnings.
yea that can be argued^ if there is proof that Jensen knew and acknowledged that these are shell companies that will funnel the chips to china then yea that's defrauding investors.
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.
Jensen has always wanted Nvidia to have a footing in China. Without that, the Chinese innovate faster and commoditize Nvidia’s business sooner. I’m willing to bet he already knew about Alice Huang selling to China. Trump probably knew for some time too. The board also knew about his second affair with his subordinate for a while.
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.
Especially because of that I don't believe China will actually invade Taiwan right now. It will bring chip production to a halt for 5 years while factories get rebuilt. In this AI race that is not good for anyone.
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.
given that jensen has handshake deals with many of his critical (supply constrained) suppliers he may have more leverage than founder shares could ever provide.
Can someone explain to me why everyone on this website, and everyone in English-language media, takes for granted that “stopping China on AI” is a worthwhile or important goal?
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.
China is terrible to people who speak out against the government and the government censors models. Open weight is nice, but not good if it’s silently been lobotomized on topics.
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.
That’s crazy. How many American political prisoners have you met or worked with personally? I’ve worked directly on campaigns to free 2 of them. There are many. You almost never hear about that. Along with a lot of other things that, while statutorily legal to talk about publicly, never seem to get a hearing in the mass media. It’s almost as if one of these countries found a way to enact defacto censorship without admitting to it, and the other country is just honest
If you are getting paid millions, you should not make these intentional mistakes, he would have known she was a spy and just didn't care. There are better options for CEO.
The possible security implications of this entire affair (affairs now) can't be overstated. That hardware's in the most secret of facilities, computing very classified workloads for very very serious customers. Not the goofy AI heads, I'm talking about the military and intelligence communities in many nations.
Hopefully this teaches the market to migrate away from proprietary CUDA and NVIDIA and their proprietary drivers.
Big companies should be resilient and diverse enough that their growth doesn't depend on one person, and yet most successful companies seem to be centered around someone with strong character and presence. Not to play cult of personality, but Huang looks like a central element of Nvidia's success. Will Nvidia go the way of Intel and other corporate grey bureaucracies that ultimately decline ?
Good tech CEOs are rare. Intel will break the bank to bring Jensen on. Even if he’s a Chinese spy, it’s worth more to shore up US fab capacity than it is to lose Intel’s tech secrets.
I see people bemoan that this is going to hurt Nvidia. First of all, it’s not like Nvidia will crumble in a few weeks. The company has a sky-high valuation because of the moat they’ve built. That doesn’t just disappear simply because Jensen steps down.
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.
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.
Honestly kind of sounds like its a great time to start a DCA buy of NVIDIA.
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.
I am just curious. Not in relation to this story: Have other people here had a change in their perspective in the last two years?
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.
i dont get why everyone just eats up the propaganda that if she's a spy she automatically works for the chinese government. we are talking about 100s of billions of dollars here, this could easily just be a corporate spy or a honeypot. these mega corps are so rich and massive they have their own spy and enforcement teams, same as big oil and gas always had and still do. back in the day when oil and resources were in poorer countries they used the exact same tactics to control and take them over. its the same playbook, just now the target is a big us corporation.
They cannot unseat him now. The work is too important, nations are competing hard against us. He has to just get away with it and everyone needs to move on, same as Oppenheimer.
This does look like a hit job. The spy stuff is ultimately meaningless and a smoke screen and may even be offered up to create plausible deniability. My take is that Dems/Biden + China Hawk Rs + decel crowd/Dario wanted export control and closed models. Jensen and Trump took a different view. Now that Dems have the Congress again, it's going to be non-stop hearings and investigations in the same spirit as the TikTok CEO with all the "Are you a commie?" questions. So the spy is offered as an explanation; nobody evaded export controls and nobody is a commie. The 2nd unrelated affair just points to an op to oust him.
It’s pretty clear (if you aren’t a huge idiot) that Jensen is attempting to bury the lede here.
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
He cheated on his wife with multiple women, it's coming out... I feel bad for her, everyone's saying she'll get billions and that's nice but she's been completely humiliated.
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.
I don't really feel that bad for her. She's 65 and will become a billionaire in her own right, meaning she can build whatever retirement for herself she can imagine. Their kids are in their 30s. Being cheated on is theoretically embarrassing, but 100% of people who have an opinion about it would be sympathetic to her (I mean, they'd see this as his failing and not her fault). Contrast that with how people will see Jensen ("stupid, reckless, betrayer of his family") and how people may see the women he cheated with (people may assume they were gold-diggers who knew exactly what they were doing).
I guess what I'm saying is, I'd be happy to be publicly cucked in exchange for at least a billion dollars.
I think that's taking it too lightly, it's not all about money. They had a life together, losing that stability at any age can be devastating, and lonely.
If this is correct, what was his motivation? I fail to see what he could have gained from it, other than a few extra billion in revenue, which they likely would have made otherwise anyway.
You don't become a billionaire by leaving money on the table. Achieving this kind of wealth is proof that you will never be satisfied, the reasonable people took their exit a while ago and are enjoying themselves peacefully. You most likely already took shortcuts and illegal actions to get there, so why not continue in that direction?
Trump has made a lot of money from NVIDIA stock, and he's very good friends with Jensen. Especially after he approved the Export Deals. Jensen will be fine after he's out of NVIDIA.
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.
Trump famously banned Epstein from his golf course and worked with the FBI during his first arrest. They famously hated each other, and were not friends
> Trump famously banned Epstein from his golf course
(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.
I think money’s not really the game for these guys, at least not for its own sake, it’s being able to bend the course of the world. People who don’t have enough usually seem to think it’s about consumption and wonder how they can be so greedy, but you can only consume so much, and that’s generally impossible to see in the rear view mirror for this group.
Honestly, I hope this doesn’t play out in a rushed way. Evaluating this is the board’s top duty. It’s critical, and healthy, for them to weigh what’s best for all NVDA stakeholders.
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.
"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" [1].
Affairs could be a whole lot more than that. For example, assuming he didn’t want his wife finding out he’s an ideal blackmail target for anyone that does know.
Add in that the democratic party wants to look tough on tech and here you have a clear case of the CEO selling known banned exports to a Chinese spy while personally fueling the data center hysteria.
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.
They had dirt on him for many years. Someone wants him ousted. That’s what’s happening behind the scene. Jensen probably pissed off someone very well-connected.
This is what I'm feeling as well. Similar to the "intervention" that put Altman back as CEO as well as a brand new board which included an ex-CIA director.
I don't care who it is as long as they give us open kernel drivers that can match amds offering. Preferably also someone who's not hostile toward consumers would also be nice.
Yes, all of this crazy would have been somewhat easier to take if Nvidia also hadn't been laser focused on screwing the consumer over the last few years. He didn't seem to be very concerned about building a constituency for his position. The shareholders have lots of reasons to love him, but customers? Not so much.
people bemoaning the foreign interference angle seem to forget all the mountains of middle-east money thrown in the AI bubble, and where this money originates from.
Why are all the tech overlords scum people? Do they become that way with power, money and fame, or is it a certain kind of person from the start that achieves these things?
That's an excellent question and I've been wondering about this a lot. I've known a few billionaires, exactly one was an amazing person, the rest were absolutely terrible people in every sense of the word. The whole word is full of NPCs to them. But your question goes to the heart of it: were they terrible people because that's a requirement for becoming a billionaire or did becoming a billionaire somewhere along the line turn them into terrible people?
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).
The question is are the 'good' people you know actually good.
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.
You're mixing individuals and groups in a way that I can't really say much about it. I was talking exclusively about individuals that I've known personally beyond sitting at the same table or working for them with three layers of indirection.
Fair enough, for me I suppose for me the vast majority of people are
deep down terrible and only made good because they have been made to
be. I can imagine what you say is very true and no doubt the vast
majority of billionaires are horrible and their untouchableness no
doubt makes that so.
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%.
I think there is a level where you are no longer accountable in the way that ordinary people are accountable and I suspect that this is the reason why it happens, but my suspicions are worth absolutely nothing and given that these people are - in spite of the vast amount of information we seem to have about them - so in control of the narratives of their lives that it is impossible to make a diagnosis that will stick. So I will revert to the default: I don't know, but the sample I've seen makes me suspect that there is more to this than just coincidence.
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.
Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point? That's a huge tell you're arguing against a straw man. This post was after a second affair, to me that's a moral flaw, not just someone exploiting him.
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?
> 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
> 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.
Ok but if you are having an affair with your direct report why would you "be affectionate" in public ?
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.
Here is a thought experiment: Put animals from different races into a singe cage and make them have same life-style. All of them are attached with an identifier tag that looks same, they all get same food, go on same rides, watch same TV shows. Then do the animals have same thoughts, beliefs, morals, norms and values? Most western governments thinks they would. Not sure when did the humanity got this dumber and forgot the saying "birds of a feather ...". Politicians decided that minds of people is separate from biology. Race, religion, culture, gender, background, age, geo-location - you were forced to ignore all of this. Just attach a American passport, give an american car, american food, american home; boom - everything is erased and all people are same.
I'm wondering how people like Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc. just continually get away with it. Are they just more sociopathic and cover their tracks better?
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.
Musk, Zuckerberg, and Altman and their companies have zero history of sketchy stuff that would, in a normal world, lead to CEOs being ousted? Affairs are enough to do it to Huang? The whole Chinese spy thing is not confirmed is it? And the three people I've listed have had documented cases of endangering national security through either their actions or their company's actions.
I suppose that's one reason. But Musk has formed basically pyramid schemes to keep his debtors from calling and to move his debt out from under him. Without that, he likely would have to sell shares to cover the debt of his Twitter purchase.
Musk has a history of having his companies buy his other companies, and his most recent example of this is obviously xAI buying X and then SpaceX buying xAI. For example, the purchase of X by xAI valued X at a ridiculous ~$40 billion. And then he took SpaceX public after all of this. And SpaceX is built upon $38 billion worth of taxpayer money, grants, tax credits, etc. Must be nice to have a bunch of loser companies all buy each other and then use a government funded hype stock to make it all back.
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.
They could lose control through a substantial shareholder lawsuit. A minority shareholder suit against Musk could prove tremendous damages repaid in stock and the judge might not let the special classes of shares with extra voting power protect his control.
It would have to be a very good cause though, disliking him or ordinary bad business decisions won't cut it.
"Okay, when I introduce you, I'm gonna say, 'This is a friend of mine.' That means you're a connected guy. Now if I were to say, this is a friend of ours—that would mean you're a made guy. Capiche?"
I’ve read through a lot of this thread and one thing that’s interesting to me is the relatively little weight that’s been given to the HR violation aspect of Huang’s behavior with a subordinate; specifically the power dynamic aspect.
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?
I think (and I hope for the USA’s sake) Jensen was actually a CIA asset and they knew Alice from day 1 and let him play with his ding dong but also importantly covert reverse spy on China.
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.
Is this how the whole castle crumbles? some tabloid sex scandal on one side like it's 2017, anthropic vibecoding a CUDA replacement for AMD on the other?
Goodbye, money! Who is seriously considering sabotaging their portfolio and precipitating a huge SP500 drop for months to come? Who, remembering the board of directors is making this decision, would want that?
I’m buying the affair and that it facilitated smuggling, but all could be explained by financial interest so far. Was she a spy or made a spy by circumstances on the smuggling itself?
If, as alleged, Alice Huang is an agent of the Chinese government, and if her activities result in Jensen Huang getting ditched by Nvidia, that is certainly going to win her Employee of the Year at the MSS (国家安全部) Christmas Party.
I like the guy, he's funny. I would say to keep him (on a leash), but if I could get endless 10/10 Chinese spy pussy I too would betray the AI race. I wouldn't cheat on my wife though, that's pretty low.
It’s not like he assaulted women, which is apparently par for the course at other big tech companies.
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.
Did you hear about the container of gpus that was lost between california and texas?
I heard that if it's not found, someone is going to get REALLY F... a spy type F one lol.
Most of these things probably have been known for ages. And yes, in comparison to the actually bad billionaires he didn't protect himself left and right. Why is this getting surfaced now?
Some group is trying to make a big deal out of this. I mean which spy posts so publicly their itineraries/photos/business meetings, on wechat? Come on!
I've been writing about history for over 20 years, and this feels like an inflection point. Some day a long-form essay will describe Huang's prescient foray into machine learning, the rise of AI, the resulting bubble, Ed Zitron's prolonged diatribes, Huang's infidelity that leads to the downfall of his company, Anthropic's disappointing IPO, OpenAI's subsequent disastrous IPO, a reckoning for AI's plagiarism, and then there are bubble bits all over everybody.
My armchair analysis is that going forward with this will most likely make the AI bubble pop.
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.
It won’t be the sex it will be the illicit sales of GPUs to China. That domino topples the next and all of the “sales” of goods to AI companies financed by the sellers. There’s a whole lot of paper sales boosting revenues while losing money with each sale going on.
If the big boys can fly to LSJ to eat "beef jerky" and fully avoid prosecution, then this is a CIA coup, because virtually nobody really cares about how he warmed his stick. They are probably mad at him for moving product to the Chinese, who they can't control as easily. They are going to install a puppet they can properly control. And "pace the frontier" by sucking the oxygen out of the room for open source and local models.
My tinfoil hat theory is that this is all orchestrated. They knew about the affair for months, but withheld it. My theory is that with the midterms results, rather than risk facing accountability as things unravel "naturally", they have this big bombshell as a "get out of blame free" card. That way everyone can collectively say "It wasn't _my_ fault things fell apart. I was doing my best, honest!"
Well, Mr. Huang sure seems to have turned his life upside down.
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.
Infidelity with a Chinese spy. Quite a different beast.
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.
It's easy to blame a person like dumb Jensen who slept with the Chinese spy.
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.
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.
Maybe now Apple and nvidia can rekindle their relationship after the bubble pops. Apple could come to the rescue, secure a heavy investment and enter into the cloud computing business.
I feel this is way over amplified to further restrict chinese models/open weights development by further controlling the company with a new CEO.. seriously, who cares what he’s doing in his personal life, I am not a big fan of him much as he should have made GPUs further more accessible to consumers, but he’s definitely not an evil AI lunatic like some AI ceo bros we see now.
Any ousting will probably be for having an affair with a direct report. At many companies, having an 'inappropriate relationship with a customer' isn't a policy violation unless there's also evidence of undue influence, so it's more conditional and complicated. Whereas just the existence of an inappropriate relationship with a direct report is a serious violation.
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).
He has to go because he opposes restrictions to run Chinese open weight models on NVIDIAs GPUs. He said so in an Axios interview in July - "The industry needs open models, science needs open models, cybersecurity needs open models". [1]
Good riddance. All these csuite people think they are so uniquely capable but if he gets kicked out nothing will change except we'll, hopefully, hear less about jackets at tech presentations.
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.
The reports that he had a second affair with a subordinate, if true, are disgusting and would lead to termination at any other company. He should not get a pass. How someone who has had so much success could have such poor judgement is a mystery to me. It’s sad, he accomplished so much.
What is the endgame of this completely cumbersome and obvious CIA journalist and intelligence community rollout of this narrative surrounding Jensen and Nvidia? Why would they nuke the credibility of America's only AI chip company and hand the future of AI to China? Do they actually think this will gain them control over AI?
Americans voted for rooting out corruption. The Congressional committees that review stuff like corruptly quashing an investigation into your lover company [1] are changing hands. Jensen coming clean right after the election was, within the range of options he had, smart.
(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.)
Those of us foolish enough to vote Trump in 2016 weren't convinced he was going to leave the swamp drained, rather that it was so bad he couldn't do worse. A lesser of two evils kind of choice.
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'.
Trying to engage in good faith here. What did you see in the first few weeks after your 2016 vote that were materially different from how he ran his 2016 campaign (and I mean the hits - "they're sending rapists, ...", "grab her by the pussy", ...)?
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?
For me personally it was trying to ban travel from whole countries based on race. Morally I didn't expect him to personally be a paragon of virtue. My hope was that the vile parts of his retoric were mostly campaign bluster and "locker room talk", and that he'd defer to experts once in office.
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.
If the anti-corruption revolution is going to focus on some dude's sex life rather than the extensive and obvious whoring of political office, I want none of it.
When the "some dude" is Jensen Huang and involves sleeping with Chinese spies while advocating for relaxed export controls, then obviously it's gonna pay him some attention.
When some dude's sex life quashes an investigation into Megaspeed, yeah, it becomes germane. (There are serious questions around Lutnick, for example [1].)
This looks like a major indictment of Lutnick, not Huang.
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?
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].
> so far it looks mostly terrible for the commerce department. Huang? I don't know
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.
> 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.
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.
I think their concern is that NVidia is acquiescent and in support of policies which give China better AI chips, which is the core of the matter regarding the honeypot scandal. The goal, if it is an op, is to get a CEO who will comply more readily with export controls.
Let’s steelman instead of strawman. The CIA likely cares little about Ant and OpenAI.
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.
And it’s also very obvious that restricting exports will only help in the short term, and in the long term, gives China reason to develop their own tech.
I thought I was supposed to believe that OpenAI & Anthropic's methods are so much more advanced than any potential capabilities of Chinese competitors that OpenAI & Anthropic must each be trillion dollar companies.
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.
They’re just reporting on things that are true and have been kept secret inappropriately. That’s not a “narrative”.
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.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theory to realized someone leaked these stories in fairly rapid succession and it’s not a leap to suggest that person has an agenda. Not everything is a conspiracy but when it only has to involve a few people the odds go up.
When one story comes out, other related stories that have been around are a lot easier to get limelight. And it's much easier to surface new dirt in those situations too. So I wouldn't use rapid succession of multiple stories as indicative of anything.
> When one story comes out, other related stories that have been around are a lot easier to get limelight
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.
You’ve already made an assumption there that both stories were leaked by the same person. What’s the evidence to back that up?
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.
I am pretty sure under normal circumstances, a person with 160 billion dollars that leads a 4 trillion dollar company is able to cause these stories to never materialize.
If someone thinks there is not a lot of sex going on in the c-suite maybe you need to get out more.
What is up with people who seem to love corruption?
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.
More like: whats up with people being utterly fucking stupid and devoid of even the bare minimum of critical thinking skills. Being pro (or at least unbothered by) corruption is just one of the ways that manifests.
Money talks. Shareholders didn't seem to mind when Tim Cook gave Trump a golden trophy. They certainly didn't mind Jensen Huang's dialog with Trump when sanctions were ill-defined. It seems like cronyism is in, and all the cool kids are doing it.
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.
Reminds me of the meme that WorldCom went down because their CEO bravely stood up to NSA pressure. Instead of, you know, running an elaborate shell game of financial fraud to enrich executives and dupe shareholders after the Dot Com bubble burst.
And worse yet, he seemed to be influence by her to violate export restrictions and was probably responsible to a substantial "donation" to the presidential "ballroom fund" to change squash an investigation into the matter.
This is up there with the most fireable things that have ever happened.
> What is up with people who seem to love corruption?
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.
perhaps they acquired or feign having acquired fundamental cryptographic breakthroughs, hoping the "bubble" spreads to China / India / ... to convert a few moths of cryptographic lead into perhaps a few years....
Unless there’s an evidence of him being compromised, this is crazy. I’m total outsider and don’t know Nvidia copropare rule machinery, but from perceived perspective that feels like significant blow to the company.
I expect shit show funnier than when OpenAI tried to put Altman with same result.
Even shift leaders at McDonalds need to sign various workplace policies, including policies about relations with their direct reports. So yeah, this is not exactly a surprise or something unheard of.
> Even shift leaders at McDonalds need to sign various workplace policies, including policies about relations with their direct reports.
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).
If you can be fired for any reason, then that's it and they can put in the contract that you aren't allowed to drink a glass of water if so be.
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.
Having a relationship with someone you have authority over is considered very problematic just about everywhere, in part because the existence of that authority creates problems for consent (among other reasons).
The NYT reports that Huang was caught on video with this second affair when they were together in San Jose.
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.
https://archive.is/ZmOEH
I recently recalled Nvidia's rather strange reaction to the Gamers Nexus investigation into GPU smuggling [0]. Found it somewhat strange at the time how incredibly agitated the reaction seemed to have been, given Nvidia could sell the same GPUs for the same price essentially instantly without the Chinese market. Their reaction wasn't merely a denial, dismissal or even silence, but very irrationally sounding for a company of their size and standing.
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...
Aren't open-weight models good for Nvidia's business? Chinese labs releasing models that people can run themselves on Nvidia GPUs creates more potential buyers of Nvidia 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.
It makes sense to me why they would benefit from chinese labs having more compute.
NVIDIA is valued far in excess of potential GPU sales. They need the hype train. Running afoul of the US government is bad for the hype train.
This just isn't true. NVDA's price/earnings ratio is 22, which is less than MSFT.
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.
I’m not sure that Hardware has the same moat as Service/Platform.
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)
I don't think this is true. AMD's hardware, on paper at least, offers the same or better performance than Nvidia. Eg the Mi355x vs B300 is close. The former released before Nvidia's GPU.
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.
>NVDA is undervalued
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
Obviously he talks about stocks
Nvidia is king of circular financing. peak accrual earnings include non-cash items and demand Nvidia is funding itself. On a cash (real actual reality) basis the multiple is 33 to 50
the 5T is crazy to me.
I wish for US to win the Chinese race if there's one. I would agree that the Chinese getting access to GPUs, building models, making them open weight and also sharing has really pushed the American labs. Without Chinese models, we would probably be 1 year behind where we currently are. Competition is a healthy thing. This competition has increased intelligence so fast and created ridiculous demand on hardware. So it's been great for Nvidia and their stock. I don't know what Jensen knows nor do I believe he could have anticipated how the field would play out. Whatever happens, it's been one heckuva ride for him. Unfortunately there are many people that would love to get into his position, the pay is going to be delicious...
These are strong and unsubstantiated claims.
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.
In my opinion it is the open weights that are pushing as much in tandem. Without them it would be easier between the top labs. They must have a large enough gap between OW to justify that extra cost. A business owner may prefer to be happy with 8/10 AI output rather than spend 5x more for that extra 2 points
Given the risks of AI tech, one could argue quite easily that "we would probably be 1 year behind where we currently are" would be a better outcome.
I wish this race to the bottom would stop.
Why do you wish for US to win? I think it's a quite scary moment if I, to be able to work, need to pay a hefty tax in tokens to a few big American corporations instead of having a server in my cellar with a few GPUs I control or having a healthy ecosystem of competition serving the models we need daily.
In the long term, the strategic interest of Nvidia is to avoid having to deal with a business entity that is too powerful.
While yes, they also have interest in open weight, it does increase their market after all, I'd be surprised if that was on the same level, given they are extending mass credits to US frontier labs and neoclouds on condition that they'd purchase their GPUs and even provide revenue guarantees.
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.
