> If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They wouldn't be able to for anti-trust concerns.

Admittedly they might be able to get some people in the US to look the other way with sufficient beak-wetting but the EU would never allow it.

Who else is there who knows chips, knows GPUs and has an exceptional track record?

Luckily I am divorced and self-employed so I can play with Chinese models all I want.

but tbh I doubt it.

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 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

That’s a stretch. He’s the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. Hearing that he had an affair, or multiple affairs, shouldn’t come as a surprise. The only person here who’s humiliated himself is Jensen, for having an affair with a spy. He was too high and mighty to take the simple route and pay for high end escorts who make you feel good for a couple of hours, and then move on with your life. No, he decided he needed to have a whole relationship on the side.

Nobody would have cared if he simply had a harem of mistresses.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'd be happy to be publicly cucked in exchange for at least a billion dollars.

Its best to not assume anything in regards to their relationship.

A billionaire being fired is not that much of a big deal. There’s nothing in the world that’ll make them worry about what will be their next business jet.

As for him being good friends with Trump, it doesn’t say much. Epstein was one of his besties and he’s still dead.

(all sourced from [0])

Well, they had a spat in 2000 because Epstein was poaching Trump's staff but he remained a member until 2007 (or possibly longer, depending on who you believe.)

> They famously hated each other

In 2002, Trump said "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with." I don't know, it doesn't sound very "hatey" to me.

In 2003, he sent his birthday message of "A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret." Still not getting much "hate" from this relationship.

I'll give you, maybe, from 2007 onwards they fell out of friendship but even then it's not clear what actually went on.

Maybe once we get a fuller release of the Epstein Files we'll know more.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Donald_Trump_a...

Before that they seem very much to have been friends.

That's a great metaphor.

"A lede is the introductory section in journalism and thus to bury the lede refers to hiding the most important and relevant pieces of a story within other distracting information."

Burying the lead in the journalism would actually be burying the lead (like the metal) so they aren't even pronounced the same. Many people make the same mistake you do so this misconception proliferates.

It's often the Board of Directors that goes and the CEO retains control in the end.

Dorsey resigned himself, wasn't fired.

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

[1] https://time.com/archive/7146565/hollandes-popularity-goes-u...

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.

Their P/E ratio is lower than in 2020 (before AI got rolling, and way below their 2023 peak.

If anything - based on current sales alone - NVDA is undervalued.

If (it’s a big if), NVDA get leapfrogged in hardware capability it will be trivial for the next generation of deployments to stop using them entirely (Google and Microsoft are already developing custom inference chips, as are others)

The same story goes back for years and years in consumer hardware too. AMD GPUs often had more raw compute capability, but fell short in actual game performance (or other applications).

Nvidia's moat is, at least partially, the software to make the hardware useful.

The hyperscalers are one story but research/consumer/“Everyman” inference is likely very different.

i would like to, but won't/can't buy their overpriced crap -> they're losing a customer -> they're doing something wrong -> their valuation is just about 0 to me, ballpark estimate

The main competitions US labs are facing, are from one another at this point, not from open weight models. If anything, the competition from new entrants in the west (Meta, xAI, even Google if you think about it) has pushed things even faster, but regardless, I don’t see how OpenAI and Anthropic would have been any slower if there were no open weight models.

That is something they simply cannot do with Chinese entities. Allegedly smuggling GPUs may be feasible, but that'd probably ruffle to many feathers in both the US and Mainland China, especially as we know they will pop a bubble to their own (temporary) detriment if it gets out of control as seen with Evergrande a few years ago.

Nvidia would rather sell those big interconnected gpu racks than individual GPUs.

> I don't think it's good for Nvidia if everyone has to go through a few labs APIs to get access to AI inference.

Maybe but isn't a business customer better for Nvidia than regular customers? They buy in bulk and commit to multi year purchases. Bonus points for circular deals

Would that not perhaps hurt their product ecosystem? What if people decide they don't want so much of one product, and would actually like to buy some of those cancelled products at some point in the future? I guess they'd have to go to a different company then!

