The board is investigating because the woman he had the affair with is a Chinese spy.

Neither the board nor the US government nor investors nor the average person gives a shit about a CEO having an affair as long it doesn't compromise his ability to do his job well.

Alleged Chinese spy unless I’m reading the article wrong? A Chinese intelligence asset could mean someone who just had CPC membership in college. Not that I’m saying Alice Huang isn’t a spy, I just would want more information before deciding.

She was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy.

Also, just to be clear here: the story is that Jensen was also going to Taiwan to meet with this person who was helping Alibaba evade sanctions, when Jensen met with this person Alibaba reps were always there, and in the US Jensen was making media appearances saying that sanctions on China had to be lifted.

Bear in mind that multiple people at Supermicro were charged for allegedly smuggling servers to China, and that the reason Megaspeed is being investigated is for effectively the same thing. Jensen denied he had anything to do with Supermicro, it is going to be much harder to say the same thing here.

I don't think the affair itself is necessarily related to the direction this will shortly take.

> She was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy.

MLK Jr. was being monitored by the FBI and CIA, who believed he was a Communist.

That has nothing to do with the fact that she was being monitored by the CIA, who believed she was a spy. Stop it with the red herring bit.

That appears to be an appeal to authority instead of establishing any facts, and the argument in the authority is not one rather than a red herring. Unless what matters isn’t whether she was actually a spy, only what CIA thought of her.

There is a huge difference between smugglers and spies though. Profit motive is all you need to be a smuggler, you don’t need espionage or anything else, you definitely don’t need a handler in zhongnanhai.

> Profit motive is all you need to be a smuggler, you don’t need espionage or anything else

What you need to be a smuggler is to avoid prison.

When one side is fully aware that you are a smuggler that they can rat on to the other side whenever they want, even a child could blackmail you.

So that's one (fairly realistic imo) pathway from smuggler -> to espionage.

This is a hypothetical anyways.

The core competency of smugglers is getting the goods delivered. Some smugglers are motivated beyond profit or avoiding jail.

Certainly no government would ever encourage its own agents to engage in things like smuggling like that of drugs especially to certain Global South nation states where the capital acquired from those drugs ended up funding pro-American paramilitaries and interests.

Contra-ry to common conspiracy theories, I'm certain any government-led self-investigation into culpability was all very aboveboard and well-substantiated.

> Certainly no government would ever encourage its own agents to engage in things like smuggling

North Korea has entered the chat ...

Some may have missed that GP comment was dripping in /s tags and Contra-iness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...

They are talking about the USA

USA, which is famous for engaging in several smuggling operations, like the Iran-Contra affair.

I thought including 'bananas [...] republic' and 'Contra-ry' would be obvious enough of hints that I was being deeply sarcastic but alas

Sarcasm is a subtle art, my friend, and sometimes the audience misses the point. I did too, and re-read your comment and now see where you were going. <soft golf clap....>

The Chinese government definitely has better sticks to threaten Chinese nationals with than ratting them out to the US. That's laughably backwards.

She is a CEO in Singapore, she avoids going to jail by obeying Singaporean law. I don’t know how American law would even apply to her, they definitely apply to Jensen though.

American law, procedures and formalities or not, can potentially apply to anyone. Nothing is beyond our reach.

Iran appears to be.

[delayed]

Smugglers can be spies actually, it’s not an uncommon trope. Just not all smugglers are spies.

Doesn’t sound like the Alibaba reps were at _every_ meeting

They were watching through very secret hotel cameras ;)

That's the risk - blackmail. It may very well be the reason Jensen is being so out in the open about this.

Chinese spy can mean everything from “sell us more GPUs to China or I leak our affair” (which I think NVDA would be very happy with - they’ve already admitted to chip diversion, and their senior execs have been arrested for the same) to trade secrets being given to Huawei.

IMHO, I’m speculating, but I think the affair happened first, and then the MSS got involved for access and blackmail.

> ...and then the MSS got involved for access and blackmail.

If you look at Megaspeed, it has Chinese state asset written all over it.

How

1. Singapore is a well-known hub for the smuggling of Nvidia chips to China.

2. The company was originally set up as the subsidiary of a Chinese gaming company.

3. When the US added stricter export controls for Nvidia chips in 2023, it was spun off and ownership reportedly moved to a BVI shell company.

4. Later it was sold to a company that is apparently owned by one person who is believed to live in China.

5. The Singapore offices of the company and others he is an owner or director of show little activity and according to one report, the co-working space at the address listed for one didn't even have a record of the company.

6. Despite the fact that Megaspeed showed less than $6 million in cash at the end of 2023, it somehow became an Nvidia Cloud Partner and between 2024 and 2026 purchased $4.8 billion worth of advanced Nvidia chips, making it the top Nvidia chip buyer in ASEAN.

This company was on the radar of people in the industry well before this scandal because basically nobody had any idea who it was and where the money was coming from.

https://en.thairath.co.th/money/tech_innovation/tech_compani...

Thanks for the extensive write up! Every point except 6 (the acquisition) sounds very normal for Chinese companies. 6 million is worth a lot more in the Mainland, not many AI chips tho… mmmm

I actually live in Asia and have done business in the region for years.

Very "normal" for what? None of this is "normal" for a legitimate company supposedly running a neocloud business on $4+ billion worth of Nvidia chips.

Singapore-based companies with this type of footprint run by Chinese nationals are almost always fronts for shady stuff.