> Chinese labs releasing models that people can run themselves on Nvidia GPUs creates more potential buyers of Nvidia GPUs
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
I'm pretty sure they would prefer to have a diversified line of products with customers willing to buy them. Should apple just stop selling everything except their most expensive iPhone, because it's expensive and popular?
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!
Who said anything about individual GPUs or consumers?
You must be new to nvidia, Petty has been their middle name for a very long time now.
Eh, I have seen their past reaction to reporting they didn't like, such as the HUB DLSS blacklisting and the like. They can be petty, yes, but the reaction to that documentary felt very different, that was another level entirely. It sounded weirdly personal, which is even more suspect given sanctions are a legal issue where even a company with a rather contentious relationship with media would normally launder each reaction through legal.
There's news of another affair involving an Nvidia employee. He doesn't really look like a victim in that case.
Source ?
If no law or illegal company policy has been broken[1], is dating another employee or cheating their wife a motive for firing someone?
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
You as the CEO can't ethically and morally ask a subordinate employee to fuck you.
Why is that?
If it's not due to a love affair (which is now public), and not just working for PRC out of ideological readons, it might be some kind of secret pressure, some kind of a secret hostage situation, so serious as to force a CEO of the world's top company to act so recklessly.
He made a strong case that the sanctions harmed his long term ecosystem lock in play.
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.
When you have a fixed supply (which GPU production basically is), the more demand the more you can charge and the more you can make. It’s not about finding buyers, it’s about creating even more demand so you can ask more than ever for the GPUs you’re making.
The U.S. blocking advanced chip sales to China has ensured China increased their efforts to someday no longer need them.
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.
It will take years for China to catch up without these GPUs, that's the whole point. By that time we have advanced AGI and can just stay ahead of them
China already makes GPUs that are good enough, even if they are slower and less efficient than the NVIDIA GPUs.
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.
2030 is an eternity. We will almost certainly have advanced AGI before then. Read the METR report.
They will build this capacity anyways, delaying them to 2030 would be a massive win.
Which METR report? The one about Anthropic's acceleration rate for improved benchmark results, that put the value at anywhere between 1.1 and 3x per year.
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.
Covert actions in the interest and by the request of a foreign power is spy craft. If you do this openly, then it would not be called spying, it is done all the time; sometimes it is called diplomacy. If you hide the fact that you are working for a foreign power, you are a spy. It is not a necessary condition, but it is sufficient.
China or any other country is not required to follow the U.S.'s laws. If they don't see U.S. rules to their advantage they may work around it.
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.
Folks here tend to forget US laws are just that - US laws. Mostly done to benefit US and nobody else. Its not like US respects any European laws, does it.
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.
Sounds more like a gun runner but for GPUs
I’m not sure if you haven’t followed this story or if you’re constructing some kind of specious argument that the only evidence you’ll accept is a personally signed letter from Xi Jinping. I’ll assume the former.
* 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.
meh. This is the only part that matters:
* 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 would be surprised if that's even her real name.
to u. because presumably u're not us citizen
I think you have a very strange definition of spying if you preclude the Chinese government using an operative to sexually compromise the world's most influential tech leader running the world's most influential tech business into breaking US laws to materially benefit China to an almost unprecedented degree.
I think you've made up your mind on this matter and you're not going to let reality get in the way.
This is not a courtroom. Jensen has been very open that he wants to be able to sell his chips to China. As of today it comes out that he has had other affairs. Jenson may have knowing broken the law. Perhaps the law will have its way with him.
My point is simply what I said at the beginning of this thread: "In effort for us to see clear eyed."
I don't have a horse in this race, but from a US perspective it makes sense to ban chip sales. This is an arms race and any advantage however small makes a difference.
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.
I agree with you and I find it sad. I grew up during the last Cold War. Dario Amodei often writes in new Cold War rhetoric. Is this really the best we can do as humans?
What do you think about USA withdrawing support for Taiwan and letting China take it?
The USA has already shown it will remove its soldiers and military hardware from east asia when a certain middle eastern country seems to require it more. Taiwan should study and meditate a bit on what happened to South Korea.
Name a single technology where the US sold to China and China remained reliant on the US long term for it in recent times. Just a single one would do. That would make me believe this theory that keeps being repeated.
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...
Your reply comes off a bit rude and not within the tone expected on HN. First off, China is not my enemy. I am a humanist (at least try to be).
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.
> 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?
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.
> Name a single technology where the US sold to China and China remained reliant on the US long term for it in recent times.
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.
This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market, when China has more active iPhone user than the whole US population.
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.
It's not the same. Nvidia is way more buyers in the US than they have product to sell. Apple doesn't have a problem keeping supply to meet their demand, and so they need to find additional markets.
It's kinda bad business to fully pull out of a giant market, with a massive customer base, because of a major boom cycle in your product.
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.
it's worse than just that. in this case it creates an even stronger incentive for a domestic chinese competitor to rise up and as soon as a chinese competitor can offer a similar product to what nvidia is offering, then nvidia's clock is already ticking. its probably too late already
It's existential for Nvidia. Jensen understood that the longer he can freely sell to China, the less opportunity/incentive there is for Chinese companies to produce their own silicon and compete head-to-head with Nvidia.
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.
This was going to happen anyways no matter what the US or NVIDIA did. China has done or is doing the same thing in every industry.
If you're z.ai in 2025 with $10 million to spend on GPUs, what's better:
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.
> If you're z.ai in 2025 with $10 million to spend on GPUs, what's better:
> 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.
> Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.
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.
Yes it is Chinas MO. But it probably possible to influence their timing and/or degree. I do not thing they have anywhere near replaced western/Taiwan x86/ARM CPUs, for example?
> There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions.
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.
Exactly, it is the same thing in Hong Kong, Japan or South Korea or any other nation in the region. Just like how they used to smuggle iPhone into China. It is a hidden distribution network that has long established.
I think there are a lot of people who want to bring him down. His competition - AMD, Broadcom, Google. OpenAI and Anthropic also have advocated for banning chip exports to China because of Chinese lab LLM competition. Then there are both Republican and Democrats who likely support the views of OpenAI/Anthropic.
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.
Oh look! We have a list of suspects :-)
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.
He’s is the CEO of NVIDIA since 33 years, he cofounded the company. This allegations are really minuscule.
He seems to have broken the law. That should have consequences. That he cofounded the company should not matter. Neither should it matter that many rich people get away with breaking the law in other cases.
What law did he break?
IF Alice was a spy, and IF he was blackmailed into selling gpus to an ally of the CCP, thus breaking sanctions, he did break law. But both of those are a stretch atp
Foreign laymen here: if these are true, would they be considered treasonous?
It’s not about that, it’s about the cloud compute loophole of export restricted chips. NVIDIA sold billions worth of chips to Megaspeed, a Chinese company spin out in Singapore founded right after the export ban. Neocloud Megaspeed rented most of their compute to Chinese companies like Alibaba circumventing the sanctions. The investigations didn’t find any wrongdoing per se even if it’s very obvious that the whole Megaspeed operation is Chinese state orchestration. Labelling Alice as a spy put an immediate hold to all of this.
https://preview.redd.it/another-women-v0-848jdvan531i1.jpeg?...
The thing is that at this point, even if this was all a plot to take him down, it worked! Can't go back to the information not being public.
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.
It definitely worked. It shows just how powerful the media is at creating narratives.
This one looks highly coordinated with multiple mainstream media outlets piling in.
> It shows just how powerful the media is at creating narratives
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.
We can't be so gullible that we think this wasn't deliberate right?
This X post makes a lot of sense: https://x.com/antfeedapp/status/2120454507448651933
> We can't be so gullible that we think this wasn't deliberate right?
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.
To be fair this is the kind of thing the media and the public love to follow. Public powerful figure, sex, spying, political and business schemes, and additionally most retail investors being exposed to NVDA, it has everything. Doesn't mean it wasn't coordinated at first to get it in the spotlight, but there is no need for that now I think.
Again, repeating my comment from the Jensen thread a few days ago: this is like directly from the David Fincher movie "Gone Girl".
I recommend watching it if the power of media interests you.
Wasn’t the CEO of AMD his cousin? I guess it would match the GoT comparison…
Also likely all gamers and home GPU users in general.
He's a strong advocate for gaming. That's why he started Nvidia in the first place.
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.
They stopped manufacturing the 5090 even under Jensens control. And no the 5090 die is only 750mm squared big, a B200s die is 1628mm squared. That is more than twice the size of a 5090.
the 6000 pro definitely counts as a server GPU. coreweave seems to think so, anyway
A B200 is two dies glued together. A single Blackwell GPU die is the same size as an RTX 5090 basically.
An RTX 5090 is a reticle sized chip.
as nvidia goes into making purely big-business hardware, some other player will arrive to provide the chips to the masses. then, the researchers will use this mass-market hardware for research, supplanting nvidia itself.
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.
The mass population hate AI and billionaires and are perfectly happy with seeing an AI billionaire FAFO.
> This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market, when China has more active iPhone user than the whole US population.
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?
What’d we go to war for again?
Yes but Apple is not Spying on Chinese users on behalf of the Chinese government. They just share information. lol.
>There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions.
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...
The whole affair circus to distract from the export control circumvention is another example of "It's a big club and you ain't in it". In which you is all of us non billionaires.
Did you mean to type "more dodgy" rather than "more doggy"? Or perhaps you know more than has been made public!
Yeah typos lol. Sorry I was on my phone typing that in between breaks.
> And Jensen's view isn't wrong. There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions.
This isn’t about right or wrong. If he knowingly broke the law he should be punished.
> This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market
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.
No need to author a grand conspiracy, it's likely exactly what it looks like. Jensen like to dip his pen in all sorts of ink and China used a honeypot to blackmail him.
China has all the incentive in the world to disrupt a major US AI firm to slow the US down.
I mean, it's a MASSIVE fraud we're talking about.
Pretending there was no China revenue in the books?? That's an insanely huge financial lie
> I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
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).
If he was actually a victim, it would be gross negligence on him and/or his board. CEO's at $100B market cap companies should be undergoing regular, advanced training on spearfishing as well a due diligence on such large chip deals.
> CEO's at $100B market cap companies
Why not CEOs at $73B market cap companies? And increase it with inflation?
I wrote this elsewhere, but right after they fire JH (he's lost all credibility on anything China going forward, and that makes it impossible for him to remain CEO), the board needs to cycle themselves off and get people who can handle the scope of a company like NVDA. The complete lack of real governance and what appears to be any succession plan is squarely on this board.
Unless this was on purpose to sell chips to China through the shell company to avoid sanctions
It's obvious that it was on purpose. He's been involved for years with the Megaspeed spy, he knew exactly what he was doing and where the GPUs were going.
Off topic: Big ups for Gamers Nexus and their investigative journalism.
I've been watching them for some time now and i must say they do pretty good coverage of the crazy tech world. They def don't shy away from deep coverage and chasing of the truth.
I just recently unsubscribed, when it became their "thing". Their LG video was terrible at dividing what TV it did on its own and what they used it for. And they have like 4 "AI Bubble" videos in row, each 40m+ long, where new one adds at best 5 minutes of new information, over the previous. The GPU smuggling investigation was nice but they quickly went downhill from there, and instead of being side projects, it is now the main hook that brings people to channel. People who care about hardware reviews have to go somewhere else.
> Their LG video was terrible at dividing what TV it did on its own and what they used it for.
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.
It also makes sense. I've pretty much stopped watching actual hardware reviews because I've essentially given up on upgrading my PC any time soon, at least until the AI bubble pops. Why watch people review stuff I'll never be able to buy? I may as well watch people review Ferraris and Gucci bags at that point.
> Have uncovered some new and unreported information in the Jensen case. We will be working on this for a while. Stay tuned.
- https://www.youtube.com/@GamersNexus/posts 1 day ago.
Being a victim doesn't make him less guilty in the eyes of the law. Even if a judge finds him to be 100% misled and honey trapped, they will still hold him accountable. If it turns out he expressly avoided sanctions and probably worse leaked military secrets then he might be going to jail. And possibly a small Nvidia top heavy pyramid with him. Anyone who followed orders will go with him, it's going to be more painful than "just" losing the CEO.
> Why not just sell to not-sanctioned entities, ensure compliance to the best of your abilities and otherwise keep your head down?
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.
Liches and Sith Lords plan for centuries.
It was so important the security services didn't even bother to warn him when they found out about the affair. You can say 'suspected' spy about anyone. Classic spin language.
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.
Dude, are you kidding me? You have such a corrupt government for the last two years that they openly did insider trading and all the other stuff. I'm sure somebody was in the known and I'm sure somebody did investigation, there was also an article how a higher ups in the government leaked to Nvidia that there was some investigations and internally there was pressure to do nothing about it.
Eh? The point I'm making is if there was a vaguely serious security risk the security services would have told the CEO ( which is separate from 'taking action' ).
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.
I'd argue that Nvidia sanctions against China have been counter productive.
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:
https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2026/9/hc-lingqu-agent-ai
> The point I'm making is if there was a vaguely serious security risk the security services would have told the CEO
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.
Think about it - after over a year of investigation the strongest thing you can say about Alice Huang is/was a 'suspected' spy - which is a phrase you can use about anything - I suspect you - therefore you are 'suspected'.
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.
Those are not the main issues. Only two core issues. The national security aspect, and the mother of all lawsuits by activist investors of NVIDIA, that the company, their current CEO and the Board is about to get hit by.
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
I said on this a few days ago that he should be thinking about resigning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418016
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.
I'm sure he was thinking about it. doesn't mean he has to. now he probably will
Someone mentioned that the 2nd affair was known about by the board for a long time, and this is pretty common in boards. They don't really care, they just keep it in their pocket until they need the ammo to fire someone. It sounds right to me, affairs are very hard to keep secret for someone that public, and then this news dropped right after the first one.
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.
> As bad as cheating is morally, we don't really know how his wife feels or if they had some open relationship type arrangement, [...]
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.
I think espionage claims are overrated. Politicians made up a trade war that scientists and engineers never wanted in the first place.
I mean it’s complicated, and I wouldn’t say scientists and engineers get much credibility on foreign policy decisions, it’s not their domain
I'd say it is much more their domain than that of the politicians who have no idea how the technology being restricted is used or built.
> 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 espionage allegations are against China though, not against him. He is the alleged victim.
Having your house unknowingly bugged by a spy makes you a victim. Having an affair with a spy, in what now appears to be a broader pattern of questionable ethical behavior, not so much.
If your lover gets recruited by a spy agency you are a victim of spying.
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.
People frequently accept that their spouse has an affair as long as it's not in their face. Basically a tacit arrangement that is never talked about.
It's not that boards don't care about the affairs, they prefer to keep it in their back pocket when a takeover is planned.
Yeah I mean they don't seem to care about the moral implications or view it as poor judgement like some people here say, or else they would act when they find out. They just see ammunition..
If I were on the board and considering firing Jensen, I’d first maneuver to sell all my shares ASAP.
That would be illegal
By the way that is an interesting insider trading question.
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?
Huh I didn’t know the board knew about the Powell case. I was wondering why all the affair stories were coming out at once.
> As bad as cheating is morally, we don't really know how his wife feels
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...
https://polymarket.com/event/jensen-huang-divorce-in-2026
Gamblers aren't known for being particularly rational, so I don't know why this would provide any insight at all. It's just gambling.
> Polymarket prices
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.
The issue isn’t a moral one from a a company perspective, it’s a conflict of interests issue.
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
this is like a theory and practice situation. in theory this is conflict of interest issue possibly undermines objectivity and so on. in practice Nvidia thrives and the man is a substantial reason of this. removing him will be plain stupid from the point of view of the company's performance.
Why should we assume corporate codes are morally just though? I do not. In fact I would argue this is evidence that company codes are in a general sense draconian and/or disconnected from social reality under capitalism, etc.
Yeah, he should leave. Next earnings call is Nov 17, he needs to be out by then so that he is not a distraction (CFO could do the call).
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.
Do you own any NVDA?
Its like cheering for firing Steve Jobs. We know how this story ends.
It is like firing Jobs yes. But when they had fired Jobs, Apple wasn't a trillion dollar firm. Was it?
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
Apple is doing fine for many years before everyone started questioning a lot of its decisions and directions.
Right but back then Apple did well, but not as well as it did when Jobs came back.. right?
Nvidia is an extremely successful company right now. It was called the central bank of AI just a few months ago
I'm one of those people that says CEOs are overpayed and interchangeable but this is absolutely not the case for Jensen
Not to be overly pedantic, but we pretty much all own NVidia, by dint of it being rolled up in the various indexes that our retirement funds track.
It's kind of hard for US techies to not have exposure to a company that accounts for >5% of the S&P 500.
> 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.
failure of integrity is the operating mode for the most powerful corporate leaders on earth.
> who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy
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.
His Dwarkesh interview should have tipped everyone off that he had a, rather powerful, irrational side.
> might also experience some just desserts in the not too distant future.
I don't know. Some people have too much power to be held accountable for their actions, e.g. Trump
What is wrong with Jensen's sex life? It seems to disturb you.
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.
Everybody has to be flamboyant rainbow people or monk. That's mandatory today.
He can have whatever sex he likes.
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.
How many companies in the world do you think make no use of any Nvidia products?
Come on, there is a difference between a company having some Nvidia, and sleeping with a salesperson at a company with a massive conflict who wants to buy lots of your hardware and import it in China, possibly in breach of laws.
Do you really think this is the same as sleeping with a random person at a company which happens to use some Nvidia products?
People are using the argument that Larry Ellison, Brin, Bill Gates, and other tech moguls also did this and really didnt face major consequences.
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.
He shouldn’t be shagging subordinates or senior employees of customers, basically. In a way, the alleged spy thing is just icing on the cake; well-run companies won’t tolerate the conflict of interest even without a spy being involved.
> What is wrong with Jensen's sex life?
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.
> 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...
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...
> who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy
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.
idk maybe successfully founding & managing (currently) BIGGEST technological company for 3 decades,
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
For real. Without the crypto bubble and then the AI bubble, he would still be a guy selling GPUs to gamers.
NVidia was at the right place at the right time, nothing else.
Not really, there were other GPU manufacturers who aren't around any more and didn't get propped by those waves. There's no denying that the company was doing more things right than their competitors.
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.
Not really, they were casting about for these kind of opportunities since day 1 in the early 00s, and pushing it with GPGPU talks at universities in the 2010s. And eventually it bore fruit.
Jensen has absolutely made his own luck here. They were in the right place waiting for the right time for decades before it hit.
Here's why Jensen is critical to Nvidia as well as the industry:
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.
That doesn't explain why Jensen is critical to NVDA. It explain why he WAS.
That's like saying it is OK that Steve Jobs died when he did because the iPhone was already in production by that time.
Jensen said we have AGI. Can't AGI do his job?
https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/1s7sgg0/nvidias_jensen...
And clearly it was ok from a business PoV?
So you think Jobs had reached the end of his inventive streak?
You reckon Apple board shouldn't have voted for his death?
You think Jobs invented the products he was selling? He was a salesman, not an engineer.
Jobs was a product visionary. He wasn’t an engineer, and wasn’t just a salesman.
> Jobs was a product visionary.
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".
have you looked at Apple's stock price and product portfolio since 2011?
You don't think Apple would be worth much more if Jobs was still CEO?
They seem to be doing fine without him
Yes, but they would do even more fine with him. Since Jobs' passing Apple has released only one successful product category: Watch.
AirPods bring in around $18-22 billion annually
RIP but yeah he was a bit rapey and didn't really add anything
Pretty sure his criticality to NVDA is the fact that he founded it and has been its CEO for all of its existence. GPGPUs were entirely his vision. Back in 2008 when no one gave a shit about CUDA or GPGPUs he was the only one insisting that massive data processing on GPUs was going to be important for data centers. He kept funding that for another 15 years despite the target audience being niche scientific computing and the market not rewarding him for that. NVDA without him is going to be a different company. That’s obviously bound to happen sooner or later, but Apple without Steve is a different company than Apple with Steve. Could be better, could be worse, but it’ll surly be different.
It is hard to imagine NVIDIA becoming better without him
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this was a ploy to buy the Chinese more time. They are coming for the GPGPU game with early entrants like Lisuan Tech LX 7G100. They are still a few years behind but you know their tenacity and commitment to getting it done by hook or by crook. A few years of Nvidia stumbling in the woods is all thats standing in the way of China catching up and taking yet another industry away from the west (as if Nuclear, Batteries, Cars, drones weren't enough). The Dems will have an ax to grind and I guess unlucky Jensen is the first victim. If they kill this golden goose man oh man the history books are going to be brutal.
> The Dems will have an ax to grind and I guess unlucky Jensen is the first victim
Ahh, looks like the midterm results are still smarting!
The Moor has done his work, the Moor may go.
He was sleeping with staff and a suspected Chinese spy. No one of character can respect or trust him anymore.
So when 98th woman births Elon’s 69th child we’ll draw the line and get him out as CEO? Or elect a Commander-in-Chief (twice) who F’ed porn stars while his wife was pregnant?
Why are you assuming your interlocutor is in favor of Elon or Trump holding their positions? If anything, one should assume he is consistently against all three men being in positions of influence.
fair, but I don’t see any other hot stories crashing a company over a horny CEO. funny how we bring in some moral high ground selectively. if we did this as a whole there wouldn’t be many CEOs or Presidents left in their position, no?
CEOs of Intel, McDonalds, Nestle all fell after similar things came to light.
all three had explicit policies that CEOs violated. if nvidia has the same the ousting should be straight-forward. though I am sure Boards will find loophole in the policy (e.g. "she was not a direct subordinate") if they want to keep CEO around
>> Under Nvidia's code of conduct, employees are instructed to avoid actual or potential conflicts of interest, with "personal relationships" specifically identified as a possible source of such conflicts.
>> 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
>Why are you assuming your interlocutor is in favor of Elon or Trump holding their positions?
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.
Most CEOs are fired for this. There are some exceptions sure but there are always exceptions. In reality, an affair with a subordinate is an express ticket to getting fired in Corporate America.
Only if you get exposed publicly like Huang, and sometimes not even then.
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.
Isn't this a strawman? Plenty of people want Trump out, but impeachment works differently
do they want Trump out because of his infidelities or for other reasons? even Evangelicals voted for him (twice) so I don’t think it is him F’ing everything that moves
I mean I want trump out for his infidelities as well as allegations of sexual assaults even on minors. I want him out for these reasons and more. I believe also lost the majority vote both times. The US elections being a convoluted mess with tons of corruption and Israeli influence is hardly a reason for why Jensen Huang shouldn’t suffer the consequence for his actions. I say fire him.
he definitely did not lose popular vote in 2024 though… I don’t have a problem if he is fired but questioning why same standard isn’t applied generally? if he is fired, do we start a country-wide crusade to oust every horny CEO?
I said majority vote not popular vote. I don’t blame you for being confused. If Jensen gets fired it won’t be merely due to his unfaithfulness. He put the company at risk by literally screwing a spy and allowing china to bypass export controls.