The only person that should be able to fire him is their spouse and only of their mariage/relationship.

Why was it wrong of Weinstein to proposition possible actresses working?

It’s not hard to see that if you’re on a position of power over someone you must keep it professional.

In the case of Weinstein, they identified as victims.

Brining the conversation back to context, no such case has been proven for Jensen.

In most juridictions there are laws against abuse of authority which applies if it is the case. How well they are enforced is a different matter but unless there is a victim I don't think there is a problem.

It is usually frowned upon in companies because of the complications that arise when people are dating.

For example it risks confidential information leaking or projects being delayed due to relationship dynamics.

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.

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.

Their main problem is not the lower efficiency, but the limited capacity of production, caused by the fact that they cannot buy SOTA manufacturing equipment.

This will indeed slow them down for some time, but it is likely that sometime between 2030 and 2032 they will become able to use EUV lithography in mass production, eliminating the principal advantage of US companies like NVIDIA. After that, they will no longer be constrained by the capacity of production for GPUs and CPUs.

I consider rather doubtful that USA will possess advanced AGI before that.

Even with the smaller amount of GPUs that they can use, I do not see any sign that they will trail by much the AI research from USA.

They will build this capacity anyways, delaying them to 2030 would be a massive win.

I don't know what your definition of "advanced AGI" is, but if it's the target for a final "win" to the AI race, I think you need to reassess what the current capabilities really are, we're still in the infancy or toddler stages of AGI at best. You should also take a look at how fast Chinese labs are closing the gap, with greater efficiency compared to US labs.

The US mindset of abundance and "scaling laws" is not going to have them win the race. It's not a sustainable strategy.

We've seen the results of this just this year when its turned out China has enough oil reserves to buffer the reduced output from the Iran war. China had been bringing in Iran/Venezuela/Russia oil for years despite U.S./EU sanctions. That's not spy craft. That's China looking after itself and not bowing to western hegimony.

Nobody apart form US has issue with current China - if folks in US are getting the idea from US media that whole world is on some jihad against China thats laughable - nope its just US, yet another failed effort that will backfire way worse than doing nothing, ie like Iran. We don't want part in that. China is not expansionist unlike russia, it doesn't have that desperate need to promote their regime and way of doing things on whole world and murder anybody rejecting it. This fearmongering is simply not working outside US borders.

Now in the past there were many gentlemen agreements between nations plus the risk of aircraft carrier group coming your way or getting kicked out of SWIFT network, but that has been overused recently so nobody cares that much.

* US intelligence agencies reportedly monitored Alice Huang for over a year and concluded she was passing information directly to Beijing.

* A memo overseen by Marco Rubio reportedly concluded that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited her to gather intelligence on Jensen Huang and potentially influence Nvidia's chip exports.

* The FBI reportedly warned US lawmakers nearly a year ago that she might be supplying information to China.

* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.

In the spy world, this is about as close to irrefutable evidence as it gets. We know that any strategically important or large company in China requires Party members in positions of authority inside the company. The CCP exerts direct power over these companies in a multitude of ways. Megaspeed is a clear example of the kind of company they oversee. To assume anything other than Megaspeed being in clear cooperation with the CCP would be a rejection of everything we know about how companies operate in China.

* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.

I would not be surprised if Alice Huang and others were coordinating chip purchases through financing backed by the China government. But that's not spying. Thats just business.

I think you've made up your mind on this matter and you're not going to let reality get in the way.

My point is simply what I said at the beginning of this thread: "In effort for us to see clear eyed."

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.

Yes, with or without approved transfer of tech to China, China will eventually catch up. Would you rather this eventual tech normalization happen through a process of growing animosity or respectful cooperation?

I don't have a dog in this fight on specifics regarding Nvidia chips. People on all sides will respond as they see fit.

False dichotomy. We have plenty of examples of selling tech to China which eventually leads to the opposite of respectful cooperation. I'm not anti-china but it has nothing to do with any of this. What was the point of bringing it up, it doesn't make your argument any more compelling. It's not within the expected logical standard that is expected on HN.