I also live in asia, and many bosses have like 10-20 companies all sorta feeding of each other in the most complex and strange ways. One day I was stepping into the office, and it was just stripped to the ground. “Oh yeah, we moved”… I am not surprised by anything anymore.

Legitimate companies don't have a collection of offshore shells, offices that keep moving, etc. Tax avoidance is real, but if you're seeing dozens of shells trading with each other in ways that don't make any sense, offices moving overnight, you should consider that you're not seeing companies that are on the up and up.

I don't know what sort of work you do/what industry you're in, but that's not how legitimate business operates in the region.

I dunno, they kinda do? Involution

I cant comment on the comment below but… this is the new normal. Everyone is shady. From the bubble teashop francise on the corner to some fancy startup. Do you ever talk with locals?

> This company was on the radar of people in the industry well before this scandal because basically nobody had any idea who it was and where the money was coming from.

Yet still they sold them the chips. Shows just how much Nvidia care about the restrictions placed on their clients.

She was also the CEO of a large customer. That sounds like it could impact his job performance.

Just to be clear, alleged spy, and working for a foreign government which wants to do a tremendous amount of incredibly profitable business with the company. Which he should be carefully weighing against the very real legal risks when the US government doesn't want that business to happen. And if he can't remain impartial, the board should be concerned about whether he can make the right decision for shareholder about that risk/profit.

What OP is implying is that the Board likely implicitly condoned any effort Jensen would take to make sales to China including making underhanded deals that look like honeypot operations but may as well have been a double honeypot operation. The implication is that the outcome of said affair was actually good for Nvidia. You imply that the interests of Nvidia and the US government and by extension the US public are aligned. That’s a citation-needed level assumption. Nvidia just wants to make money. The government hopefully has different interests.

The penalties for ITAR/EAR violations are severe so I suspect it's as ludicrous and incorrect a theory as one might suspect.

What is interesting is the woman appears to be extremely mid-looking.

If there is a lesson to be learned from all these extremely powerful men cheating on their wives with objectively ordinary women (e.g. Gates, Bezos, Tiger Woods) it's that the most beautiful woman in the world is worth about the same as the woman that works at McDonald's.

Implying that beautiful people can't work at McDonald's?

There is a more crude corollary to this theory that I chose to omit for decorum's sake:

P = P

More like beautiful people are less likely to be into weird stuff probably.

[delayed]

Based on what?

From observation, it seems Starbucks/High-end coffee chains attract easier looking staff. At the end of the day, you are going to get the higher paying job, and the higher paying job can afford to select the easier looking ones.

These guys are so rich they can hire beautiful prostitutes whenever they want. Looks alone are dime-a-dozen, in the end it's personality that counts (the latter notably also holds true for non-gazillionaires).

I like to believe Bezos was still being yelled at to take out the trash and for leaving dirty pancake batter bowls in the kitchen sink.

Yeah, someone like Huang probably has beautiful women throwing themselves at him all the time and it's quite possible that he's taken many of them up on the offer already, it's just never come out before. A man who has access to such abundance of beautiful women may over time become more interested in things like personality, if he wasn't already more interested in personality before -- there are some men who care more about personality from the start.

I'm sorry but what is this vapid take on personal relationships and attraction? I don't get the point of anything beyond your first sentence. Can you explain?

This isn't a storybook love story.

Men — in particular, powerful men — want to stick it in the hole.

Above all else, even if it means risking everything, they'll do it anyway.

Incel views

Not the OP, but I was also curious about how the woman looked, i.e. if she was physically attractive or not. That's interesting from a "history of honey-potting"-perspective, good for the Chinese that they knew what moved this horny CEO's gears and that they were able to match it. As far as I know it was the Russians/Soviets who were experts at honey-potting, this is the first time when I read from the Chinese doing the same at such a high level.

There was also Fang Fang and Rep Swallwell

https://abcnews4.com/news/nation-world/swalwell-and-fang-fan...

Diane Feinstein also had a Chinese spy for a driver for 20 years, though I'm going to assume for my own sanity that wasn't a sexual relationship.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/details-chinese-sp...

I think this has been going on a very long time, it's just that these were politicians so I think everyone just brushed it off as "business as usual."

Diogenes?

[delayed]

Outside of your odd take on attraction, which is way more than looks alone...

There are memes that super-model looking women dating nerds are almost always spies of some sort. For this spy to have any chance at gaining real information she needed to have an actual relationship with Huang - which, see above, is more than looks alone.

It's unfortunate how it's perfectly rational for a board to want their CEOs doing just enough fraud/backchanneling/cosying-up-to-suspect-world-leaders to maximize shareholder value, as long as they're not getting caught/... in ways that overall minimize shareholder value.

I don't think it's rational for boards to encourage fraud, as it is illegal, nor does it happen much. The others sure.

That's not unfortunate: that's the way the system is designed to work:

* Corps maximize shareholder value

* Govs make laws/penalties to avoid too much harm/risk by corps

* Press keeps everybody accountable

It's great when everybody's doing what they're supposed to do.

Unfortunate is when corps are so in bed with gov that they don't bother innovating or growing

[delayed]

On Wall Street, no.

I think it was Francois Hollande who was photographed while in office on his vespa leaving the presidential palace to see his mistress

Surely you weren't under the impression that the executive class is honest?

Sure, if by high performing you mean fully assuming the lions share of risk of establishing monopoly in a speculation market via personal enmeshment with a corrupt political administration on the verge of sunset. His job for this board could very well be gone-rogue fall-guy.

I think he meant, look at the chart, and not whatever you just typed up.

Chart analysis of bigger-number-better is accelerating past 1 recession per decade.