What do you mean "lost the majority vote"? More people voted for him than anyone else, and he got a majority of the electoral college.
Look up plurality vs majority.
In American English "majority" can mean "plurality", it's a bit weird! [1] Saying "lost the majority vote" when you mean "won the election with under 50%" is bound to confuse people.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/majority definition 1.c
I am not making this up, majority vote and popular vote are literal phrases used to describe the results. Please look it up. I agree it’s confusing.
I know you're not making it up, "plurality" is a real word and in a technical context "majority" can be contrasted with "plurality". But even then you really wouldn't say "lost the majority vote" for someone who won an election (try searching for that phrase: none of the hits are people using it like you are).
The majority vote is being used often to indicate whether or not majority actually voted in a given President. In the USA however, majority vote win happens infrequently nowadays, only 4 out of last 9 elections with winner won a majority vote. so perhaps unfair to bring that up, the 2024 was an absolute blowout by USA's standards
Elon is a despicable human being. But you should know his children are usually conceived via IVF, not naturally.
Secondly, no one sane defends our pedophile president so not sure why you bring that up as supporting fact.
77,303,573 did in 2024 election
those were not all votes of support, like last week was mostly not about supporting democrats
Just because he isn't as bad as Elon Musk doesn't mean he's okay
Totally fine to want those people away from positions of responsibility too — I certainly do. Why assume people are arguing for an exceptionally harsh treatment here? (Even though, as the CEO of a public company whose influence on the future arguably outweighs both Musk and Trump, it would be merited)
Thanks for making sure this discussion didn't pass without some classic whataboutism. You're a great service to the people on this site. Keep it up.
People care for financial results (the recent 4% stock dip after the scandal means nothing, Nvidia does dips like that 10-15 times every year based on various news).
And almost all of big CEOs sleep with stuff or not-their-wives. Many do worse, think certain private islands...
Let's start holding all of them accountable. Then it'll be fair.
Accountable for what? Cheating? It’s not illegal and hence none of your business.
Evading sanctions.
If maybe Jensen set foot in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or another ME country they could stone him for adultery. Thank god we don't have these religious laws in the US -- well I hope we don't..
I, a shareholder who the board is supposed to represent, respect and trust him as a business person. I don't care for his private choices, but quite frankly I really don't care either. I'm not his wife. And I don't think any spy convinced him to sell more chips he is chips maxxing to the extreme all by himself.
> No one of character can respect or trust him anymore.
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.
There’s no way at least 50% of SP500 CEO’s never had an affair haha
His behavior demonstrates poor judgement. Demonstrating poor judgement is the best reason to fire an executive. More companies should do it.
A personal failing not a poor business judgement. Unless it can be shown that the company could have sold more GPUs if he had exercised better judgement.
At the highest levels and in the times of most stress, can you have one without the other?
A personal failing involving treachery made public lowers trust towards him, even in business situations. Should have been more upright or more discrete.
The two are not unrelated. Judgement is judgement, and a person who shows poor judgement outside of business is at risk of showing poor judgement in business as well. As indeed he did: the dude was banging one of his subordinates, something he would've known full well is completely unacceptable in American business culture.
Warren Buffet has a non-puritanical relationship structure.
Who cares?
>> completely unacceptable
Except, it happens frequently and most of the time people ignore it. In practice, it is accepted most of the time.
Are you serious? Sleeping with a subordinate gets people fired all the time. It is absolutely not ignored.
+1. I know a couple who was working in a multi national. She was reporting to him. When they started dating she moved to a different department. Eventually they married, she left the multi national altogether and became a stay at home mom.
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.
They didn’t say every time, they said all the time - which is true. But as you said, it can work out if it’s disclosed and a person can move outside of the org chart of the other.
I'm American. I don't agree with you. Don't speak for me
Good for you. You don't define the workplace culture we operate in. Any employer out there would fire you in a heartbeat for sleeping with a subordinate.
Agrees. The company actually sold more GPUs. Not fewer!
Having alleged sexual intercourse with a direct report certainly arises to poor business judgment.
I think he can be disciplined without the company sawing off the branch it is sitting on. If Huang had been sued for sexual harassment then the bar would be higher.
It’s not just a personal failing. He was being used to bypass restrictions against an adversarial government. Why are people acting like he’s in trouble because he violated the boy scouts code of conduct? The restrictions on China have a national security angle to them.
This "China is an enemy state" story is a stale joke.
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.
It's interesting because they like apparently missed the part where in literal wars companies (ex. Ford, Alcoa) literally supply both sides and nobody broke those companies up.
China can be a trading partner while also being a geopolitical rival, no?
Imagine if every high street in America had three stores selling Hamas-styled garden gnomes with "death to America :)" written on them. Obviously that does not happen, right? Because Hamas is actually an enemy of America. Since this does happen with China we can conclude China is not an enemy.
It must be wonderful to go through life with such a simple-minded view of the world.
It’s difficult to talk about this stuff when starting from 0, but I’ll try to kick it off and leave it for someone else to wrap up.
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.
> 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
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.
They are decoupling but its a slow process
so many sterotypos in a row. no wonder you people never learn and will fail before you even know. The freedom of press really create a generation of brainwashed people in the 'free world'
> 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.
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.
> 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.
If the Chinese government is such a friend why are they employing spies to work around trade restrictions?
Chinese policy is actually to ban import of NVIDIA cards. It's partly a "you can't fire me, I quit" thing and partly a "burn the boats on the beach" thing to fully commit to developing rivals domestically.
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?
> 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?
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"...
Export restrictions to China have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political capital. OpenSSL is a restricted export as a hold over from WW2 era of political theater for shit sake.
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.
Sure, they have nothing to do with NatSec if you think AI progress will plateau here.
The timeline of the Chinese spy stuff raises serious concerns - the Chinese company created the shell company and days later inked a massive deal with NVIDIA. There are federal sanctions against this... that's not a poor business judgement?
> 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.
He actually sold more GPUs, just not where the US government wanted them to go.
Violation sanctions, and likely knowingly, is not good for Nvidia.
If MegaSpeed (or any quantity buyer of GPUs in Asia) held all required licenses and met all U.S. export and KYC regulations, selling product to them was legal.
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.
This whole China ban is meaningless in my opinion because the ban is only on exporting physical GPUs to China. The US is OK with Chinese logging in to machines that are physically located in Singapore. Is there any advantage in sitting close to the GPUs, if not what is the point of this ban?
China can generate an enormous amount of electricity so a GPU is worth more to them on home soil.
> The US is OK with Chinese logging in to machines that are physically located in Singapore
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.
Maybe.
But if what they discovered wasn’t usable in a prosecution, pressuring the board with his affairs isn’t unthinkable.
>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.
At this level, as he should know with the amount of scrutiny on public figures and hoe that they say and do can affect share price - ones personal actions can be business decisions.
And this is an obvious example.
Poor morals isn't the same as poor judgement. Clearly he has had very very good business and technical judgement over the years.
I mean, even before you get into her being a spy, giving company secrets to an affair partner generally isn't very good business judgment either.
Whether you think that outweighs everything else is a distinct argument, but the two things aren't mutually exclusive.
Dating a spy is not poor judgment? And sorry, if you're running of the world's most valuable and strategically important companies, and if an attractive woman with hazy business connections appears out of the blue in your orbit, you really ought to entertain the possibility.
Wasn't it Anthropic or OpenAI that sent a warning about this exact possibility to regular employees?
Exactly! I said this elsewhere in this thread but why are we so willing to reward these executives with insane wealth and influence but they can’t be held to the same level of standards they expect from their own employees?
It is the same standard though.
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.
> Clearly he has had very very good business and technical judgement over the years.
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.
Treating AMD/Intel as a control group, Nvidia has done quite well.
Are you implying that if you have good judgement a few times, you can't have any bad judgement ever?
We have seen CEOs stick around for far more, let alone a CEO who has been there from the start.
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
> Was anything confidential leaked?
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.
It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company. We don't even know what arrangements him and his wife may have. But in the worst case, it's immoral and wrong but a personal issue for him and his family.
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.
He should have divorced first, as expensive as it would have been. Being a single/divorced billionaire playboy is understandable, being a married billionaire playboy is going to be messy.
US people are in another level or idiotic puritanism and hypocrisy.
Wow, how can you respond to the parent in this way? Are you a psychopath? Also where is the hypocrisy? You accuse without any support.
They actually are. People cry "psychopath" without reading the definition of the word.
> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.
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.
He didn't sleep with a subordinate - Alice Huang was an Nvidia client, not an employee.
the other dalliance
I'm talking about his other affair, with Kimberly Powell. I've amended the previous comment to say so because I guess people don't know he's had more than one.
You've exceeded its history cutoff
Apologies, I was unaware of Jensen's embarrassing parallelism when I wrote my comment!
It's just 2 being public. When you see 2 ants in your house, its never just 2 ants.
Lots of people meet in the workplace, it seems a really US thing to be so hung up on it.
Ok. And?
And? I guess there's a few people on HN that are sleeping with their co-workers and their wives don't know about it and they're feeling a little guilty.
There is always an awful lot of defense and downplaying of infidelity on hn. It is common but less common then the number that dont.
It’s more of a recent thing in the US too[1]. It started aggressively declining in the early 2000s (along with almost every other way except for online and bars). Though I think there is a general stigma in the US these days for “meeting at work” unless under certain circumstances, like 2 new hires hooking up, or 2 people at the same company but they don’t work together. Anything else and people are gonna start questioning the power dynamics and a bunch of things that make it not worth the hassle. Maybe it was the Lewinsky case, maybe it was the popularization of workplace abuse, maybe it is the bipartisan increase in judgement casting and virtue signaling.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/ho...
[2] https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst
Meeting in the workplace is not the issue, the superior/subordinate relationship is. The power imbalance creates liability.
Re: his wife, there is absolutely no way he would admit to some kind of open relationship thing in public, that would be even worse PR. Sleeping with an exec.. personally I don't care, this is incredibly common and there is no actual legal problem if there wasn't favoritism.
Why are you going so far out of your way to invent reasons why he secretly didn't actually cheat on his wife and to ignore the corporate legal risk of non-disclosed relationships that create conflicts of interest?
I just feel that personal misdeeds should stay in that realm, and also a ban on relationships in the workplace like we effectively have now has kind of been bad for our culture broadly... you can call it a "legal risk" but at the end of the day, if there was no favouritism then nothing wrong happened besides some form to HR not being filled out.
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.
Jensen's behavior is also very consequential...
Are you his PR agent? Is your argument seriously he had open relationship with his ~70 year old wife?
> there is absolutely no way he would admit to some kind of open relationship thing in public, that would be even worse PR.
That argument doesn't hold water given everything Elon has done.
Heck Elon also slept with an exec. No one cared.
Musk slept and has a child with Shivon Zilis who was his subordinate at the time, didn't seem to matter that much
Just to clarify their child was via IVF. Which seems to be a common thing with Musk.
He was duped into smuggling GPUs, violating sanctions, and risking US national security, which endangers the company. Ain’t just that he banged someone.
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.
I bet many other CEOs do similar kinds of stuff, but for some reason this guy got singled out. The hungry hungry hippos probably did it because they could seeing as he doesn't control the board like MZ.
Yep. His affairs cast a long shadow over his push for "restricting AI accelerators is bad, we should just sell all the GPUs we want to China".
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.
What's the argument that he was duped into doing it? He has plenty of incentive to want to sell more GPUs and broaden his customer base as much as possible, there's no evidence that sleeping with some Chinese lady that may or may not be a spy has anything to do with it.
>It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.
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?
So far I haven't seen a shred of evidence pointing to Alice Huang being a spy besides just her being a Chinese citizen.. and China has been explicit in instructing its industries to NOT rely on NVIDIA cards as much as possible and build their own.
Ok, but the people who have the information to determine these things aren't in the habit of distributing detailed evidence to news organizations.
Honestly given the amount of hysteria, disinformation and propaganda I've seen about China since they've become a credible rival to the US, I'm not inclined to believe this stuff without serious evidence.
The same people making the claim also regularly lie, or make ultimately false claims if you want to be more charitable.
This isn’t McCarthy waving a his latest batch of names in front of the camera. Journalists started sniffing around Megaspeed a year ago, noticing its business presence and purchase volume didn’t add up.
Megaspeed circumventing Chinese law banning imports of Nvidia cards is evidence against her being a spy rather than for. Why would a spy be working directly against official policy?
There's more than one kind of shady person.
Yes, China has been pushing their tech companies to use Chinese GPUs.. which they've gotten push back from their ai companies, saying they're not competitive yet (which is true). And one of those AI companies -- Alibaba -- was the investor in Megaspeed.. which is where Jensen met Alison.
> There are solid arguments for treason here
Yeah no. This doesn't even come close to treason. Treason in the US is incredibly difficult to prove, which is intentional.
You don't think selling $7.5B of export controlled technology to an unvetted and unknown company, led by a woman who's former gig was TV news host, and who you also happen to be sleeping with, was poor judgement?
Its a good decision if there are no proven legal issues to selling to that company. It made more sales.
If he was banging the maid, then that is between him and his wife.
That was not the case here.
> It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.
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.
> It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.
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.
> But it's clear that most people disagree.
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.
And yet the stock drops 8.5 percent when the news comes out, it appears people do care huh?
The evidence for most people caring about this issue isn't the online discourse about it.
The evidence is their stock being down 8% since the news came out.
How else would you explain that drop?
> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company
If you don't see how secret affairs with spies and employees impacts the company then you're being willfully ignorant.
The point is he didn't behave rationally on one big really important point from a shareholder value standpoint. He didn't just sleep with someone and his arrangements in this regard are irrelevant
> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company. We don't even know what arrangements him and his wife may have. But in the worst case, it's immoral and wrong but a personal issue for him and his family.
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.
Should boards fire overweight CEOs? Poor judgment eating and drinking surely translates to how they manage a company
Performative denseness is unattractive.
Pot meet kettle
So is being fat
By this measure, Sergei Brin and Eric Schmidt and Musk and many more would be retired somewhere quietly.
Ok. And?
They slept with foreign spies and helped them evade export controls?
Does poor judgement in personal matters translate into poor judgement in running a company? Especially with this track record?
If that was the case, IMO he wouldn't have come this far.
NVIDIA is one of the most successful companies in the world in large part because of Jensen.
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.
> by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years
That's less than a slap on the wrist.
This reads as inauthentic astroturfing. The man was compromised by intelligence.
Sleep with a subordinate. Sleep with Chinese spy. Sell export restricted chips to Chinese shell company (likely knowingly). Lobby on behalf of China.
If he knowingly violated US export restrictions then that's something for the US government to look in to.
What is firable in your view then?
I dont like this crummy idea that you can do no wrong as long as stock price increases.
There should be harm to shareholders. If the US investigates and found that export control laws have been violated and fines Nvidia $X billion then that's harm.
I mean, shares a down a lot, at least some is attributable to his behavior, so there was very direct harm.
Short-term share prices are not a good metric for anything. Shares were down significantly even before this news, and that was because of concern that datacenters will be banned by newly elected politicians.
He was lobbying on behalf of shareholders. In case you didn't know, we want him selling every last chip at the highest price possible.
You are definitely overselling him. If you are a hardware maker, you naturally want to sell to as many markets as possible. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith.
Agree. I'm thinking any decent CEO will gladly lean into new markets that want to use your products in ways you did not anticipate.
Why didn't other HW mfgs predict market swings as well as he did?
Why did NVDA fare differently than AMD or Intel?
> For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.
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
He had a nice jacket but I think it was Ian Buck that was actually useful?
No one is irreplaceable
They should also give him a slap on the wrist while they're at it
Thank you for the insight, Claude.
the only things the "AI industry" has done is price normal people out of computing, give justification for companies to lay people off, fill the internet with slop, contribute to centralizing capital, and add a transaction cost to everything people do with their computers. i couldn't care less about the "industry" that focuses on profits or the "nation" that is more committed to overseas wars than providing basic infrastructure.
AI is strategic, so the government pays for it behind the curtain. Everything the government buys is taken out the hands of the poorest people. The rest pays more for what is left.
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.
The man cannot even keep his pants secure - how can he secure GPUs from being smuggled?
Here’s why Jensen needs to go:
I’m a gamer and I want my fucking GPUs back.
You would never have had them in the first place without him. Say your thanks first before you kick him out the door.
> Huang backed the use of Nvidia GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computing, including the development of CUDA
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?
I think we are yet to know how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Nobody is irreplaceable. And this includes Jensen Huang.
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.
didn't the very early deep learning frameworks use opengl and shader constructs? I recall reading something to that effect.
If my memory right, it was around time when opengl allowed programmable shaders to render to texture. It was limited to floating point numbers and very short programs.
Nope. These are inexplicable things that point to Jensen allegedly collaborating with a foreign actor and nation. The board should punish Huang and save our industry and the nation. Plain and simple.
Viewing people like this is unhealthy. Nvidia could have failed instead of 3dfx, and that it didn't involved some luck, not just the magical clairvoyance of one individual.
And anyway, whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.
Cuda was first but there was also openCL shortly thereafter. The idea was bound to hatch.
> whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.
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 design of cuda is basically just brookGPU from stanford (supported by IBM, Sony, ATI, NVIDIA and DARPA), CUDA isn't so important beyond the fact that a hardware company can use it as a moat if they want to be anti-competitive. Google bought PeakStream, intel bought RapidMind.
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.
There's a nearly 20 year lead up to the current CUDA dominance including working with developers, but on the gaming side there's also a parallel with the dominance of nvidia's gaming tech versus how much ATi/AMD were able to get their tech to stick. Nv invested not just in capable hardware then throw it over the fence to leave developers to figure out, but software solutions easily integrated by others and engineer support to show off their hardware in the best light.
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.
> 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.
No chance of that - it wasn't luck. I was there. Nvidia was simply a lot better and Huang must get a lot of credit but he hired good people.
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
You describe why Jensen WAS critical for Nvidia and the industry.
> For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.
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.
Visionaries you can get a dime a dozen. Worshipping individuals like this is not healthy.
This is some AI-generated slop.
Sure, and Jobs was a visionary for launching the iPhone, yet Apple has still done incredibly well under Cook
Back in 2002-2003 there were folks attempting to get GPUs to do non graphics tasks because of the amount of potential compute available. I recall running a sorting algorithm on a Radeon at the time. It wasn't quick but it worked.
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.
Nvidia made that idea possible by making GeForce 3 in 2001, we experimented with GPGPU because Nvidia already created the opportunity. And at the time, using a tiny specialized fraction of GPUs (of all things) for general-purpose computation was an absolutely ridiculous idea never taken seriously by most people, even us doing it.
He's an extremely skilled shovel seller, but let's not pretend he foresaw the reason for every hole being dug. Most universities taught CUDA classes way back. Did they also see deep learning and cryptocurrencies coming? Supercomputers did exist and where all about FLOPS and that was a legit market. Intel released their Xeon Phi cards around the same time. Ironically, while deep learning started with consumer graphics cards, it could have started on super computers and right now it's back to super computers anyway.
NVIDIA went nowhere for much of its history. Just look at its stock chart for most of its history.
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.
>Here's why
stopped reading
I feel like you're overstating NVidia's influence. OpenCL with AMD GPUs was also just fine around that time, we were all figuring out how much you could port and get a crazy speed up for not much effort. NVidia's ecosystem was particularly annoying to deal with on Linux. Maybe we'd have gotten AlexNet a year later without Cuda.
GPGPU computing massively predates both Cuda and OpenCL
People arguing the technical and business merits of what Jensen brought to the company aren't getting how serious these allegations against him are.
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
The amount of times the word “allegation” and “suspicion” and the way this soap opera is flowing around screams that its all smokescreen. We don’t even know if this women was a spy… even that is an “allegation”.
The facts are very scarce and yet this has been blown out of proportion.
Maybe I am wrong :-) time will tell.
On the contrary, the allegations are tabloid level nonsense. Jensen does not even posses any "sensitive info". He is just a ceo for a company that designs chips, something China has no trouble doings. What China lacks is the manufacturing knowhow of the most advanced lithography machines which will also allow them to manufacture the most advanced chips locally. Huang however does not have a single clue about that chip manufacturing.
A single clue really? I reckon he knows a decent amount about chip manufacturing. You know, as part of his role getting microchips designed and manufactured for thirty years. Ok he might not know the minutiae about the techniques used at TSMC but he’ll know a huge amount - he’s not just hand waving at subordinates getting them to deal with it. The fact that he doesn’t yak on about it shouldn’t be confused for ignorance.
He has access to all sensitive info, he's the chief officer! He would not have access to some sensitive unreleased, but the rest he's pretty aware. And he signs every deal.
Yeah, he has die layouts tattooed on his penis.
He started as an engineer and easily could have all kinds of shit on a laptop that could have been accessed physically
On the plus side we might start seeing a lot more modded 5090 with 96GB of ram
What's so magical about selling to the USG that it should create some sort of obligation on the part of a civilian CEO?
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.
If you sell national security impactful equipment to the USG, you're in a special category, private industry or not.
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.
One thing is the China question. Another thing is the question of open source AI.
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.
The claim that he sold massive amounts of chips to a restricted country as being "massively illegal" is absolutely false.
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.
This is the biggest problem with HN: people who make big claims without enough research usually get upvoted. But try saying something against, say, Rust, Apple products etc., and you’ll be massively downvoted by fanboys who think they’re superior to everyone else.
Hn is just a rumor mill these days. All people do is gossip
That has always been the case as far as I can tell. The idea that forums were less about rumors and gossip in the past is nonsense
>Apple products
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
> 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
My understanding was the Megaspeed sales weren’t classified as sales to China. Nvidia circumvented those requirements.
Based on what? I thought Megaspeed circumvented those requirements?
Did they? Singapore and Malaysia are not China, FYI, and there is no prohibition on Chinese entities using GPU capacity overseas.
Yes. A lot of folks on here were initially thinking the issue with the Chinese spy was a sort of “oh funny how silly” type issue. For someone in his position with Nvidia a strategically important company for the US that’s a grave error of judgment. Add then yesterday revelations of additional indiscretions and this suddenly a growing pattern of incredibly poor judgement.
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.
They guy has been running Nvidia for over 30 years and has billions of dollars - what would make him want to sell out to China? What possibly could they offer him? You actually think she was like, "if you tell me secrets then I'll sleep with you"
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.
Like most office affairs its rarely if ever about that.
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.
No harm no foul then. Let adults be adults.
Not sure about how the government or his company perceives 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.
she was like, "if you give me allocation of gpus for delivery now rather than in 5 years then I'll sleep with you"
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
I don't think he'd sell out to China. But I can believe he'd be sharing high valuable information during some pillow talk sessions.
If you have a CEO doing that, you need to fire them.
But this is not the domain of the board, is it? Whether he put the national security at risk is up to US Government to decide. The moral side of the question is for the people involved to decide. For the board to decide is the company will be better off w/o him.
> The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
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.)
The relationship has been to a degree known to even the public for years, it's extremely unlikely that intelligence services didn't know about it until now and that they'd permit it if they'd consider it a possibility that Jensen could leak any important IP
Nah.
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.
> The real problem is that nobody knows how much sensitive info Jensen gave this woman or how far that info spread.
Why? If he's that important then our own intelligence community ought to be doing counterintelligence, making sure he's ok, providing support to him and so on. This is not some random guy. Did we just forget to do that?
What’s the non-cynical explanation here which doesn’t involve Jensen having ruffled feathers he shouldn’t have?
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
I think you should consider the genuine do-gooders inside the federal government who wanted to blow the lid on this for a year but were blocked by the president. Now that he’s weak, they went for it.
You’re deducing too much from two lines of reporting
does the timing seem random to you?
> 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.
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.
He literally has children with Shivon, who is an employee / direct reportee informally in at least some of his companies.
Has Shivon been implicated in billions of dollars' worth of export control violations?
(Also not batting for Elon, but you asked for reasons why people would care about this scandal more.)
That's a fair point. I wasn't aware that she had a reporting chain to Musk, but it seems that she did when she worked at Tesla and Neuralink.
Musk has 4 children with a neurolink exec that reported to him. She was also on OpenAIs board until 2023, where she fed him confidential info about the company . The relationship has been ongoing since 2016, but was kept secret until 2022.
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.
Let's not forget that if almost anyone else did what Musk pulled with Starlink in Ukraine he would get a 5 am visit from counterintelligence at his house the next day.
The difference is that Musk is an actual oligarch and Huang is "just" a billionaire.
6. Huang's public persona wasn't unhinged enough, and too Asian, to withstand such a scandal.
> 1. China hawks in tech and admin wanted him out
kinda weird China would want him out, considering he's been begging to sell chips to them
You're making the assumption implicitly when comparing to Musk that this should be fair or about morality.
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.
> 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.
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
Is that true? The orange man has been openly accused of being a Russian asset for quite a while.
Sadly, I hate to make it political.. but I don’t think left wing people can admit they are being mislead. Huge groupthink consensus motivations on both sides but it’s much worse for left wing persons.
They commit the sins of the religious more than they think
Eh, the hammer will down on Musk for his Ukraine betrayal.
There are three forms of accountability here, that Elon and other newer tech founders meticulously calcified themselves away from
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.
Nvidia is one of the most critical strategic assets in the USA today, underpinning economic dominance and national defence. Leadership at this level usually operates under an implicit shield. Normal procedure would be to cover-up. A sudden loss of Nvidia's founder and CEO at this juncture is a blow to American strategic posture and a windfall to China.
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.
Your last sentence lacks clarity for me
Commenter is saying the real news isn't the affairs. (Trump was told about the spy late 2025.)
But "whatever" happened to make them count.
E.g. Jensen angers some important people. Or someone decides NVIDIA has too much market control. Etc.
I mean main media outlets know that the public really has turned on billionaires so this is some meat to feed the readers (great ad rev). Someone from the administration leaking the information to a reporter for sure wouldn't be surprising without knowing how much it would blow up. Also many other viable theories too.
Seems like this happened just after the US midterm elections, maybe there's something there?
Perhaps they reached a conclusion that congress would inevitably discover this once real oversight happens, so they decided better to get it out now before Democrats are actually in control? It makes quite a lot of sense to do it now from that perspective. Who knows, maybe a presidential pardon shoe is about to drop as well.
I figured there will be quite a lot of people taking actions like this ... but nVidia was a surprise for sure.
Right exactly. Two months is a long time for this to blow over. It will be far outside the news cycle before anyone is called up to Congress. This is the safest time there will ever be to rip the band-aid off.
I think it’s factions within the GOP. Pro NatSec people wanted to get it out for a long time. Trump blocked. They agreed to keep a lid on it for the midterm to not embarrass Trump and thus hurt their side. Now they’re free to speak.
Which affair?
It turns out he was banging an employee from his company, too. Dude is a sex addict.
let me get this straight :
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?
I am simply observing that at this level affairs are usually covered-up for the interest of the nation. This affair was covered-up for a bit, seeing as it was broadcast on Taiwan news in 2024, so something else changed for them to end the cover-up and broadcast the affair to America.
llm slop
One would hope.
More like brAIn rot tbh
probably; reminds me of a quote by Chomsky making fun of postmodernists
> 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
Gates, Bezos, and now Huang ? Let's see, whose left ? Zuck ? I'm sure there are plenty of skeleton's hiding in his closet ...
A "windfall to China?" Jensen Huang seems to have been conspiring with Alice Huang to illegally sell high-end NVIDIA chips to China. That's a windfall to China.
Sure is convenient for everyone to spend all their time talking about the CEOs personal life than however many billions of prohibited sales have been happening here.
China have billions of $ of GPUs sitting on the dock because their government capped imports of nvidia.
There is not going to be a stop of chips going into China.
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
Kneecapping Nvidia in this case is absolutely a windfall to China
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.
Pedantically: it's not a windfall if they specifically brought it about.
China has a stated government policy they don't want Nvidia chips and you aren't allowed to import them.
2 affairs - one with a sub-ordinate and one is a foreign agent who got chip flow through to a sanctioned country.
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 am wondering if his public apology for being unfaithful to his wife (weird for it to be public, to his employees) is actually covering up for some corporate malfeasance.
You mean alleged chipflow to China?
If Apple can survive losing Jobs, Nvidia can definitely survive losing Huang.
Apple survived when Jobs returned.
Been doing just fine without him since.
I hope “fine” isn’t an illusion.
Compared to what?
CIA hawks. Self-inflicted wounds again.
Three things are happening that seem relevant for timing.
Midterms over, major loss of power for faction Huang seems linked to
Distillation getting harder
Anthropic IPO
Not to mention the recent government rebranding to Superintelligence.
I think a new regulatory regime is coming.
Nuanced opinions
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?
I think the revelations about his children working for the company as well aren't helping him much as well.
I was going to say that getting your children a job – even a good job – isn't generally a problem. But installing them as senior directors with million dollar salaries does seem like a bit much.
Founders benefits? Also "family business" loyalty can be a win for the company.
Jensen has successfully grown the company and thus he can be trusted to hire the best talent, even if they come from unusual backgrounds. Perhaps, they were hired because their insights from attending cooking school, etc are valuable.
2 is a huge deal, enough to get you fired in almost all instances in Corporate America for that alone.
It's a huge deal for underlings who have to obey their masters. It's not a huge deal for masters who make the rules.
If you allow your employer to control your sexuality you are not fully human.
It's a huge deal regardless. You'll be fired even as a CEO. As the above comment states, CEOs of Nestle, McDonalds, Intel have fallen once these things were uncovered. It's basically an express ticket to getting fired.
Yeah, but does it make sense? The CEO is responsible for company success. Firing them over sexual misconduct is a decision to prioritize non-profit related matters. Companies do this all the time because of political correctness, but it is strictly speaking optimizing for other things than shareholder value.
They were talking about "underlings" who have to "obey their masters" and supposedly don't matter, while those "masters" are not "fully human" if they let anyone impose rules on their "rule making". It is the kind of talk that makes you want to cover your drink.
I am merely saying, if you fire a CEO because of, say, him having a relationship with an underling, you are saying: "there are arbitrary things more important than profitability".
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.
> arbitrary things
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.
Even in purest capitalist sense, romantic relationships cloud judgement and point at a possibility (inevitability?) that people in question (CEOs, managers, owners, board members) will do that again thus increasing the risk to the business.
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 read it as sarcastic pointing out the hypocrisy, and that they're fully in support of free will for anyone to pursue relationships they want at all levels. You could disagree with the latter, but the starting point doesn't seem like what you suggest
There is no law or really good principle that suggests that shareholder profits matter above aspects such as ethics; that is just a misrepresentation of something a famous economist said.
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.
His dick cost people hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value and this is about the worst case scenario outside of maybe a true sexual misconduct lawsuit coming against him. Like with your thinking taken to an extreme, if he murdered someone he should keep his title and run the company from jail because it doesn’t make him a bad engineer and we don’t want to bow to woke?
How does it NOT make business sense to consider firing bim here (outside of manosphere thinking)?
Having an affair vs. killing someone is materially different - one is legal, the other is not.
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.
For Intel at least, that CEO was fired because the board wanted him gone, because he destroyed the company. The relationship with a subordinate was only a pretext. If he'd been performing well it would never have been made an issue.
You are contradicting yourself. If destroying the company isn't enough pretext to get you fired but an affair with a subordinate is, then it's a big deal that would have been an issue regardless.
They needed a pretext because if the board publically confirmed how much damage he'd done to the company, it would hurt the company even more through investor and employee panic.
When has legal fallout from an affair with a subordinate ever destroyed a Fortune 100 company? That doesn't happen.
You are not making much sense. Was he destroying the company or not? What kind of destruction does not have obviously visible signs (to everyone) that can be acted on? What Kind of board sits down and decides that the destruction of the company is worth investor panic because 'it's worse than it looks'. What, are investors going to be calm as he destroys the company?
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’s a big difference if it’s a mercenary CEO hired by the board versus a founder CEO that likely controls much of the board.
> It's a huge deal regardless. You'll be fired even as a CEO
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 Gates while he was CEO of Microsoft and she was a newgrad developer.
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?
Sleeping with your subordinates opens the company to lawsuits. Which is bad for business.
This is just a weird and IMO slightly creepy thing to say. Office affairs are ripe for power abuse and corruption. It’s not about sexuality.
I mean—certainly if it turns into the kind of situation where the higher-ups can’t look the other way. It probably becomes a problem as soon as your supervisors have to think about it. It definitely becomes a problem as soon as it becomes their problem, or a distraction from what everybody’s there to do.
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.
It's difficult (impossible really) to hide such affairs indefintiely when you've reached that kind of status and notoriety. No amount of discretion will keep someone from finding out eventually when so many eyes are on you, so it's really just a matter of time till some sort of public disclosure.
It's only huge because it has been made public by a large amount of medias. If you have ever worked in any companies, you'd know the shit going on at any layers.
It doesn't have to be 'made public by a large amount of medias', just made public. Regular ole avergae nobodies get fired for the same.
> The fact that he slept with a subordinate shows bad judgment, but isn't a huge deal
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.
But ok at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, …
It's ok a lot of places. Consenting adults gonna consent.
Elon hiring Jensen to run Terafab would actually be hilarious.
Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion. The bigger issue is that he has shown multiple poor judgement choices and the board has to weigh if he is a larger liability than he is an asset at this point.
> Yes, it is normally a big deal but Jensen is a founder CEO of the biggest company in the world. He would have most likely been given some grace for a single indiscretion.
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.
That we know of
At Japanese companies this happens monthly or weekly. Although J companies are more like a clan than a western corp.
The United States is not required to emulate every single cultural value of former Axis powers, I think.
At US companies or even at Nestlé (as it was quoted) or other, it continues to be the case.
He sure did.
At the time Mark Hurd was shown the door I think HP had 320,000 employees. Still got the boot.
Carly deserved to be fired, but Hurd was fired ostensibly for an inappropriate expense report (like expensing a date). Larry Ellison immediately hired Hurd, but HP sued.
Many thought that was a mistake at the time.
Law For Thee, But Not For Me
Correction: Most US companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it.
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.
How would they reassign someone from the reporting chain of the company's CEO?
Asserting that they can’t be a direct subordinate should suffice in practice in most cases.
The CEOs of both BP and Nestle lost their jobs for having relationships with employees.
it's very common actually. One of my former managers was pressing an intern for sex, dangling a job. Too bad we weren't hiring at that time. Why are they doing this? Maybe the power is the point?
Isn’t it a conflict of interest to be sleeping with your direct reports? How does that play out in performance reviews? It’s definitely a massive HR problem
It's also really ethically dubious to sleep with someone you have that kind of authority over
Why? It’s how the mammal world works since the beginning of time. Females seek out the alpha male.
"Is-Ought Fallacy" is the right search term.
The "alpha male" is not even how wolf packs work in the wild: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-alpha-wolf...
The researchers who coined the phrase eventually realized it only applied to artificial packs in captivity, not the wild.
Mammal world has also worked by killing another mammal with food you want if slightly hungry. Yet, for some reason, people don't question why murder is illegal whenever someone gets convicted of homicide. Selective appeals to evolutionary history are an empty argument.
It's certainly an abuse of power and a lot of companies in the US forbid this explicitly, often in employee guidebook
That's where the "disclosure and reassignments" come into play - you can date a direct report, as long as you let the company know they should report to someone else from now on.
> ...and a ban would be considered legally impermissible.
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.
the person you're replying to wrote you have to disclose.
But as far as I know, it's not illegal, as this person implied, for a European company to forbid relationships between direct reports.
Disclosure allows for people to be reassigned so that they're no longer in a subordinate position.
But they didn't say you could be fired in the EU, which the comment you replied to pointed out has actually happened.
Are you guys thinking that Europe is a country and have the same labor law everywhere?
The US also does not allow banning relationships, but employers are not required to employ both persons in a couple. Europe restricts many aspects of people losing their jobs, is a more salient aspect of the legal comparison.
What US state law prevents this?
It demonstrates poor judgement, which should be a sackable offense for a CE.
The problem is every other CEO and potential CEO has demonstrated the poor judgment of not building Nvidia.
At an America Monopoly Telecom you know, it is acceptable so long as you wait 365+1 days to marry your affair partner.
CEO of a public company answers to the Board. CEO of a private business do anything they want until caught.
That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.
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.
He and Nvidia intervened to stop an investigation into Megaspeed.
Imagine not having Kimi, Qwen & co.
I am an open weights model proponent so obviously I am intrigued and glad that Qwen exists (though at the moment I personally use US-trained open weights models — Muse Glimmer, Gemma 4, and I am testing Nvidia’s own Bolt —because they better fit my requirements).
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.
> That was pre-Trump, afterwards anything seems to go.. none goes to jail and all is for sale, as long as you pay the hand. That's the perception we have as Europeans from live in America.
> 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?
The law is one thing, and shouldn't discriminate on CEO status. but the decline of "cancellations" for various infractions of political correctness is definitely a positive in my book
I'd love statistical evidence that "cancellations" have decreased under Trump. As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
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.
> As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
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.
Trump literally tried to cancel the White House press corps but putting that aside:
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-...
I'm sorry but that list HAS to be satire, right?
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.
> Amazon and Apple were cancelled?
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...
"Cancellation" is just how the rich spell "the consequences of my actions".
Being burned by a mob is technically a consequence of the action of appearing like a witch.
That doesn't imply that's a good and healthy way to run a society.
Yes, the consequence-free current administration has been soooo much better for the US.
The balls of steel is what got him in trouble in the first place.
Page, Brin, and Schmidt all dated Google employees. Gates married a Microsoft employee. I’m not sure if any of those folks dated direct reports, but does it really matter when you’re the CEO? Not condoning this behavior, just saying that there’s precedent for it not significantly impacting careers of execs. The spy thing is a another thing entirely.
Page and Brin have controlling voting shares of Alphabet, so they can't exactly be booted by the Board. Gates met Melinda 40 years ago and many things happened 40 years that would not be acceptable today.
Gates also had the most expensive divorce, paying Melinda 70B or something. We’ll see what Jensen has to pay the ex wife.
Excellently put.
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.
> I'm glad others agree that his infidelity is a complete nothing burger. Moralising about this is wrong and is a purity spiral.
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.
> Huang himself said his infidelity hurt his wife and his kids.
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?
2) Got Brian Krzanich of Intel fired
> 3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
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?
It changes things from "he was the victim of a spy" to "sanctions evading conspirator that aided an enemy".
Even more interesting given his Taiwanese citizenship.
That was my understanding too. The spy part makes for a good story, but if she came out and said "Hey, I'm a spy for China. Want to share something of value to the state?" it would make her a terrible spy, so I'd assume it's really about poor judgement.
How'd they figure out she was a spy anyway?
Him being removed for sleeping with a spy would not necessarily be intended as a punishment for sleeping with her, it's a self defense mechanism to prevent the spy from continuing to have access to a highly placed, compromised individual
This is a bit like saying "I didn't know passeordstealer.baddies.com was a phishing site when I typed in the company's password for the bank, so it's not my fault all our money was stolen!"
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.
Current evidence suggests he didn’t even do a prelim background check. His mistress worked for Chinese state television prior to the role she assumed through which she was introduced to him.
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”.
A piece of speculative but interesting information: the FBI didn't give Jensen Huang a "defense briefing" which would warn him that he was being targeted, despite them knowing Alice Huang was a spy a year prior (memo circulated in May by the state department). Apparently this is very atypical.
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.
Large numbers of chips sold at high prices skirting export laws would possibly make him a willing participant...
You literally only think shes a spy because the US Propaganda machine says so. There's no evidence of this.
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.
Her whole work history is very suspicious. The company she worked for is extremely suspicious.
Isn't the fact that her company is alleged to have smuggled a ton of banned NVIDIA chips into China a lot worse than the fact that he slept with her? Infidelity isn't good but nobody will arrest you for it. Sanctioned goods are a different story
The person you replied to is not making a moral judgement. The reason it is bad for Nvidia that he slept with her is the leverage she had over him. The impropriety is just an issue for his family.
Spy is just an allegation
I'm sorry, is your assertion that he didn't know somehow makes this better?
That assertion makes no sense, yet tits the best interpretation I can gather from your odd comment!
Surely you mean something else?!
> I'll admit I haven't really been following this story, but I ASSUME he didn't know she was a spy?
As best I've heard, nobody knows that now. We have some rumors with absolutely nothing behind them.
Incompetence is a great reason to fire someone, it turns out.
The co-founder of NVIDIA, when it is basically at its peak stock value, is incompetent at running NVIDIA? Sure.
Jesus, it's like nobody has ever watched a James Bond movie.
> 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.
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.
Where does "bribed the President of the United States to ignore 3 & 4" fit in? Or is that one more of a problem for said President?
Agree with everything, except a sub point of #6: Jensen was presumably unaware she was a spy.
Sleeping with somebody that turns out to be a spy is insanely poor judgement.
Not knowing doesn't make it any better!
Not knowing doesn't make it worse.
> the law must be respected
I wouldn’t call this particularly nuanced, certainly if they were sold to intermediaries not subject to the export controls (Singapore)
You have a due diligence requirement to ensure that whoever you sell to obeys export restrictions. You can't turn a blind eye. This is actually called "self-blinding". It works kinda similarly to KYC/AML (Know Your Customer / Anti-Money Laundering) requirements in financial services.
More [1].
[1]: https://www.millercanfield.com/resources-305.html
That’s… a take. The fact the only problem you have with him violating export controls is that he got caught isn’t really nuanced. It mostly just points to you not having a moral compass.
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...
Neo-puritanism in 2026. Why?
curious from someone who is ignorant, what makes the export controls bad?
So this is something I kinda agree with Jensen Huang on. Let me explain. The US export bans to China in this space take two forms:
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".
The idea behind the export controls is that by 2030 we’ll have some sort of superhuman intelligence and it’ll be impossible to catch up. I spoke to Biden’s ai advisor and that’s what he told me. They know China will catch up but are betting it’ll be too late for them by then.
That's just fan fiction. The only way it's too late is if there are no limits to AI scaling in the universe. Otherwise, China will be able to catch up.
The only other way is that these people want to go war with China as soon as super intelligence is invented.
Well its certainly not fan fiction because I got it straight from the authors mouth. I believe that would just be called fiction.
Then it's fiction.
I'm as big as an AI bull as anyone here but we still have physical laws. Everything is a sigmoid.
A counterpoint I’d like to suggest.
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.
I don't think your point counters his. I think it supports his point.
There are a lot of Game of Thrones type of stuff going on when it comes to chips and AI.
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.
3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
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.
I somewhat disagree.
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.
[1]: https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
2 is a huge deal.
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.
the woman is 42...
In general, adulthood does not confer an immunity to coercion.
But is assuming that all actions of extremely successful mature women are due to coercion as progressive as you hopped?
I think you've made the assumption that I'm assuming something.
>>> 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.
> Either he's easily manipulated. Or he's a predator. Either way... not someone you want as CEO.
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?
Odds are she wasn't a spy see this write up - https://desmondshum.substack.com/p/alice-huang-the-spy-narra...
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.
You can argue about what the word "spy" really means, but even the source you quote thinks she's an asset for the Chinese establishment who was working to secure access to Nvidia chips for Chinese users, in contravention of US sanctions. A terrible terrible person for Jensen Huang to (literally) be in bed with.
The details are relevant if you care about the story. If this were flipped, it would make a difference if she was working for the CIA, the state department, or Intel.
> If this were flipped, it would make a difference if she was working for the CIA, the state department, or Intel.
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).
Great substack, can I ask how you discovered?
That post hit the front page here recently a couple days ago but had 0 engagement and fell off after less than an hour.
Your opinions are just that, but not really nuanced.
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.
> The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
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.
Such weird takes. Selling shit is bigger deal than destroying your family?! Fuck money, take care of your family, your lives! Family > geopolitics. Everything trickles down from there
> the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
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.
Hopefully that guy will also be in prison in three years.
Why would that happen if it didn’t happen when they had 4 years to do it the first time? Seems unlikely.
The Republicans that shielded him will be out of office and also he is a lot less popular now.
he was not particularly popular at the end of his first term. mainstream right was not pleased with the bad optics of january 6, young right was not pleased that MAGA became MIGA and "build the wall!" became "build what wall?". the early days of COVID fascism happened under him as well. it's fairly obscure lore now, but he'd lost all that deplorable alt right support that supposedly got him nominated and elected in the first place. for example: https://www.newsweek.com/richard-spencer-joe-biden-trump-mag...
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.
> Why would that happen if it didn’t happen when they had 4 years to do it the first time?
Not saying it will certainly happen, but there will be different people at helm this time, and his more crimes are out now.
I don't think it will happen for ideological reasons. Despite his lack of respect for the decorum of US democracy, most others have too much respect for it to start putting former leaders in prison.
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.
So the "decorum of US democracy" means that a president can murder, rape, pillage and raid, yet should not be put into prison?
The US political apparatus has a lot of unwritten standards that are followed out of tradition. While people might vehemently disapprove of how Trump has pushed or blown past those limits, doing the same thing to achieve accountability might set a new lower bar for those traditions, rather than restoring them.
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.
A lot of pretty words to give a dressed up version of "yes". That's what you're saying: Yes, it's a good thing if a US president can murder, rape and pillage without going to prison. Where do you sraw the line? Raping 10 children? 100? You're making it sound as if there isn't one.
> 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.
Yeah, in some hypothetical situation where a leader is directly involved in a violent crime, sure, I don't think there would be any issue drawing a line there.
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.
It's much better than the South American alternative of throwing the former president in prison every single time the party switches.
Leaders do a lot of things and laws are complicated, lawfare is stupidly easy.
I strongly doubt any American top leader will ever go to prison. That's something that gets decided by American top leaders, who are very aware of what happens when you open that Pandora's box: look at countries like Taiwan or South Korea, where it seems like basically any government position ends in a prison cell.
The guy who now has complete and total immunity thanks to the Supreme Court?
It's not complete and total immunity. It's presumptive immunity for official presidential acts.
Prosecutors "just" have to establish that the criminal behavior is not an official act, of which there are plenty such examples.
He blanket pardons Vance and everyone around him. He resigns in the last month and Vance blanket pardons him.
This is fixed by enforcing the law. Defeatist logic like this serves no purpose. Said country delivered a large electoral defeat to that person a week ago.
The fact that this scandal was leaked is a sign that the rule of law is returning.
„this scandal was leaked“ is for sure not a sign of „the rule of law is returning“.
It sure is.
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.
Go on.
Just putting it out there, but he might not be the best role model to try and emulate even for a ruthless company. Especially now that the laws might at last be enforced against him.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
- William Penn & MLK Jr
I'm sure the fact that Trump owns tons of NVDA was of _absolutely_ no consequence when the Department of Commerce granted them the ability to sell their GPUs to certain Chinese companies.
Yeah fair. But not everyone is POTUS. And maybe we can hold CEOs to a higher standard, idk.
Unfortunate but true. The current admin is lawless which makes everything think that they are stupid if they follow the law.
Not to mention another friend of the admin whose crimes in DOGE might need investigation.
> the law must be respected and the being seen ignoring the law would have a chilling effect on appearance of a fair democracy.
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.
> The fact that he cheated on his wife isn't particularly relevant
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.
> Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail.
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?
> 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.
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.
But if you allow them privilege denied the great and the good what message does that send "to the children" ?
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?
Not the person you replied to, but
> 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
Jensen is not as far as any of us are aware, a spy.
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.
dude you better believe if you have a clearance and they find out you have an affair you're losing your clearance
exceptions of course for the commander in chief
Yeah, right, the /only/ exception.
Jensen's job does not rely on having security clearance. There's no evidence he has security clearance is there?
Yes I especially want that to apply to congress, judiciary, and police, even more so than corporate CEOs! People in positions of higher responsibility, should, you know... be more responsible. Police and people in power should break laws less often, and be more trustworthy, and less selfish than average. They are in a position that requires a higher standard.
Handmaiden's tale.
This reminds me of when people complain about a lack “freedom of speech” but what they actually want is freedom from the consequences of their speech.
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.
You've left out the worst parts of the scandal, which involves the US government investigation into the Megaspeed being buried after a large contribution was made to the White House ballroom fund. This website has a pretty good summary https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-nvidia-scandal-no-e...
smashing a spy doesnt affect anything, did he leak anything? Did he report to the authorities?
>3) The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
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.
Why not both?
Sources connected to US intel have gone on the record to say that they believed her to be a spy, going so far as to have the Secretary of State brief the President directly. They don't bother the President with things like this unless they feel the intelligence is strong.[0]
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/10/us/politics/trump-china-t...
maybe she didn't even know she's being used as a spy.
this is hard to prove or dispute. smuggler is benefit china 100%.
Spies don't tend to advertise their activities on social media, so "unwitting spy" might be the real explanation.
> "unwitting spy" might be the real explanation
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.
there are some doubts there https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/11/jim-himes-alice-hua...
I'll bet 100 dollar this is just about money.
Unfortunately Senior US leadership said it doesn’t count for much anymore
> lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status
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.
> 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)
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.
It breaks my heart that so many people will excuse his infidelity as irrelevant. We need better leaders to set examples for the youth. This current crop is so slimy and distasteful.
No you missed the point.
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..."
If someone is willing to break their most sacred vows to their loved ones, why should I, a relative stranger, think they will keep their word to me?
You are absolutely entitled to that opinion.
It does end, because people lose their jobs for office affairs all the time and rarely if ever for parking tickets. There’s no moral inconsistency there, not all bad behavior is equivalent.
number of people who lose their jobs for infidelity divided by the number of people who do it.
Hard to estimate it precisely but less than 1% is likely to be accurate, no?
What percentage of people who get parking tickets do you think lose their jobs as a result?
Not many, because we have principles of that kind of morality not being applicable. Double parking beside fire hydrants isn't universally celebrated though, is it? I look down on that kind of thing, you might be the same yourself.
You do not have to judge someone for a parking fine just because you judge someone for cheating on their wife.
Other countries and cultures formalize infidelity, Americans just haven't bothered doing so yet.
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.
> The fact that he slept with a Chinese spy is a huge deal.
Is it true?
Has anyone stood up the claim she's a spy yet?
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?
One man’s infidielities is going to cost every investor in index funds greatly given the outsized weighting of Nvidia in the SPY and QQQ ETFs.
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.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/11/10/800126553/whiteh...
Who are we to judge beyond legal controls?
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.
Your judgment of me is a reflection of how you judge yourselves.
I pity you.
Yes and no. I think the board knew about the smuggling and now that it's out they need to sacrifice the CEO. Probably, they still trust him but that does not matter here, saving the company's valuation and trying to evade fines is more important.
1) They were married years before he founded NVIDIA and she already co-owns the stock.
> other than the lack of a prenup meaning she owns half his stock
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).
> sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort
Or just... not cheating on your wife
Fyi just calling something nuanced doesn't mean that it is.
> 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.
When I read that Jensen was exploring Chinese Models, I thought it meant something different.
If this had happened at a more recent founder-led tech company, the board would have far less practical independence
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)
And that’s precisely the sort of arrangement we should ban.
Humans need someone to be accountable to, even if it’s just some guy walking behind you saying “memento mori” twice a day.
I think even if NVIDIA were founded recently, it still wouldn't have such a share structure. The companies that do have dual class shares are software companies that can grow significantly without raising a ton of capital. NVIDIA being a hardware company, that is a lot harder to do even today.
Anthropic is the most capitalist intensive company of all time and has a similar structure.
Per their S-1, Anthropic has on net spent almost none of the cash they raised.
are they just funding it via revenue?
Yes. Turns out all the people claiming Anthropic was a terrible business have some extremely heavy goalposts to move.
Anthropic structure is way, way more complicated. Though it does indeed give full control to the founders, forever
Based on the publicly-available org chart [1], I gotta say that OpenAI's legal structure [2] is way more complicated than either.
1 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthropic%27s_corpor...
2 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OpenAI_corporate_str...
Oh wow, that’s a whole other level of over engineered hierarchy
They may be.. Rest in piece.
Crazy we even allow non-voting shares and multiple tiers of shares.
i'm actually pretty okay with non-voting shares, it's super voting that are the issue
How and why would you?
Those are the same thing.
you sure about that?
The theory is that if an investor is under no compulsion to purchase shares that entitle them to no say in governance, so if they do so, they only have themselves to blame.
So much for theory!
America has always been a land of inequality..
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 ?
It has worked out very well for my portfolio for 20 years now.
If you cherry pick the winners, doesn't matter what the corporate structure is.
Not really. We allow for a lot of ownership conditions.
Even among dual-class IPOs (which are the minority), only 18% of them have CEO control. [1]
That figure raises to about half if you include all officers/directors.
[1] https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Lowry%20-%20Buck...
Anthropic are planning a bizarre share structure that strips any voting power from shareholders. They will have a single special founders share, held by some new entity owned by the founders, that has 51% voting weight. 1 share to rule them all.
This is kinda huge; my layperson view is that Jensen has been responsible for their long term technology strategy, which requires deep understanding of so much outside of the business domain. I'm not exactly thrilled that they are "eating the world" (hf purchase had me bent out of shape, for example), but they've undeniably executed on some long term complex shit. Who could take his place?
> Who could take his place?
One of the greatest failures of Nvidia's Board was in failing to push for a successor. (Musks' companies face a similar risk.)
Nvidia had 3 cofounders. Jensen was one. The second cofounder still works there.
Is that founder a Jobs or a Woz? It matters.
Jensen is a Jobs.
I have a lot of respect for the man, but he is no Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs never had a black leather jacket
I served with Steve Jobs. I knew Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was a friend of mine. He is no Steve Jobs.
It's been so long since he passed that I think most people commenting have forgotten Steve's singular contribution to the industry.
not really; all three founders were engineers with deep technical expertise
He's not that bad
What kind of coat do they wear
Hopefully a tasteful and highly monogamous tweed
I’m personally hoping for a red trench coat like Carmen Sandiego.
With Nvidia, Do we know this or is there just not a public face?
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.
I wonder about Tesla. The Cybertruck was Musk’s baby and I wonder if the company might be better off with someone a bit more balanced at the helm. They might have needed Musk’s outsized personality to warp the perception of electric cars long enough to get the mass production rolling, but now maybe someone more amenable to regular incremental improvements rather than another big bet on AI and Humanoid Robots. Spin that stuff off to another company and focus Tesla more on their core business.
Tesla's stock is not based in reality. It's based on a cult of personality. Once that person is gone, so too is the stock price.
They have (had?) talented engineers, they may have a future as a decent car company if they didn't keep getting pulled into 20 directions by their 5 minute attention span CEO.
The trillion dollar valuation would be gone for sure.
Yeah but how much is just nvidia happened to be in the right business for the AI boom
It’s not like Jensen predicted it
He may not have predicted the specifics, but they didn't just happen to be there. Nvidia started work on CUDA in 2004, and aggressively iterated machine learning hardware and software for twenty years to get into the position they had for the boom.
Well AMD and Intel were too, and they've not delivered remotely close to the same performance as NVIDIA.
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.
What about his cousin? I think she would be a perfect fit
you implying acquisition?
China will pay him more.
That would be fascinating if China offered to double Jensen's salary and give him command of all AI hardware production ...
Why though.. He's a CEO.
It's really interesting to me how unaggressive Jensen has been vs. his peers about tighting up control over his company (even during the recent years when he had huge leverage):
- 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).
He gets other benefits.
Indeed, that's why they are firing him.
Eh. It's as likely there is some power play going on here and they're using his behavior as leverage.
When big changes happen, it's because multiple vectors have aligned. One isn't enough.
I think you're understating the difference between "an affair by a CEO" and "an affair by the CEO of a company at the center of a technology deemed as critical to national competitiveness and national security, with a spy for your most serious competing foreign nation".
When Congress starts having hearings about your affair, you have fucked up but good, as they say.
He could get 100x of those types of benefits with 1/100 the wealth too
You mean being a centimillionaire is all it takes to bag a 100 chinese spies?
To bag 100s of baddies of equivalent looks.
Doesn't have to be spies (which in this case is just conjecture anyway, and likely just trying to get him for political reasons).
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Had the frequented epstein island with underage children, nobody would have said anything, and even Congress would fiercely defended Jensen Huang and classify any document that has his name.
That is The American Way.
Is it though? I’m having a hard time believing that American billionaires represent Americans. The anti American sentiment that conflates Americans with Epstein is all too pervasive; it’s the new slur.
No, but the American leadership also visited that island, and control the DoJ.
Your remark is deeply antisemitic and is quite dangerous to our democracy
How about this all is some sort of theater for him to "peacefully" exit the whole operation and retire, given he not gonna be poor and is very likely to not go in jail given his role in making NVIDIA the company it is.
You think his wife and family are on-board with being publicly humiliated just so he can retire? I can tell you aren't married.
They don't have a prenup. I'm not married, but public humiliation for billion's in nvidia stock seems pretty ok.
not married, but myself also does not sit on $trillions so I cannot even closely relate to his situation. besides his rock star looks definitely didn't scream family man, and guy seems to have been quite open about it. to further extrapolate my point - Musk, another of them peoples sitting on trillions, did already set some very definite precedents reg marriage and children. pretty bizarre stuff for the normie-looks of the guy, isn't it? now I can only guess what a hot rod such as NVIDIA CEO who's taking calls from POTUS can actually scheme about...
Then perhaps we will have a second NeXT and a Jensen Huang who will revolutionize the industry when he comes back.
Instead he made his daughter Senior Director of Product Marketing, made his son Director of Robotics Product, and made his son-in-law VP of AI Infrastructure Growth.
Maybe his idea of asserting control is less about voting rights and more about family allegiance.
Were they qualified? Were better candidates passed over? Your comment lacks substance, although I suspect you may be correct
They are all extremely unqualified, as even a cursory review would tell you
How exactly is Jensen qualified to run a $5Trillion company? He isn’t, yet he built one.
It might be more accurate to say “He wasn’t, until he built one.” That seems like a key difference between him and his kids.
What would be the odds that they are all qualified enough for a company this size? It's wild how much billionaires get away with
How many times would a company scenario need to run a double blind hiring + real time run of the hirees running the company for a period of time to have a statistically significant result to reject the null hypothesis that the people had no affect on the performance of the company compared to a sample of other viable candidates?
I’m sure they were very qualified. Right?
family allegiance until it's about his wife
Not cheating is truly that one amazing trick for feeling morally superior they don't want you to know about. Highly recommended.
Has the wife made any statements yet? Intimate relationships have a wide range of definitions of "cheating"
No, but he issued a press release apologizing for hurting her. While it's correct at this point to call his honestly into question, it's a possible clue.
It is just a small family business setup by a Taiwanese businessman.
That's nepotism and that's a sure sign of despotism.
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.
I wonder how much of this is to do with how recent and explosive (relative to the history of the company) nvidia’s growth was. Like before the back to back booms of cryptocurrency and AI, the company was mainly selling products to gamers (iirc, their datacenter business was like 10% in 2019). It wasn’t that long ago that nvidia’s comparable companies were like… super micro and western digital, rather than Apple and Google.
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.
> super micro and western digital, rather than Apple and Google.
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.
He does not seem vital to the company at all
I suggest reading Tae Kim’s book on the company. Unless Mr. Kim is lying - and he has no incentive to - NVIDIA is very much an extension of Jensen. His management shaped it to the core. It would survive his ousting, but not unscathed. Comparisons to Jobs & Apple are not unwarranted.
Sure, and Jobs learned that he did not have unconditional power.
And when he left, Apple started circling the drain.
Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were unmitigated disasters.
Amelio managed to make one of the greatest decisions in the history of American business and buy NeXT to get himself replaced by Jobs. How is that an unmitigated disaster? He could have bought BeOS.
Fair point.
Before that, he was known for spending most of his time, polishing his private plane.
it may turn out that his absense might be vital to the companies future.
He's been behaving like a sugar hyped child over the last 15-20 years imho.
The last 15-20 years, so basically when the company was at its most successful?
wait for it... wait for it...
Can you please elaborate on why? He seemed like a luminary from what little knowledge I have. (Very well spoken, wide domain knowledge, obviously made the right bets, etc.)
Nvidia focused on gaming for 20 years, made a ton of bets that didn't pan out (self-driving cars, set-top boxes, streaming, etc) and made unforced errors (Arm acquisition attempt). Nothing hints at him being a visionary beyond wanting to diversify.
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.
The ARM acquisition attempt looks better each day now that x86 is zooming into irrelevance and Apple Silicon remains exclusive to Apple products.
It didn't even start with AI, their exorbitant valuations go all the way back to the days of the cryptocurrency mining craze.
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.
CUDA is what they did right. That and they focused on developers (tooling, support, drivers) outside of gaming long before it was obviously a relevant market. Jensen does deserve a lot of credit.
They didn't just focus on gaming though. They've spent the last two decades making sure they're the obvious choice for scientific and engineering number crunching, by creating and continuing to invest in CUDA. Which is also why they have been an obvious choice for the AI crowd.
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.
The AI winter wouldn't have ended without NVidia cards. NVidia didn't benefit from the AI boom, they made it possible. CUDA is the be all and end all of the AI boom.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to try and get AMD cards working.
That’s an absurd statement considering Nvidia has been pushing CUDA since 2007. I doubt Nvidia was making a “bet” on set-top boxes as the next 100 billion dollar idea. It was simply gaming adjacent which was the main market for GPUs which is their business. Nvidia has maintained their position on GPGPUs potential for 15 years before they paid off. Literally no other company had that vision. If that was an obvious thing, where is Intel, AMD, Samsung, TI, or Qualcomm chips? They only had 15 years. It’s crazy to call it “right place right time” when they have been anticipating it for over 15 years.
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.
CUDA was just not that big of a commitment of resources honestly for a gpu company. It also broke even relatively early in terms of making money because of oil and gas. Jensen personally threatened to axe the entire project multiple times when we nearly failed to meet certain contracts.
I have no insights into internals of Nvidia, but it really doesn’t make sense to me how there is literally no alternatives that are even close to its maturity. I remember in the early days OpenMP and PPL being contenders early on, but I never heard about them after and only CUDA kept going. I was working on a graduate project in 2009 and I remember us looking into OpenMP and CUDA and going with CUDA because we found it easier to use. But also along with CUDA, only Nvidia pushed the whole GPGPU idea and AMD (and Microsoft to some extent) only paid lip service to the concept without any actual commitment like Nvidia did for a long time.
apple has a lot to do with it. Apple drove the early days of opencl, and pulled out some time in ~2012. Ian made a decision to cut opencl support at Nvidia at some point in time after that. Had apple actually made a proper GPU compute language standard after walking from opencl, it might not have been such a empty landscape. But alas, apple wasn't in the HPC business, which was the only place that actually made money from GPGPU.
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.
> It also broke even relatively early in terms of making money because of oil and gas.
Beg your pardon? what does this mean?
This is circa 2009 or so
https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-vi-gpu-co...
Is successfully maintaining product leadership in a lucrative consumer category a failure to you?... Their self driving car tech is used in multiple products and clearly represents a future growth area. They've correctly predicted market movements and trends, built or bought up all the pieces needed to offer complete solutions with leading performance.
There would be no AI boom without Nvidia, their cards were instrumental to making it possible, that's why they're so dominant.
was arm a bad move in retrospect?
Because that's not how organizations work. Especially not organizations made up of MSc's and PhD's, each with specialized knowledge that the CEO has no clue about. It's a myth that the person with the most power is also the most important.
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.
I guess we'll find out
Seems like much more sane governance for a publicly-traded company.
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.
Agreed. This is almost certainly a key to Nvidia's success. A lot of tech companies end up shooting themselves by putting too much power into the CEO, so that when the MBA takes over it turns into a corporate pillaging operation. Cut back on staff, ramp up on prices, maximize shareholder value at the cost of sane long term business practices.
> A lot of tech companies end up shooting themselves by putting too much power into the CEO, so that when the MBA takes over it turns into a corporate pillaging operation.
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.
Wall Street rarely appoints CEOs, that's the job of the board. And those members generally get there via investment into the company (usually before it goes public).
The MBAs get there often because it's who the board picks when the founder retires.
The board is chosen by the shareholders in the absence of some arrangement to the contrary (e.g. the special class of shares), and for a large publicly traded company, the major shareholders are generally going to be large investment funds, i.e. Wall St.
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.
Google did the super control way before Zuck did.
> 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.
I think there is a fundamental of what do well means in this context.
> Google did the super control way before Zuck did.
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.
> 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
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.
Only if you think the definition of doing well is shareholder returns. I think it’s time for a different way of evaluating corporations, like their overall benefit to humanity. In that lens Meta is not doing well.
If you're not a shareholder you don't get to vote. If you are, vote! If you can't, but you chose to be a shareholder, well I'm not sure what the complaint is.
That's the idealized version. In practice, there are millions of people who never "chose" to invest but because of index funds have a significant portion of their retirement savings in companies lacking any real governance or oversight from the board that ostensibly represents their interests.
How do they have index funds?
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.
> How do they have index funds?
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.
And if you invested in those index funds in the past 15 years, the return would be superb.
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.
The parent comment isn't about dual-class companies, it's about the fact that many shareholders effectively don't get a choice in how the votes for their shares are cost.
Exactly.
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.
Well, you probably need to be doing extremely well to get to IPO in a situation where that structure is a possibility.
It's not really surprising that companies that print huge amounts of money with fairly little need for funding do well.
It's the counterfactual that is interesting. How well could this company have done in the other timeline where the founder didn't retain all that control?
> The companies with dual shares seem to do well
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.
The counter argument is that active external governance can be bad for the long term prospects of the company. Optimizing for quarterly results, activists investors threatening and getting sweetheart deals that are good for them and bad for the rest of the company.
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'm imagining a world where you don't get to fuck up as bad as FB did spending multiple years chasing the Metaverse while letting their platform rot, relying purely on plateauing ad revenue.
Looking at their revenue growth, it's one of the best companies for shareholders (ethics aside of course).
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.
Yep, he wasn't innovating at all, though:
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 ;-)
There can always be tons of "could have" examples but his decision to push CUDA in my opinion was risk and innovation that paid off
What are you thinking about the AI App store?
A Taco Bell exec is on the board IIRC. I'm sure she is more than competent and capable. But it's a bit amusing.
I love Taco Bell though, so she is probably doing a good job.
> I love Taco Bell though
I won't trust anything you say. I have seen what I needed to.
Taco Bell is the most delicious, consistent, affordable, healthy, and fun national fast food chain. They deserved to win the franchise wars on the strength of the Chalupa alone. Baja Blast Mountain Dew is on the Mount Rushmore of soft drinks and Hot sauce packets are a staple in every junk drawer in America. Their discontinuation of Baja sauce and lack of post-1998 commitment to the Enchirito are their only sins (and God has forgiven them because He worked through them to create the Steak Grilled Stuffed Burrito as recompense and was satisfied with such).
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.
A flat structure means nobody is a clear competitor with Huang for the top job. If Huang was able to get his way as was, adopting a more traditional structure would have just made somebody else a significantly more powerful #2. A lack of a clear successor might make the transfer of power rougher unfortunately.
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-...
It's not that we don't want to get rid of unethical politicians, we just can't.
He's well compensated because he owns a lot of the company, much at much cheaper valuations, right?
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.
>that Americans will tolerate lies, murder, and all sorts of other things from their highest elected officials
Lies are one thing, but murder?
Jensen cooperated with china well before the affair. I'm pretty sure her being a chinese spy did not change anything in his decisions. His position on China did not change for years. And he is right. As long as we export chips to china it's really hard for them to invest into developing their own chips from scratch. It's just too expensive. If that door closes they will be incentivised to go for it that much harder. As it is right now they are one step behind us but in the future this won't be the case anymore and since we don't have hardware manufactuing experts in US it's just a matter of time we'll get surpassed. Sure we can bet on AI to overcome that but it's way easier for china to get a software stack going then for us to get hardware manufacturing back.
Jensen effectively is Nvidia, and is likely the only person that truly knows the company - this is what ties him to his place and of that doesn't ensure it I don't think anything else would. Almost all significant successes Nvidia had were results from direct action from him, and he truly knows the tech
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.
> He isn't Chairman of the Board (a role over 50% of Fortune 100 CEOs apparently hold).
Combining these roles is extremely poor governance, and it shouldn’t be legal but unfortunately it is.
As another comment thread brought up, his children are both working pretty nice sinecures, which would have been huge negative press during any kind of corporate governance struggle. I don’t think it was even widely known, I was a Jensen fanboy and I just now learned about it.
Well, what makes me little dissapointed is instead of focusing on issues and topics that really matter, we discuss who f*cked whom.
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.
It is unethical to fuck your subordinates.
ETA: It's nice to see all the incels downvoting this lol.
I agree, but the risk of company secret leakage is high in this story. And for a such pivotal and big company I understand the board decision.
>we got somehow trained
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.
What on earth are you talking about?
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.
I'm talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, as published in his landmark paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" that appeared in Psychological Review in 1943.
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#...)
"Not that long ago"
"appeared in Psychological Review in 1943."
I consider 1943 a long time ago.
The acceptance did not end (or begin) with the first publication?
But nothing turns on this. Feel free to replace "Not that long ago" with "Previously".
I guess the point is there's no value in repeating some long-refuted idea, especially when it's kind of sexist and outdated now.
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.
Sounds like he helped China get GPUs in violation of export controls. This puts NVidia in a tough place as keeping him as CEO risks broader legal ramifications.
it seems like this is the legal equaivent of smoking dope behind the McDonald's ..basically no one cares that much. The govt. could prosecute or make an example.,but whatevah. It's implicitly understood nvdia is a huge success and central to the US tech boom.
You may have been smoking too much.
We were already into personal liability for board members territory (and possibly GC) BEFORE the latest allegations.
Mhh no.
LLMs are seen by politicians as a national security issue.
Better models = better cyber offense/defense, etc.
Was it really no one else’s job to make sure export controls were adhered to?
the CEO is ultimately responsible and accountable
Presumably those people report to the CEO.
I think /u/jazzyjackson was referring to the US Government, who, there are grounds for thinking, did know something about all of this and immediately swung into action .... or not, as the case may be.
Really I figured nvidia has a legal team that evaluates how exposed they are to risk of running afoul of the US government. I ask because, ok the CEO was complicit, but should the company wash their hands of it and pretend they had no way of knowing? That it was only the CEO that was responsible?
But I ask out of ignorance, I’ve never been inside a Big Corp.
Remember Jensen Huang's first post on twitter: "For my first post, I’m sharing a letter NVIDIA signed on why open models matter." https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2080643682408321103
Open Weights and American AI Leadership https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-L...
That has nothing to do with the topic at hand
Large companies always have a backup plan in case the CEO needs to be replaced. What usually happens in these cases is that a new CEO will be named. That new CEO will focus on maximizing the company's earnings while neglecting the tech. And the company will be an earnings winner for the next few years.
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.
Would be pretty difficult for him to have any influence if he ends up in a cell
would you want that CEO job?... founder behind the scenes driving the show.
I'd be crying into my $10,000 dollar bills that I'm also lighting on fire...
They need to fire him outright. The company needs to set the example that misconduct won’t be tolerated at any level. Keeping him on in anything but a transition capacity would be a mistake.
Most people couldn’t care less about him having affairs. Sex is part of life, and affairs are pretty common.
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.
> bigger issue is the conflict of interest stuff
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.
I agree the corruption and conflict of interest stuff is the real issue here and is serious. I’m just criticising the hand-wringing over him banging some random woman (or women, as it apparently turns out), as if that is some unprecedented or shocking behaviour or worthy of a reprimand on its own. Most of the world left that prudish shit behind in the ‘90s.
> the hand-wringing over him banging some random woman
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.
> saw as a bit of a paragon
He was never a paragon.
https://mustsharenews.com/jensen-huang-signs-woman-chest/
Consensual and very tame. That's nothing.
Ok, I see your definition of paragon differs from mine, possibly depending on how much money the paragon has.
Apparently. I don't think that anything vaguely sexual is inherently immoral.
I’ll give you a shortcut for the future, and I will be downvoted for doing so.
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.
Not a paragon but definitely a very capable entrepreneur.
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.
I think marital infidelity is shitty behaviour but I also think the main issue here is that this man in this job with this global significance thought this woman was safe to be involved with.
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 think it’s necessarily prudish, but in order to accurately judge it you need to know if someone’s ENM or not, and that’s more than most people make known about their personal lives.
Stepping outside of your marriage behind your spouse’s back is still scummy behavior.
"random women"
one was a direct report, one was a spy
can't get more random than that, i agree
"some random woman" who happen to be a) a foreign spy and b) a direct report. You absolute moron.
AFAICT, (b.) isn't correct? The alleged spy works for a Singaporean company called "Megaspeed"[1], and while there is a conflict of interest argument, perhaps, "direct report" seems incorrect.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_Huang_spying_scandal
There are reportedly two women. One is Alice Huang, who you mention, the other is Nvidia's VP of health care: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/technology/jensen-huang-n...
you didn't even bother trying to read the article...
The article is paywalled for me.
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.
This sounds too reasonable.
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.
Not familiar with the details, I asked the ai overlords to gather up public evidence and give me a summary and... this feels like a very premature accusation. Unless you know something that isn't public, seems like we need to wait and see.
Your common or garden affair? Not a big deal.
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
Man what are you on about? Most CEOs are gone the moment affairs (especially those within the company) come to light.
As people said about the Huggingface incident: if you see one ant in your kitchen, the best estimate for the total number of ants actually present is well above one.
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.
There are now two allegations: that he had sex with a Chinese spy and that he had sex with a direct report.
The second one will get you fired just about anywhere.
Frankly, has he broken any law?
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.
Enabling billions of dollars of export-restricted chips to be shipped to China is probably more of an issue than the affairs, legally speaking.
And someone using their influence to have the DOJ squash the investigation into the matter that Commerce was running? Not a good look.
Huang doesn't decide national policy. Were the chips shipped legally?
They were shipped to a sketchy Singaporean company that his Chinese spy-mistress worked at, and IIRC he tried to prevent investigations into whether those chips were being redirected to China.
The whole “Chinese operative” reeks of a grossly cobbled together smear campaign, spoken with the voice of a BW cinema newsreel from the McCarthyist era
The accusal is that he has broken US federal securities and export control laws. There also may be some light treason.
Reducing this to “an unconventional sex life” is a weird and sort of stupid take when matters of global trade and export sanctions policy are concerned, but sure, we’re all a bunch of violent prudes over here.
Give me a fucking break.
Engaging in a relationship of any sort with a direct report (the second woman he reportedly had an affair with) is typically prohibited behavior. The imbalance of power between a boss and a subordinate in their report line just screams sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.
It's nothing to do with prudishness about his sex life and everything to do with his actions endangering the company.
Typically prohibited because it comes with the *risk* of sexual harassment accusations.
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?
Large traditional companies.
Recent trend is quite the opposite. What's Tesla without Musk selling pipe dreams ? Pretty sure there is 0 plan for replacement.
Are you suggesting that one cherry picked example proves a new trend?
Nvidia, SpaceX, Tesla - that's 3 out of 3 new companies in top 10 US.
two people
And 3 out of top 10 US companies by valuation. Sample size is obviously small. But if you look at larger picture, there is lots of them.
It doesn't seem Nvidia had a backup plan: https://x.com/business/status/2119633671300730893
Huang expected to run the company well into his 80s, with no clear successor.
Related: Jensen Huang Said to Have Had Relationship with Nvidia Executive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459321
This doesn’t bode well for Anthropic’s IPO indirectly, due to whole AI industry being propped up largely by Nvidia’s circular investment. Also there’s likely a big overlap of institutional investors who are both NVDA and ANT investors and will now likely seek to dump ANT at the opening bell.
Short term, days or weeks, there will be panic. But the impact of the change won't really be felt for years to come. For the next few years, the company will be fine.
FALSE.
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
These days US has nowhere near enough soft power to do something like that.
They can't even stop one company from selling physical chips to China, yet somehow they're going to prevent anybody from running open models? I don't know, it doesn't seem likely to me.
there will be divergence: US-aligned world (NATO+Korea+Japan and other vassal states) will bend over and agree to whatever regulation Department of Commerce/State is cooking to ban open weight (Chinese) models.
the rest of the world will be starved of GPUs and chipmaking equipment and chemical supplies for chip making
Agreed. And it would damage Nvidia if they went along with this.
fall of nvidia is acceptable collateral damage, they are just hardware vendor. all their chips are made by TSMC anyways. And they can be replaced by OpenAI's inhouse chips or googles TPUs, made in the same TSMC factories.
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
If anyone can make chips like Nvidia, why isn't another company doing it already? Anything can sound easy if you reduce it enough, but I really don't see how it is that easy in practice.
its not easy, but google and amazon are doing that, openai is working on that, others will follow
Indeed, If the CCP stays stable long enough they'll (as a country) succeed at it.
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.
I don't see how this can happen, though. There are a lot of GPUs out there and open models have already been downloaded millions of times. (IIRC Deepseek v4.1 Flash has been downloaded nearly 2M times just on HuggingFace, just over the past month.) The NATO world already relies quite heavily on open models, in many cases served by Mistral and other local providers. China is also developing its own hardware -- Huawei isn't slacking -- and it's not that far behind. And I'd bet there's no such thing as a "GPU Level" block that can't be hacked away.
Such a move would also be transparently dystopian... though, in fairness, I suppose that makes it more plausible than it would otherwise be...
they will use National Security as a pretense to force everyone on "verified-aligned AI".
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
>Open models will be banned at the GPU level.
Is this actually technically possible?
maybe, unless you have a torrent client
lol
> (at least in US/NATO/US-aligned world)
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.
US still has hard power, what do you think Canada or Denmark can do against US's will ?
invoke Nato article 5? or loudly complain to see a manager?
I… don't think that will work now…
> 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.
false, US is able to dictate its will to its vassals, because US controls the supply us chips for inference and software for LLM
... NATO? The EU's biggest AI provider sells DeepSeek and GLM.
This might rather save the IPO. Banned open source models will allow the closed source players to maintain power and recoup a larger part of their investment by driving up the prices.
Maybe Jensen used Claude and asked a bit wrong things about Chinese ladies. And here we go.
Is that why tech bros are circling the wagons? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/technology/jensen-huang-a...
> due to whole AI industry being propped up largely by Nvidia’s circular investment.
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.
Part of me wonders if recent problems with AI (Huang leaks, OpenAI models hacking Huggingface), haven't been arranged by OpenAI in order to poison Anthropic's IPO.
This doesn't seem like a healthy move for the company's longevity. What else did Jensen do? It's a given that companies that size will be targets for espionage and leak information even without it. This one mistake is enough to end all the value he has-and would continue to add to nvidia? Feels like we're missing information about the whole thing.
What else did Jensen do?
There needs to be an else?
Uhm ... yes? Screwing around is not a crime. That is something Huang should settle with his family. His wife may divorce of forgive him, but a divorce is not something that the company should fire anyone over.
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 also sold chips worth billions to her "mistress" and the chips probably went to China. So he did circumvent sanctions. Thats the only crime I recognise in this matter.
Allegedly. We will no doubt learn all about this from national security council operations this year. But we don’t know what happened or what he did or did not know right now.
These are Trump political sanction. NVDA is a multinational company out to maximize profits for shareholder. Selling to China should not be on any sanctions list. China is not the enemy of anything in my book.
> The fact that he slept with a suspected Chinese spy is not a crime either.
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.
Screwing around is not a crime, but he also isn't under threat of prison time. He's under threat of losing his job, because he has shown that his judgement cannot be trusted (he had two illicit affairs, one of which was with a subordinate). It's perfectly reasonable to fire someone from a leadership position for having bad judgement.
thats rich, coming from an Epstein Island nation...
where are those epstein files, by the way ?
Alleged relationship with a sub-ordinate.
God. Who cares.
We cannot be sure that we know the full story behind it, nor that we ever will.
That seems like a stretch. companies have faced far worse. this is not Enron or something
A news story was just released with allegations that he had an affair with one of his reports as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/technology/jensen-huang-n...
why on earth would this be an okay thing? could you follow a leader you couldn't trust hasn't sold all of your IP to competitors?
I don't believe in IP protections, so yes, easily.
When you say this in a job interview it tends to be a fairly short job interview.
What if I told you selling IP to someone else is the opposite of it being free to use.
It worked for trump.
So he had an affair with a woman. Who cares. He's human. He's not a spy. This whole charade to dethrone the founder of the biggest company in the world is a joke. I hope the NVDA board are not stupid or they should all resign.
As is the pearl clutching about an "affair", as if it's not going on with lots of other executives that we simply don't know about.
Jensen's been lobbying hard for years to get the government to allow selling high-end GPUs to China. It's his position that this will discourage local competitors from getting big enough to meaningfully threaten nVidia's dominance.
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.
The public face of one of the most important companies in the USA has been compromised.
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.
Plot twist: what if this was the China’s goal? Maybe they sent the spy and then leaked the story (or waited for it to leak) to remove Jensen?
> This doesn't seem like a healthy move for the company's longevity.
Who cares? Consequences have actions, and hopefully that's not just based on which choice is gonna make someone the most money.
The thing I don't understand is what is the real issue? Just the bad PR? I would kind of think affairs are pretty common, it's just this is public? I'm struggling to find anything where he did something bad business wise or compromised national security. Seems like Americans just love the sensationalism of affairs. Makes for good news I guess.
The woman he was having an affair with is suspected of being a Chinese spy, and she may have been using him to circumvent US export controls to move lots of NVidia chips into China.
but we don't have any evidence of that? also, seems the wrong person to target to do that right? He'd leave a long evidence trail trying to get people in the company to do that? I'd think if you wanted to do that you'd target someone further down in the operations side of things. So all we have is he had an affair with a possible "spy"? If he didn't know she was a spy, and didn't take any actions that circumvent anything, basically he just had an affair? Given intelligence agencies knew about this for a long time, and didn't tell him, kind of says they didn't have anything of substance and there was no real risk?
We actually don't, other than the U.S. government claiming she is. The timing of this seems quite odd considering the current government just lost an election, and has a history of blaming things on China.
> but we don't have any evidence of that?
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."
That would be problematic irrespective of him having an affair with her though. The real story then should be the circumvention of the export ban and the coercion of US officials, not the affair itself.
A CEO cheating on his wife doesn't exactly paint them as a trustworthy leader to partners, suppliers and customers. Even less so when he does it twice, with a foreign intelligence operative.
I kind of just assume this (affairs) is likely the case with a reasonable percentage of CEOs, and if he didn't know she was a spy, he was just having an affair. Also given all the photos, it wasn't even that much of a secret. I'm just struggling to see what he did wrong other than the affair. Given approx 15-20% in US have affairs not really out of the ordinary.
Can someone make the strong case for why he should be ousted?
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.)
Evading export controls and lying about it is a pretty bad look
It's come out that he was having another affair with a Nvidia employee as well, their vice president of healthcare. Having an affair with a client is one thing but having one with a client and a subordinate is maybe enough for the board to remove him.
Your aside is the primary issue and he may have worked with a CCP agent to bypass federal export controls.
So let me get this straight, there is now a grand conspiracy within nvidia and its supply chain network to avoid export controls? How exactly would that work? "Hey its Jensen, can you call John in shipping and send 16 containers of H200s through Myanamar to China?"
"This Singapore client wants a bazillion H200s".
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
Reality, I suppose that most procuments is played along the line : this Singapore company claimed it was for their local legal entity, and here the certificate/contract they signed.
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.
Maybe more "Hey, sell to this new Neocloud I met with in Singapore. Sure, it's ran by Chinese nationals, no, I don't know who's workloads they're running, don't worry about it."
...which may or may not be a violation of the export controls but it violates the intent.
So because you, in your infinite knowledge of international smuggling, can't envision any method for evading export control, it must not be possible. Is that what you're saying?
According to the NYT[1], Megaspeed (originally Chinese owned) was registered in Singapore in 2023, allowing it to bypass US export bans. FOUR days after the re-registration, Nvidia designated Megaspeed a preferred partner, giving it priority access to advanced chips (H200). Seems a bit odd.
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...
The part where the mistress is a corporate cutout for Alibaba and head of a company making multi billion dollar deals with Nvidia, I imagine.
> him possibly being compromised by an international spy
you answered your own question.
These are some good points! Thanks for the replies.
he was sleeping with a chinese spy
> aside from him possibly being compromised by an international spy
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".
He revealed himself to be obviously stupid and while CEOs don't do much, they can't seem to be obviously stupid.
The thought that Jensen Huang might not be CEO of Nvidia when GTA VI comes out.
He's had the job since before GTA 1 started development.
Capitalized Nvidia with $200 of his own money (out of $600 total). If he gets booted, it is certainly the end of an era.
Maybe he'll pull a jobsian 2nd coming to his own firm
Let's see him get bounced out on his ass so he can chip in $1000 to start a new company.
We could certainly do with more competition in the space!
That $200 was a sort of formality; him buying his shares from the company as part of the incorporation paperwork. It has nothing to do with actual funding needed to run a business. Nvidia's first round of financing was 3 months later. $2M at a $6M valuation [1].
[1] https://principus.si/2024/12/28/tae-kim-the-nvidia-way-jense...
NVIDIA was capitalized with only 600$? I didn’t realize the company was this old…
Yeah, I think if he gets booted I won't bet on Nvidia anymore. He is the company.
> He is the company.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo
Not meaningless but literally he named it and founded it sitting in a Denny's.
who cares where he named it, stan'ng for the Oligarchy is becoming a social faux pas, fyi
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?
Oh god forbid you commit a "social faux pas". Way better to stick to the approved messaging.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50382631
NVDA may not exist by the time it comes out. or humans for that matter when ASI happens
Maybe take a break from fox news
NVDA will cease to exist in 7 days?
Only it's soul if Jensen is fired.
he's figured out how to render polygons.
next move is navigating polycules.
He is into polygamy :)
There isn't enough discussion of how many controls needed to fail for Nvidia to smuggle billions of dollars of GPUs to Chinese firms in violation of export controls. The affairs with alleged spies is not even the most egregious failure of corporate governance.
Controlling such high-volume products has never really worked, especially if you sell to other third countries. Plenty of western electronic parts show up in Russian weapons, despite export restrictions.
These are matters of degree, and I challenge you to find a comparable example of arms vendors having 20% of their revenues from vassal states of geopolitical enemies while also having their leadership be personally compromised. Makes sense why Jensen boasts about not having written contracts documenting his crimes when, e.g., he was going around Singaporean family offices raising money for Malaysian shell companies to place orders on behalf of China.
Considering that only Jensen has been pushing for anything close to open-source models in terms of AI vs the token merchants of OpenAI and Anthropic, it seems a really bad time for Huang to leave.
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.
> Considering that only Jensen has been pushing for anything close to open-source models
There are many more companies that signed the letter, see the bottom of this pdf
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/wp-...
NVDA down almost 8% in after-hours trading.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/
AMD way up
Better hope AMD ascendant limits the main (only?) downside of alienating allies (once again, but from "our" side this time) for no upside whatsoever, not even rule of law
(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
Is there any reason why this will actually change the fundamentals of Nvidia's business so long as 5080s go for as much as a used car and the entire world wants H200s? Even if they lose an extremely hands-on CEO, they're selling a very expensive product with extremely high global demand.
Uh huh.. that is today. what about the day after tomorrow?
I think demand for Nvidia products will remain strong by Friday.
I don't know, there sure are a whole lot of H200s sitting in warehouses for companies forced to take delivery or be cut out of future lots.
Yeah I genuinely don't know either! I'm just very curious about the effect an ouster will have not on the stock price, but the business of designing and selling chips.
Why aren’t they putting them on for resale ?
I wonder what happens to NVDA afterwards. People say Jensen is NVDA or at least he has a lot of controls over the company. I guess they finally found the right time (very bad midterm) and the right opportunity (mistress as Chinese spy).
I even wonder whether some elements within the Chinese government has a hand in it -- not (only) the mistress part but the ousting part.
There's probably a lot more to this than we'll ever know.
Given that
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?
Offer Jensen asylum to run a chip company in China
Show of power Got caught Kill stock
Maybe?
I'm thinking the people behind trying to oust him are people who don't appreciate him likely knowingly violating export sanctions and putting the rest of the company and himself at risk of massive fines and criminal prosecution
I think it's worth even considering that if the allegations are true that the objective was to get Huang fired. Sure, he sold China chips, but they have their own homegrown chips now and the Chinese government have played a direct part in that.
There is no “they” in this. My read is the timing of all of this entirely down to the results of the midterm elections.
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.
It's not immediately clear that Jensen is as visionary and indispensable as some people claim. True, under his watch, Nvidia rose from a relatively obscure company to one of the largest companies in the world, and even a national asset. But it's really hard to believe that these achievements are due to Jensen's brilliance. Jensen didn't create the crypto mania that propelled Nvidia in the 2010s, nor did he create the current AI revolution.
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.
Yes, you're entirely correct. But you're also underestimating the people's potential to squander great opportunities like these. Look at AMD for example, they had a good head start over nvidia yet they haven't done anything remotely as good.
Under his watch? You mean the entire time from the very beginning. He built the company from nothing and you are not sure he is visionary and indispensable. can't make this shit up :)
Right - unreal to think the founder from the 90s isn't core DNA to nvidia. All the thread here thinking you can parachute in a CEO and nvidia would be fine.
You're not really addressing the point made above, that the things that contributed the most to Nvidia's valuation (crypto, AI) are not things that Jensen had much to do with.
> He is no Steve Jobs, who almost single-handedly started the PC revolution and the iPhone revolution
by being ousted from his own company and using his golden parachute while * being bought back*?
You are really not giving the man any credit - I suspect you weren't part of the GPU era of video games and don't understand the roots of nvidia. That man hustled that company. You can't say things like "right time and right place" without being a little blase.
I don't know much about Nvidia's history, but isn't Jensen largely responsible for CUDA and the company's monopoly on machine learning hardware? It wasn't an obvious bet at the time that this would pay off, but Nvidia sure poured a lot of money into making their software stack so good that nobody wanted to even consider other options.
Yes, at least according to the reporting on the company. It was an all-in bet on something very niche at the time.
Jensen made basically two visionary decisions. The first was to promote GPGPU with CUDA across their entire lineup including consumer hardware. The second was to specifically invest heavily in supporting machine learning way before anyone else in chips cared. CuDNN came out in 2014, just two years after AlexNet. Three years before the transformer. Eight years before ChatGPT. Before PyTorch. Before TensorFlow. Other chip CEOs probably hadn't even heard of AlexNet in 2014. Even at the time I thought[1] AMD and Intel were crazy to completely ignore a market opportunity like this. They still haven't caught up.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10030957
That's two things over a long history. I wonder how many other initiatives he spear headed that never went anywhere.
Plenty. But also I'm sure there were a lot of decisions he made earlier in the company's history that led to them being in the position to start the CUDA project. I'm less familiar with those. They were consequential at the time but now they only matter inasmuch as they allowed the company to survive until AI took off.
It still baffles me that most people don't realize how success in 'business'/'leadership' positions has almost nothing to do with an individuals skill/intelligence in leading/decisions but simply mere luck and timing. You could argue that to attain a high position in a company requires some level of shrewdness and intelligence though, but that is another game.
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.
Is everyone here subscribed to wsj?
No. They read the headline, hit the paywall, and decide that’s enough to give their well-informed opinion.
I think there are multiple factors working here:
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?
It's #3 and shortsellers. There's no one who can lead Nvidea, like he does with his technical depth, connections and trust within the company. Getting rid of him will be a loss for all investors and board.
Did he break any law?
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.
I think this is for the FBI to determine.
Jensen made Nvidia. He named it, he built it from nothing with 2 other founders.
Ousting him is pretty much the worst case scenario for the company.
If Nvidia is going to fire Jensen Huang, my question is whether Jensen will be allowed to start another "Nvidia".
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.
Why would Jensen without Nvidia be a better bet than Nvidia without Jensen?
Why does it need to be? Why not both? What if both produces a net positive, as competition is usually a good thing?
> Why would Jensen without Nvidia be a better bet
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
Thought they smelled wrong? Am I missing a reference to something?
idk reading everything what is coming out it looks like he had much unlimited power to do whatever he wanted. so i dont buy that someone (even legal) was a hurdle for him.
What are you talking about? Do you understand how companies work?
That's not how the world works. Most of what NVIDIA does is protected by patents and trade secrets, not to mention CUDA.
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.
It's just a shower. It won't harm you.
> 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
This is … oddly specific
I don't think Jensen without Nvidia would be better, but he's uniquely suited to fund a company, raise an enormous amount of capital, jumpstart contracts and partnerships, utilize connections at the highest levels of the global economy, and attract talent across all levels of a new company. Very few people, if any, have the foundations to do this.
What do you mean "allowed"?
I assume golden parachute + noncompete contract.
Ah, the golden handcuffs.
It's not just the Chinese spy. NYT:
> Jensen Huang... also had an extramarital relationship with an executive who reports to him, according to five people who worked at the company.
In what way did this affect nvidia's products?
How is that relevant? You could claim he was a victim of a honeypot, but an affair with a report is an abuse of power. Any regular employee would be terminated within a day. A CEO in his position will take a little more than a day.
I used to be a frequent visitor to /r/nvidia ~15 years ago until ~5 years ago. Around 2020 it turned increasingly into a sort of stock price cult. The discussions were corrupted with people who felt like they had a duty to try to help increase the stock price. I'm seeing inklings of that in these sorts of threads. How are these people so unaware of standard corporate policy? This is like the stereotypical case that's presented by HR to new hires.
It's an abuse of power, but it's also an excuse to get him out. Fortune 100 boards don't make decisions of this financial magnitude because of ethical considerations. Some political wind must have shifted against Jensen.
You mean like Sergey Brin was over Amanda Rosenberg? Oh wait, he wasn't.
1. That was 2014, prior to #MeToo, etc. This is less tolerated now (which is good, in my opinion).
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.
Even putting that aside, it affected the stock price, so I don’t see why the board wouldn’t care.
So what ? Does it make him a bad boss ?
Yes.
... yes? Obviously?
...yes... maybe effective at business, but definitely a bad boss to have relationships with your directs
I can overlook a lot for a bad boss that makes me a multi-millionaire possibly ten times over.
> whether Jensen will be allowed to start another Nvidia
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.
> He now knows how not to get trapped into a tactically targeted honeypot…
Does he? Plenty of serial cheaters out there getting caught repeatedly.
He's still a shareholder. It is considered extremely bad form to start a company that competes with a company that you are still a shareholder of unless you have not been fired with cause. The only other example I can think of is Jobs. So it is possible but I would assume that post Jobs contracts were put together in such a way that it would be very hard to compete with the company you got booted out of and that you are still a shareholder of. I've signed a couple of contracts over the years just as shareholders and those already mentioned that if I had competing interests the deal would be null and void and I'd be liable, and for good reasons too.
Why couldn't he just sell his shares then buy unencumbered fresh shares straight on the stock market? Lose <1% of spread...
He could pretty trivially divest or move his shares into a blind trust or something. This isn't rocket science, and furthermore it's not as bad form as you might think. It happens all the time with little repurcissions.
You think the kind of lawyers that power the documents behind these endeavours (a couple of trillion dollars) have not thought about this?
> the kind of lawyers that power the documents behind these endeavours
Those lawyers were hired by Jensen.
And paid by NV.
He will have a non compete agreement for a while. May be 1 year or more.
In California?
California allows paid noncompetes but it's not clear what they could offer him since he already has ~$150B.
If I am Lip-bu at Intel, I’d wire Huang after news cycle cools.
> he knows the ins and outs of a GPU fab business plus he has all the connections.
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.
> Jensen will be allowed to start another "Nvidia".l
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.
This is a fascinating theory.
Almost worth the time I wasted reading through the steaming pile of trash that all the other comments on this story are...
He would absolutely be fired if he were in any role, but as CEO cofounder, it's hard not to attribute Nvidia's success to his leadership.
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.
Something very fishy is going on here. If NVIDIA suddenly closes down GPU sales to the general public after Jensen is gone then we know what is happening: the Altman/Dario/Musk mafia have gotten what they wanted: no more compute for open weight models for the general public.
That is exceptionally unlikely.
It's been true for the last 2 years. If they hadn't slowed down the historical progress, we would've had 512 GB VRAM graphics cards today.
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
— Honoré de Balzac
China wins again The Guoanbu ( Guojia Anquan Bu (国家安全部) China's spy agency ) is subtle.
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.
Interesting to see what happens to the consumer, gaming GPU market.
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.
It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, and there seems to be quite a bit of evidence of a coverup and deliberate deception. It’s a liability problem; shareholders will sue. Heads will roll.
This is like Apple board firing Jobs and Woz at the same time.
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.
Jensen Huang is genuinely a classy guy, all possibilities accounted for, I like him.
The breed of CEO's coming up in tech are monstrous in comparison.
That YTD chart, woooow. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/
It will be a huge mistake for Nvidia
Isn't this just not only about the severity of crimes but the potential to withstand the legacy of whatever crimes that were committed that seems untenable to digest.
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?
This all looks like an excuse to force him to bend the knee. He is the only western tech ceo who is 1) a strong proponent of open weight models and 2) is highly critical of the chip sanctions on China because they’ve done the opposite of what they were meant to do.
Without knowing more this seems like the wrong move... The U.S. has the AI supply chain visualized incorrectly. The necessary manufacturing, raw materials and components all come from outside of the U.S. For nVidia to have decades of supplier relationships and manufacturing understanding, much of this was in the hands of the CEO more than other companies. Jensen has a lot of direct reports which is odd given the corporate structure.
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.
If the allegations of selling “trade secrets” are false. He should remain CEO. I am unsure that there is ITAR or real regulations here, is it really an AI war. If it was it would be best if they trained on American chips for America.
I want a straw poll from people that actually own NVDA. Or at least can honestly adjust to a mental frame of "I am an NVDA shareholder".
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?
Own some stock, don’t want him to be fired but he should be. Sucks all around
I would not be surprised if the woman is actually a CIA agent. Since the government bought a stake in Intel, and 15% of Nvidia exports revenue, it has been clear that it want direct control of the industry.
What bothers me is all these might be the plan afterall, the primary goal is not just to buy billion dollars of GPU.
Iamgine you're a spy or a mistresss, would you appear in public with the high profile target?
My cynical view is that a lot of US IP has already gone to China through Nvidia. The US should probably now monitor AMD, its executives and its relationship with China (via Taiwan or direct), if any, just as closely.
Yea, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
why not?
The ultrarich typically don't suffer from the consequences of their actions in the current age.
Unless they screw their shareholders.
A quick search says, Jensen owns under 4% of NVidia, and they aren't super-voting shares.
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.
He can just retire and live happily ever after. The mention to shareholders is pretty much the only thing a billionaire can’t do without getting in trouble.
CEOs of major corporations get fired all the time, including for their actions.
The CEO works for the board. And the board really doesn't like when their company ends up on the front page of the WSJ for helping a Chinese intelligence agent traffic your company's own product in violation of US sanctions.
Fired with cause or stepping down (most likely stepping down)>Interim CEO named> Jensen flew too close to sun and got burned. Board investigations will put everything on Jensen and they will turn that chapter over. Much more information will come out. His wife I will divorce him as well. This whole thing is more political than anything else. Who leaked all of this is my biggest question. Nvidia should be fine in the mid term, but unstable in the short term.
I still recall, as a young engineer (1999) working in a high-flying startup outside of Boston -- bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of naive optimism -- I flew to Houston in late '99 to demo a fabulous optical networking switch to ENRON, all the while thinking why in the world would ENRON want to be in the business of networking. Ended up selling them a TON of very expensive equipment.
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)
Affair or not, this is a tragedy for American technology.
If the affair were not with someone who was a CCP spy then Jensen Huang would still have his job.
Nope, sleeping with your subordinates will also get you fired
That would be the first affair we learned about... there's another and that may change the calculus. Regardless, the proverbial tragedy, IMO, would be depending on the judgement or heartbeat of one guy (CEO or not) at such a scale.
"Our kingdom for a shadow", or something. https://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardiii/richardiii.5.4.html
Do we actually know how much positive effect he has on running the company or are we just making assumptions?
You are wondering if the guy who co-founded Nvidia and was its CEO since its founding (over 33 years of leadership) and saw its market cap top over $4 trillion dollars “had a positive effect”?
he'll move to Taiwan, Taiwan will become part of China, China will move talent, Jensen will become the CEO of a new asian company and they will become a powerhouse in chip production in ~5 years
And getting the big boss all the bitches he wants is actually part of Chinese corporate culture.
This is overblown; nvda is a mature company jensen has set the right bets forward so it's just a matter in who the successor is. In terms of revenue impact, assuming megaspeed accounted for ~20% of sales (rumored estimate) then game optimal move is to have OAI/ANT pick those sales up. We will hear about a transition plan probably around earnings.
If those sales were illicit, and listed under earnings reports as legitimate, is that defrauding investors?
yea that can be argued^ if there is proof that Jensen knew and acknowledged that these are shell companies that will funnel the chips to china then yea that's defrauding investors.
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.
I take no joy in noting that personality-driven companies are notably at the mercy of the vagaries of the key-man in the key-man risk clause... :-/
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 has always wanted Nvidia to have a footing in China. Without that, the Chinese innovate faster and commoditize Nvidia’s business sooner. I’m willing to bet he already knew about Alice Huang selling to China. Trump probably knew for some time too. The board also knew about his second affair with his subordinate for a while.
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.
So what happens if this actually goes through? Everyone switches their hardware spend to which other providers?
TPUs and AWS's Trainium seem to be at least in the ballpark of being competitive but does that matter at all?
Nvidia will still be around?
1, Jensen Huang ousted as a CEO
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...
For some measure of nominative determinism, that is a pretty haunting timeline.
What is the connection between a Taiwan war and Nvidia?
Their fabs are run by TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (even the ones in Arizona, AFAIK)
Especially because of that I don't believe China will actually invade Taiwan right now. It will bring chip production to a halt for 5 years while factories get rebuilt. In this AI race that is not good for anyone.
But how does destabilising Nvidia help with invading Taiwan?
> China isolating Taiwan with an ongoing military drill
well, they do this like 6 times a year, it just usually doesn't make the news
So his girlfriend's a spy.
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.
Jensen Huang is a traitor without a doubt
Someone really wanted him out that bad. Wow!
given that jensen has handshake deals with many of his critical (supply constrained) suppliers he may have more leverage than founder shares could ever provide.
Not so surprised
Can someone explain to me why everyone on this website, and everyone in English-language media, takes for granted that “stopping China on AI” is a worthwhile or important goal?
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.
China is terrible to people who speak out against the government and the government censors models. Open weight is nice, but not good if it’s silently been lobotomized on topics.
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.
That’s crazy. How many American political prisoners have you met or worked with personally? I’ve worked directly on campaigns to free 2 of them. There are many. You almost never hear about that. Along with a lot of other things that, while statutorily legal to talk about publicly, never seem to get a hearing in the mass media. It’s almost as if one of these countries found a way to enact defacto censorship without admitting to it, and the other country is just honest
If you are getting paid millions, you should not make these intentional mistakes, he would have known she was a spy and just didn't care. There are better options for CEO.
The possible security implications of this entire affair (affairs now) can't be overstated. That hardware's in the most secret of facilities, computing very classified workloads for very very serious customers. Not the goofy AI heads, I'm talking about the military and intelligence communities in many nations.
Hopefully this teaches the market to migrate away from proprietary CUDA and NVIDIA and their proprietary drivers.
There is a second affair...
Why would this do anything to make people move on from the best performing devices in widespread production that money can buy?
They are going to put in Eric Schmidt.
Some of these main narratives just don't add up. If the end goal was to get chips, why is China blocking those H200s and it's stuck on port.
There's a different angle here worth listening to: https://youtu.be/IC3Kh40dEQY
Big companies should be resilient and diverse enough that their growth doesn't depend on one person, and yet most successful companies seem to be centered around someone with strong character and presence. Not to play cult of personality, but Huang looks like a central element of Nvidia's success. Will Nvidia go the way of Intel and other corporate grey bureaucracies that ultimately decline ?
Good tech CEOs are rare. Intel will break the bank to bring Jensen on. Even if he’s a Chinese spy, it’s worth more to shore up US fab capacity than it is to lose Intel’s tech secrets.
Earnings call next week is going to be very interesting. Wow.
I see people bemoan that this is going to hurt Nvidia. First of all, it’s not like Nvidia will crumble in a few weeks. The company has a sky-high valuation because of the moat they’ve built. That doesn’t just disappear simply because Jensen steps down.
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.
Nvidia is Jensen. If he's out, NVidia crashes and takes the AI bubble with it
I have no qualms with this outcome.
EDIT: I assume the bubble will collapse into correction eventually, sooner is better than later.
It would be quite funny.
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.
>Unless we discover that all this circular financing was some kind of scheme.
I think this is one of those " the question is the answer" moments.
Nah, just get rid of him now. It's a GPU not a rock band.
The only issue is finding replacement, Only 5 days to earnings.
Is there one? Obviously lots of MBAs out there but anyone who can really fill his shoes?
Isn’t Jensen super vocal about having dozens of direct reports? Because that would prevent any of them from appearing as a natural successor.
1. Replace Jensen as the President in the board with Tim Cook.
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.
Buck is a great person, really nice. Hiring Tim Cook as CEO probably not a great idea though IMO
For the time being the CFO or COO would do. But stock will take a hit.
I was at Intel when they made Bob Swan (COO) the CEO.
Going only on the one day point, I wouldn't recommend it for Nvidia.
s/day/data
What about Chris Malachowsky? He also would be a co-founder CEO
He's done for
we can live in hope, the company needs a cooler head.
but tbh I doubt it.
Obviously his actions were wrong and showed poor judgement but it would be a massive mistake for them to can Huang.
Honestly kind of sounds like its a great time to start a DCA buy of NVIDIA.
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.
Idiots
Steve Jobs, Sam Altman, Jack Dorsey ..... Jensen Huang?
It's often the Board of Directors that goes and the CEO retains control in the end.
Steve Jobs had been successfully ousted, and he had to bring Next to the then-ailing Apple to get back to the leader position.
Dorsey resigned himself, wasn't fired.
And Apple needed an OS, and a credible CEO, desperately.
yea but afaik none of those people helped a Chinese intelligence agent smuggle their own company's product into a country under US sanctions.
Huh I wonder if the true goal of the spy was to disrupt Nvidia by getting him fired, slowing them down, not stealing secrets.
I am just curious. Not in relation to this story: Have other people here had a change in their perspective in the last two years?
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.
He’s not gonna end up leaving. This is rubbish.
LOL this is so funny!
Karma for fucking over the gaming community that propped up his company for so long.
i dont get why everyone just eats up the propaganda that if she's a spy she automatically works for the chinese government. we are talking about 100s of billions of dollars here, this could easily just be a corporate spy or a honeypot. these mega corps are so rich and massive they have their own spy and enforcement teams, same as big oil and gas always had and still do. back in the day when oil and resources were in poorer countries they used the exact same tactics to control and take them over. its the same playbook, just now the target is a big us corporation.
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 in lesser that the needs of our partners, our friends, and our world.
If your getting paid millions, you should not be able to get away with these kinds of mistakes. There are better options for CEO
They cannot unseat him now. The work is too important, nations are competing hard against us. He has to just get away with it and everyone needs to move on, same as Oppenheimer.
This does look like a hit job. The spy stuff is ultimately meaningless and a smoke screen and may even be offered up to create plausible deniability. My take is that Dems/Biden + China Hawk Rs + decel crowd/Dario wanted export control and closed models. Jensen and Trump took a different view. Now that Dems have the Congress again, it's going to be non-stop hearings and investigations in the same spirit as the TikTok CEO with all the "Are you a commie?" questions. So the spy is offered as an explanation; nobody evaded export controls and nobody is a commie. The 2nd unrelated affair just points to an op to oust him.
It’s pretty clear (if you aren’t a huge idiot) that Jensen is attempting to bury the lede here.
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
He cheated on his wife with multiple women, it's coming out... I feel bad for her, everyone's saying she'll get billions and that's nice but she's been completely humiliated.
We have no idea what she’s feeling or what she knew. Careful jumping to any conclusions here.
> but she's been completely humiliated.
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.
One is a alleged spy the other a subordinate. It is a giant can of potential legal liabilities for Nvidia.
Nobody would have cared if he simply had a harem of mistresses.
I don't really feel that bad for her. She's 65 and will become a billionaire in her own right, meaning she can build whatever retirement for herself she can imagine. Their kids are in their 30s. Being cheated on is theoretically embarrassing, but 100% of people who have an opinion about it would be sympathetic to her (I mean, they'd see this as his failing and not her fault). Contrast that with how people will see Jensen ("stupid, reckless, betrayer of his family") and how people may see the women he cheated with (people may assume they were gold-diggers who knew exactly what they were doing).
I guess what I'm saying is, I'd be happy to be publicly cucked in exchange for at least a billion dollars.
I think that's taking it too lightly, it's not all about money. They had a life together, losing that stability at any age can be devastating, and lonely.
A lot of rich folks have agreements about this kind of thing.
Its best to not assume anything in regards to their relationship.
If this is correct, what was his motivation? I fail to see what he could have gained from it, other than a few extra billion in revenue, which they likely would have made otherwise anyway.
You don't become a billionaire by leaving money on the table. Achieving this kind of wealth is proof that you will never be satisfied, the reasonable people took their exit a while ago and are enjoying themselves peacefully. You most likely already took shortcuts and illegal actions to get there, so why not continue in that direction?
Preventing china from developing competitive chips.
Trump has made a lot of money from NVIDIA stock, and he's very good friends with Jensen. Especially after he approved the Export Deals. Jensen will be fine after he's out of NVIDIA.
[Citation Needed]
and they kissed
> Jensen will be fine after he's out of NVIDIA.
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.
Trump famously banned Epstein from his golf course and worked with the FBI during his first arrest. They famously hated each other, and were not friends
> Trump famously banned Epstein from his golf course
(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...
... allegedly for poaching the "talent"
Before that they seem very much to have been friends.
I think money’s not really the game for these guys, at least not for its own sake, it’s being able to bend the course of the world. People who don’t have enough usually seem to think it’s about consumption and wonder how they can be so greedy, but you can only consume so much, and that’s generally impossible to see in the rear view mirror for this group.
The phrase is “bury the lede”, not “bury the lead”: I just learned it recently, too.
They are both correct and used even among journalists.
My phone corrects my spelling. Lately it has begun correcting my grammar. How long until it points out idiom misuse?
Honestly, I hope this doesn’t play out in a rushed way. Evaluating this is the board’s top duty. It’s critical, and healthy, for them to weigh what’s best for all NVDA stakeholders.
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.
> Obviously, the affairs are a very serious issue,
It’s just sex mate, it’s really not a big deal unless he giving favourable deals to his mistress’s company.
"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" [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/09/business/economy/nvidia-m...
Who do you think Alice Huang is, mate? People had questions about NVidia's deal with Megaspeed since day 1.
Affairs could be a whole lot more than that. For example, assuming he didn’t want his wife finding out he’s an ideal blackmail target for anyone that does know.
it could be just a hookup. But its his life. His family. Its trust. And like others said, it can get way deeper and more complex. We just don't know.
> the investigation needs to determine whether there were any security conflict of interest breaches
The Board–correctly–fears for themselves personally in a case involving Jensen's public and multinational corruption scheme.
Add in that the democratic party wants to look tough on tech and here you have a clear case of the CEO selling known banned exports to a Chinese spy while personally fueling the data center hysteria.
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.
> democratic party wants to look tough on tech
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-...
hopefully the "fear" whats the best long interest of stockholders.
They had dirt on him for many years. Someone wants him ousted. That’s what’s happening behind the scene. Jensen probably pissed off someone very well-connected.
This is what I'm feeling as well. Similar to the "intervention" that put Altman back as CEO as well as a brand new board which included an ex-CIA director.
They should poach Lisa Su to lead Nvidia, she's one of the most talented CEOs of all time and knows chips.
I don't care who it is as long as they give us open kernel drivers that can match amds offering. Preferably also someone who's not hostile toward consumers would also be nice.
Yes, all of this crazy would have been somewhat easier to take if Nvidia also hadn't been laser focused on screwing the consumer over the last few years. He didn't seem to be very concerned about building a constituency for his position. The shareholders have lots of reasons to love him, but customers? Not so much.
And now we know if she starts wearing leather jackets everywhere, dump stocks asap
She’s also Jensen’s cousin!
Better yet, buy AMD.
> Better yet, buy AMD.
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.
With this administration? Anything is possible for the right price.
tbf they wouldn't be able to run a proper cpu company either, they can barely do ARM and those are easy mode
Ah yes, more monopolies will solve everything!
Just ask Apple, Google and Microsoft!
Why when her GPU market is a fraction of Nvidia, brutally honest it would seem she isn’t qualified at all or AMD would be a real player.
Considering what she did for AMD and completely revolutionized x86 I'd say she's one of very few people who are qualified.
Who else is there who knows chips, knows GPUs and has an exceptional track record?
Bringing in his cousin to run the company doesn't look great either.
people bemoaning the foreign interference angle seem to forget all the mountains of middle-east money thrown in the AI bubble, and where this money originates from.
Why are all the tech overlords scum people? Do they become that way with power, money and fame, or is it a certain kind of person from the start that achieves these things?
I'm scared about how this in turn shapes society.
"a certain kind of person from the start"
Kings were also famously out of touch with reality. Hierarchies, if left alone to grow this tall, do this to people.
Only the bad kings and they soon found out about it.
You would do well to look at the history beyond the modern era.
It's so common, the French have a word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roi_fain%C3%A9ant
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.
That's an excellent question and I've been wondering about this a lot. I've known a few billionaires, exactly one was an amazing person, the rest were absolutely terrible people in every sense of the word. The whole word is full of NPCs to them. But your question goes to the heart of it: were they terrible people because that's a requirement for becoming a billionaire or did becoming a billionaire somewhere along the line turn them into terrible people?
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:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/in-memoriam-rene-sommer/
The question is are the 'good' people you know actually good.
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.
You're mixing individuals and groups in a way that I can't really say much about it. I was talking exclusively about individuals that I've known personally beyond sitting at the same table or working for them with three layers of indirection.
Fair enough, for me I suppose for me the vast majority of people are deep down terrible and only made good because they have been made to be. I can imagine what you say is very true and no doubt the vast majority of billionaires are horrible and their untouchableness no doubt makes that so.
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%.
I think there is a level where you are no longer accountable in the way that ordinary people are accountable and I suspect that this is the reason why it happens, but my suspicions are worth absolutely nothing and given that these people are - in spite of the vast amount of information we seem to have about them - so in control of the narratives of their lives that it is impossible to make a diagnosis that will stick. So I will revert to the default: I don't know, but the sample I've seen makes me suspect that there is more to this than just coincidence.
"Nearly any man can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power" - Honest Abe
I hope you can see the conceit in this answer as well. Being powerless is perhaps a great test of character.
Edison v. Tesla is probably informative here, the system rewards scummy behavior.
> Why are all the tech overlords scum people?
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.
Why did you have to "quote" something no one said to make your point? That's a huge tell you're arguing against a straw man. This post was after a second affair, to me that's a moral flaw, not just someone exploiting him.
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?
> 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
Finally some sanity. He should have resigned.
From the NYT Story:
> 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.
I’m very curious what the going rate for such an offer is.
An RTX 5090?
I mean, the guy's worth $150B or so.
Do they offer $20k? $200k? $2M? He stands to potentially lose tens of billions over this.
The fact that they had a process for this is telling.
See Succession, after a certain net worth this is common practice, family bodyguards and lawyers train for such cases, however absurd.
Ok but if you are having an affair with your direct report why would you "be affectionate" in public ?
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.
The longer you get away with it, the safer it starts to feel, so they take more risks.
Some folks get a thrill from getting caught, too.
So, is "the AI-trade" now gone?
(Whatever the wallstreet guys understand by this term)
The company that rises due to AI has being ready to fall because of human nature. What a great joke.
Crazy indeed.
Here is a thought experiment: Put animals from different races into a singe cage and make them have same life-style. All of them are attached with an identifier tag that looks same, they all get same food, go on same rides, watch same TV shows. Then do the animals have same thoughts, beliefs, morals, norms and values? Most western governments thinks they would. Not sure when did the humanity got this dumber and forgot the saying "birds of a feather ...". Politicians decided that minds of people is separate from biology. Race, religion, culture, gender, background, age, geo-location - you were forced to ignore all of this. Just attach a American passport, give an american car, american food, american home; boom - everything is erased and all people are same.
This is certainly fast after the NYT article on his second affair. I suspect this was in the works after the original affair + export scandal.
I'm wondering how people like Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc. just continually get away with it. Are they just more sociopathic and cover their tracks better?
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.
Get away with what exactly?
Musk, Zuckerberg, and Altman and their companies have zero history of sketchy stuff that would, in a normal world, lead to CEOs being ousted? Affairs are enough to do it to Huang? The whole Chinese spy thing is not confirmed is it? And the three people I've listed have had documented cases of endangering national security through either their actions or their company's actions.
Zuckerberg controls 61% of voting shares for Meta, and implicitly, the Meta board of directors.
The board decides who is CEO. Zuck controls the board. Zuck cannot be fired unless he wants to be.
Zuckerberg and Musk can't be fired. They own controlling share.
I suppose that's one reason. But Musk has formed basically pyramid schemes to keep his debtors from calling and to move his debt out from under him. Without that, he likely would have to sell shares to cover the debt of his Twitter purchase.
He paid for that with: 1) shares of TSLA that he sold, 2) company debt (not personal debt)
He had billions of dollars in a margin loan tied to Tesla stock.
Care to explain which "basically pyramid schemes" you are alluding to? A link to a reputable source would suffice.
Musk has a history of having his companies buy his other companies, and his most recent example of this is obviously xAI buying X and then SpaceX buying xAI. For example, the purchase of X by xAI valued X at a ridiculous ~$40 billion. And then he took SpaceX public after all of this. And SpaceX is built upon $38 billion worth of taxpayer money, grants, tax credits, etc. Must be nice to have a bunch of loser companies all buy each other and then use a government funded hype stock to make it all back.
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.
They could lose control through a substantial shareholder lawsuit. A minority shareholder suit against Musk could prove tremendous damages repaid in stock and the judge might not let the special classes of shares with extra voting power protect his control.
It would have to be a very good cause though, disliking him or ordinary bad business decisions won't cut it.
Get away with what? I haven’t heard anything about Musk, Zuck or Altman falling straight into a honeypot from an unallied nation
Musk and Russia?
Why does he support Putin?
"Okay, when I introduce you, I'm gonna say, 'This is a friend of mine.' That means you're a connected guy. Now if I were to say, this is a friend of ours—that would mean you're a made guy. Capiche?"
Board is likely looking ahead to Democrats taking office and investigating the spy relationship and lack of action taken by the government.
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’ve read through a lot of this thread and one thing that’s interesting to me is the relatively little weight that’s been given to the HR violation aspect of Huang’s behavior with a subordinate; specifically the power dynamic aspect.
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?
what a weird coincidence 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 :-)
He came upon a wife changing amount of money and couldn't resist
I think (and I hope for the USA’s sake) Jensen was actually a CIA asset and they knew Alice from day 1 and let him play with his ding dong but also importantly covert reverse spy on China.
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.
Is this how the whole castle crumbles? some tabloid sex scandal on one side like it's 2017, anthropic vibecoding a CUDA replacement for AMD on the other?
Goodbye, money! Who is seriously considering sabotaging their portfolio and precipitating a huge SP500 drop for months to come? Who, remembering the board of directors is making this decision, would want that?
People owning no stock, with grudges against the C suite class. A lot of people, I'd assume.
Mr. President a second Jensen affair has hit the tower
AI is under attack.
Any proof his mistress is a Chinese spy or is she just Chinese (and young and hot)?
It's kinda cool this guy is a computer nerd who is living like a rock star.
No, just a smuggler in contact with the biggest chinese companies, and the department of commerce being utterly corrupt, normal rock star stuff.
I’m buying the affair and that it facilitated smuggling, but all could be explained by financial interest so far. Was she a spy or made a spy by circumstances on the smuggling itself?
If, as alleged, Alice Huang is an agent of the Chinese government, and if her activities result in Jensen Huang getting ditched by Nvidia, that is certainly going to win her Employee of the Year at the MSS (国家安全部) Christmas Party.
ITT: underclass gossips about their masters' sex lives and wifey feelings
I like the guy, he's funny. I would say to keep him (on a leash), but if I could get endless 10/10 Chinese spy pussy I too would betray the AI race. I wouldn't cheat on my wife though, that's pretty low.
It’s not like he assaulted women, which is apparently par for the course at other big tech companies.
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.
China would love nothing more... Perhaps they orchestrated it... Illogical...
So Jensen also had an affair with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, who is also married.
Looks like both Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia CEO have Single Instruction Multiple Threads (SIMT) architecture.
Did you hear about the container of gpus that was lost between california and texas? I heard that if it's not found, someone is going to get REALLY F... a spy type F one lol.
The media attention here was weirdly intense when it broke out.
With his connections , he can start another one.
100% dumping my Nvidia stocks if this happens. Maybe triggering this en-masse was the goal all along?
What you mean "goal"? It takes a lot of active effort to shoot yourself in the foot like that.
Most of these things probably have been known for ages. And yes, in comparison to the actually bad billionaires he didn't protect himself left and right. Why is this getting surfaced now?
Probably the worst choice he made is to project an image of devoted husband who adores his wife. Should've learn from Elon.
Macro: Is this political subterfuge to distract us from other things like criminal government officials? Spiteful payback for losing the mid-terms?
I don't think it's any of these things.
It's NVIDIA being sued because they defrauded investors by including illicit chip sales in their Q3 figures
He literally FAFOed
well deserved. Should join Bill Gates in the same Unfavored Not-Gentleman-Anymore Club and be forgotten.
Turns out he's just Jensen Hung
Note to self: if a hot chick ever shows interest in me and I'm not that attractive then be on my guard.
What did board of tesla said when Elon asked some random girl on Internet to have a baby for him?
Sadly, Jensen never got invited to Epstein Island and is therefore a persona non grata in the highest circles of business and government.
Some group is trying to make a big deal out of this. I mean which spy posts so publicly their itineraries/photos/business meetings, on wechat? Come on!
huang himself be open sourced prior to nvidia graphics driver.
I hope it was worth it.
What do you think he’ll be thinking of on his death bed. Nvidia’s shareholders or the human connection.
Correct. It's been reported that his blood is now over 80% Cialis, so yeah, he'll be thinking of human connections for sure.
Everyone knows what the GeForceExperience meant.
I've been writing about history for over 20 years, and this feels like an inflection point. Some day a long-form essay will describe Huang's prescient foray into machine learning, the rise of AI, the resulting bubble, Ed Zitron's prolonged diatribes, Huang's infidelity that leads to the downfall of his company, Anthropic's disappointing IPO, OpenAI's subsequent disastrous IPO, a reckoning for AI's plagiarism, and then there are bubble bits all over everybody.
We'll call it Billy and the Bubbleosaurus.
Jensen really needs some time off.
It's Joever
My armchair analysis is that going forward with this will most likely make the AI bubble pop.
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)
Interesting that the thing that might pop the AI stock bubble isn’t anything to do with the technology at all but a good old-fashioned sex scandal.
It won’t be the sex it will be the illicit sales of GPUs to China. That domino topples the next and all of the “sales” of goods to AI companies financed by the sellers. There’s a whole lot of paper sales boosting revenues while losing money with each sale going on.
It’s the Dot Bomb days all over again.
Good luck with their stock. He's on par with Steve Jobs level of marketing.
Why does it feel like half these comments are NVDA holders?
These things would be clear causes for resignation at any big corp
Hard to imagine this happening. Curious if he will pull off a coup like Sam Altman.
it's because the gamers haven't been able to buy a gpu since 2024
If the big boys can fly to LSJ to eat "beef jerky" and fully avoid prosecution, then this is a CIA coup, because virtually nobody really cares about how he warmed his stick. They are probably mad at him for moving product to the Chinese, who they can't control as easily. They are going to install a puppet they can properly control. And "pace the frontier" by sucking the oxygen out of the room for open source and local models.
Mission accomplished: nvidia nationalized.
That was probably the Chinese intelligence intent, to destroy Nvidia this way. The tools are going for it.
My tinfoil hat theory is that this is all orchestrated. They knew about the affair for months, but withheld it. My theory is that with the midterms results, rather than risk facing accountability as things unravel "naturally", they have this big bombshell as a "get out of blame free" card. That way everyone can collectively say "It wasn't _my_ fault things fell apart. I was doing my best, honest!"
So they risked an actual transfer of intel to entrap him?
silicon valley - paedophilia is fine, but sleeping with a Chinese AI executive is where I draw the line
Well, Mr. Huang sure seems to have turned his life upside down.
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.
"Nvidia" was named for envy, one of the 7 deadly sins. Maybe his next company will be "Luxuria"?
insane that an infidelity should have any bearing on the ability to lead the company he took from zero to 5 trillion
moralism blocking progress once again
Infidelity with a Chinese spy. Quite a different beast.
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.
It's easy to blame a person like dumb Jensen who slept with the Chinese spy.
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.
Should have sold at 220 ugh
But there's no real competitors still? Even for the medium term?
> But there's no real competitors still? Even for the medium term?
So AMD, Google are not "real" competitors?
AMD does not have any hardware in direct competition with Nvidia's high end products. No company does.
They do. Anthropic just moved off of Nvidia and straight onto AMD hardware as if it was nothing.
Interesting that seems to have just happened. Surprised it wasn't bigger news
Conspiracy theory, the affair news came out to bury this story lol
I had 10 shares at 30 I sold at 40. Now I'm all bogleheads though.
Beijing is laughing their asses off at us.
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.
This is how the market tanks...
SMH
Does every man, woman, other and pet in silicon valley still inform for Stratfor?
His crime is he put his junk in the wrong kind of spy?
Maybe now Apple and nvidia can rekindle their relationship after the bubble pops. Apple could come to the rescue, secure a heavy investment and enter into the cloud computing business.
Steve Bannon ( et al., himself already having done the job now serving by rolling release AI proxy ) Trump move. Dunno who invented it but it works
And another Mackenzie Scott is born.
.
You posted this verbatim in the other thread, Dario.
it would be ironic if this is how the AI 'bubble' pops.
Irattional things continue to be irrational i guess
Seems the sort of rumor anyone could produce.
I feel this is way over amplified to further restrict chinese models/open weights development by further controlling the company with a new CEO.. seriously, who cares what he’s doing in his personal life, I am not a big fan of him much as he should have made GPUs further more accessible to consumers, but he’s definitely not an evil AI lunatic like some AI ceo bros we see now.
I still don't understand why Jensen didn't just offer the lady involved a horse.
I mean, that's acceptable these days isn't it?
Is there a archive.ph link? This article is paywalled.
Any ousting will probably be for having an affair with a direct report. At many companies, having an 'inappropriate relationship with a customer' isn't a policy violation unless there's also evidence of undue influence, so it's more conditional and complicated. Whereas just the existence of an inappropriate relationship with a direct report is a serious violation.
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).
He has to go because he opposes restrictions to run Chinese open weight models on NVIDIAs GPUs. He said so in an Axios interview in July - "The industry needs open models, science needs open models, cybersecurity needs open models". [1]
[1] https://www.facebook.com/ChinainAus/videos/nvidia-ceo-jensen...
Good riddance. All these csuite people think they are so uniquely capable but if he gets kicked out nothing will change except we'll, hopefully, hear less about jackets at tech presentations.
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.
CEO sleeps with customer. CEO sleeps with someone who reports to him. Time to go.
The reports that he had a second affair with a subordinate, if true, are disgusting and would lead to termination at any other company. He should not get a pass. How someone who has had so much success could have such poor judgement is a mystery to me. It’s sad, he accomplished so much.
What is the endgame of this completely cumbersome and obvious CIA journalist and intelligence community rollout of this narrative surrounding Jensen and Nvidia? Why would they nuke the credibility of America's only AI chip company and hand the future of AI to China? Do they actually think this will gain them control over AI?
https://x.com/ChinaSelect/status/2120253050845593723
Americans voted for rooting out corruption. The Congressional committees that review stuff like corruptly quashing an investigation into your lover company [1] are changing hands. Jensen coming clean right after the election was, within the range of options he had, smart.
(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...
> Americans voted for rooting out corruption.
Wasn’t the swap drained in 2016 too?
Those of us foolish enough to vote Trump in 2016 weren't convinced he was going to leave the swamp drained, rather that it was so bad he couldn't do worse. A lesser of two evils kind of choice.
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'.
Trying to engage in good faith here. What did you see in the first few weeks after your 2016 vote that were materially different from how he ran his 2016 campaign (and I mean the hits - "they're sending rapists, ...", "grab her by the pussy", ...)?
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?
For me personally it was trying to ban travel from whole countries based on race. Morally I didn't expect him to personally be a paragon of virtue. My hope was that the vile parts of his retoric were mostly campaign bluster and "locker room talk", and that he'd defer to experts once in office.
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.
Gotcha.
> 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.
Thanks for the honesty and humility. These types of perspectives are wonderful to read.
Wherever you land on your views in the future, being willing to question everything is a superpower.
Onward!
> The days of the CIA running a competent conspiracy, if they ever existed, are long behind us.
Now that's something I'd like everyone to believe, if I was the CIA.
The US intelligence community is pretty shot, but we too quickly forget how much of the internet is influenced by them.
If the anti-corruption revolution is going to focus on some dude's sex life rather than the extensive and obvious whoring of political office, I want none of it.
When the "some dude" is Jensen Huang and involves sleeping with Chinese spies while advocating for relaxed export controls, then obviously it's gonna pay him some attention.
The guy advocates for relaxed export controls because it makes him stupid amounts of money, at the cost of our national security.
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.
> some dude's sex life
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-...
This looks like a major indictment of Lutnick, not Huang.
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.
> that's not what we're seeing?
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...
Thanks. I have my popcorn in hand but... so far it looks mostly terrible for the commerce department. Huang? I don't know.
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.
> so far it looks mostly terrible for the commerce department. Huang? I don't know
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.
> He then corruptly quashed the investigation using Nvidia’s resources.
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?
> Civilians don't get to quash investigations
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...
"some dude's sex life"
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.
I think their concern is that NVidia is acquiescent and in support of policies which give China better AI chips, which is the core of the matter regarding the honeypot scandal. The goal, if it is an op, is to get a CEO who will comply more readily with export controls.
They are finding ways to tighten chip export to China, which is the biggest threat to OpenAI/Anthropic atm.
Let’s steelman instead of strawman. The CIA likely cares little about Ant and OpenAI.
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.
And it’s also very obvious that restricting exports will only help in the short term, and in the long term, gives China reason to develop their own tech.
The biggest constraint in AI is energy, not hardware. You can always throw slower hardware at the problem, just have more of it.
Energy is the hard part, and US is deeply behind on that.
I’d say EUV lithography is the hard part; China doesn’t have DUV in production yet from what I can tell, so their FLOPs / MW is going to be terrible.
China already has reason to develop their own tech, and is actively trying to do so. Availability of US chips will not change that.
I thought I was supposed to believe that OpenAI & Anthropic's methods are so much more advanced than any potential capabilities of Chinese competitors that OpenAI & Anthropic must each be trillion dollar companies.
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.
NYT and WSJ doing the bidding. Unleash the Oppenheimer protocol. It’s an epic footgun. History repeats itself.
Given the massive amount of chips funneled through to CN, I guess it leaves regular ol' corporate governance no other option.
They’re just reporting on things that are true and have been kept secret inappropriately. That’s not a “narrative”.
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.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theory to realized someone leaked these stories in fairly rapid succession and it’s not a leap to suggest that person has an agenda. Not everything is a conspiracy but when it only has to involve a few people the odds go up.
When one story comes out, other related stories that have been around are a lot easier to get limelight. And it's much easier to surface new dirt in those situations too. So I wouldn't use rapid succession of multiple stories as indicative of anything.
> When one story comes out, other related stories that have been around are a lot easier to get limelight
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.
You’ve already made an assumption there that both stories were leaked by the same person. What’s the evidence to back that up?
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.
“sources close to the White House”
I am pretty sure under normal circumstances, a person with 160 billion dollars that leads a 4 trillion dollar company is able to cause these stories to never materialize.
If someone thinks there is not a lot of sex going on in the c-suite maybe you need to get out more.
What is up with people who seem to love corruption?
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.
More like: whats up with people being utterly fucking stupid and devoid of even the bare minimum of critical thinking skills. Being pro (or at least unbothered by) corruption is just one of the ways that manifests.
Money talks. Shareholders didn't seem to mind when Tim Cook gave Trump a golden trophy. They certainly didn't mind Jensen Huang's dialog with Trump when sanctions were ill-defined. It seems like cronyism is in, and all the cool kids are doing it.
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.
Its also utterly myopic and partially the reason we are at the precipice of a massive bubble burst.
Reminds me of the meme that WorldCom went down because their CEO bravely stood up to NSA pressure. Instead of, you know, running an elaborate shell game of financial fraud to enrich executives and dupe shareholders after the Dot Com bubble burst.
And worse yet, he seemed to be influence by her to violate export restrictions and was probably responsible to a substantial "donation" to the presidential "ballroom fund" to change squash an investigation into the matter.
This is up there with the most fireable things that have ever happened.
> What is up with people who seem to love corruption?
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.
"America's only AI chip company"
Nvidia has a large market share, but AMD, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Qualcomm all produce AI chips... these are all American companies.
+Broadcom (as much as it pains me to say)
And let’s not forget Apple, which makes Apple Silicon chips and makes the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio, which are very popular devices for local LLMs.
They're a non-factor. The largest coherent Mac cluster you can wire together is >100x smaller than a single DGX SuperPOD.
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.
If they didn't want to hand the future of AI to China, maybe Nvidia shouldn't have had a Chinese CEO? (By which I mean this wasn’t their objective)
Reputedly it’s Marco Rubio who has been the main leaker. Think about what his motivations may be and the timing and you’ll have an answer.
perhaps they acquired or feign having acquired fundamental cryptographic breakthroughs, hoping the "bubble" spreads to China / India / ... to convert a few moths of cryptographic lead into perhaps a few years....
Unless there’s an evidence of him being compromised, this is crazy. I’m total outsider and don’t know Nvidia copropare rule machinery, but from perceived perspective that feels like significant blow to the company.
I expect shit show funnier than when OpenAI tried to put Altman with same result.
Even shift leaders at McDonalds need to sign various workplace policies, including policies about relations with their direct reports. So yeah, this is not exactly a surprise or something unheard of.
> Even shift leaders at McDonalds need to sign various workplace policies, including policies about relations with their direct reports.
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).
Any such policy is illegal and wouldn't last in court. You can't contract away human rights.
You can't ban someone from having a relationship. But you certainly can require them to disclose such a conflict of interest to the board.
As a manager of McDonald's?
It is not a human right to have sex with whomever you wish free of restrictions.
It absolutely is for two consenting adults who aren't blood related.
It certainly isn't something for Ronald fucking McDonald to have an opinion about.
No, it isn't.
In the US, most employment is at-will, which means they can fire you for any reason they want except for a list of prohibited reasons.
"Having sex with a direct report" is not on that list of prohibited reasons.
If you can be fired for any reason, then that's it and they can put in the contract that you aren't allowed to drink a glass of water if so be.
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.
Having a relationship with someone you have authority over is considered very problematic just about everywhere, in part because the existence of that authority creates problems for consent (among other reasons).
Even if he’s not compromised it shows a pretty serious lapse in judgment. Remember that CEO and HR exec who got caught at a Coldplay concert?
I'm not sure what the big deal is. Eric Swalwell slept with a Chinese spy and he was part of the government at the time.
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.
I wonder if Trump will retaliate against Nvidia. Neither (firing, retaliating) would be good for the world economy.
The NYT reports that Huang was caught on video with this second affair when they were together in San Jose.
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.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50417105
Makes you wonder who the person(s) is?
It:s because he's close to Trump.