Let's get back to the original point that you made, which is parroting the idea that selling leading technology somehow prevents China from accelerating their pursuit of it. Do you have any evidence of that working?

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.

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.

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.

This is exactly how it played out, too, which is why Huawei chips have started taking inference workloads in China and we're now starting to see them in training too.

1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?

It's a no-brainer. If there were no export controls, Nvidia would be taking all that oxygen out of the room. Chinese chip efforts would be put back by at least 5 years, and probably more like 10.

Sure, they might get there eventually but Nvidia would still have that lead when they do.

> 1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?

Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.

There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China. You can't bait them into acting against their own interests by giving them stuff. If the harm to the domestic chip industry would really outweigh the benefits, the CCP would issue the order and no-one would buy the Nvidia chips and that would be that.

Clearly untrue, because many companies are using the gimped H20s and the full H200s (both legally imported or smuggled) despite official government policy being silicon-self-sufficiency. It's a bit more complex than "CCP issues order and everyone immediately falls into line".

> There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China.

I'm not saying it "hurt China", I'm saying there's a fine line to tread between supporting Chinese AI models now, at the expense of the Chinese silicon industry in 20 years' time. The US export ban forced the issue and took the alternative off the table.

Generally this does work. China is pretty resistant to it as countries go.

See how difficult it is for the US Chip market to get off the ground, because it is so easy to just buy from other countries. A government directive to "Build It", only goes so far. So the Chinese Gov directing its companies to build chips, would have headwinds if Nvidia chips were available.

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.

  But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.

Finally, because he's of Han Chinese origin, I bet they thought they could get the media to coordinate a narrative around him that will force him out. Of course, he sort of made it easy to pin something on him.

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.

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."

Like, internal Nvidia KYC policy changed per Huang to facilitate GPU sales to Megaspeed.

Whether or not he realized it, cared, or was aware and doing it on purpose, he was acting as an enormously powerful lobbyist and influencer on the US as an agent of China.

If only the economist was equally "concerned" about other CEO misconducts...

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.

As far as I can tell, most of the reports were just recounting factual information. The narrative was already there. The media didn't create it.

This X post makes a lot of sense: https://x.com/antfeedapp/status/2120454507448651933

What do you mean by "this"? One thing I agree with is that we knew about this story for months. I've read about Jensen's affair with Alice Huang and her ties to the Chinese government at least five months ago.

The thing that triggered the current reporting was the new sourcing about U.S. intelligence findings that came out in late October. So mainstream news started reporting on it once they had sources they found trustworthy.

The confusing thing, though, is not that the story suddenly became big, but why it didn't become big much earlier.

Did they ever find the uranium in Iraq? Good luck with those guys.

Whenever I see these kinds of stories I think of this, written a century ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallizing_Public_Opinion

Hanlon's razor seems to apply here, so I don't really think it's a psyop. Simply information many (top secret) parties were aware of for a while that other people who are incentivized to tell everyone eventually caught up on.

I'm tired of hearing hanlon's razor tossed around. How about the inverse: I attribute malice if doing so makes the system better and explains your behavior. Even if you are just a fool, your actions impact others and have the same consequences of malice. I hold you to account like a criminal if you act like one.

I recommend watching it if the power of media interests you.

They could have easily just waited a month or two and let this all just go away.

It's the outside pressure.

Does it just come down to virtue signaling pressure?

- He is married and had multiple affairs

- He slept with a subordinate

- He slept with a business partner

- He was compromised by a Chinese spy

These are all just facts - the narrative writes itself.

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.

An RTX 5090 is a reticle sized chip.

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.

> WSJ reports that details of the affair were known to top officials, including SoS Rubio and CIA Ratcliffe, “going back to last year,” and were brought to President Trump; the administration took no action to blacklist Megaspeed.

Does this this sound like people who want to bring him down or people who wanted to protect him?

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 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...

This isn’t about right or wrong. If he knowingly broke the law he should be punished.

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.

China has all the incentive in the world to disrupt a major US AI firm to slow the US down.

Pretending there was no China revenue books?? That's an insanely huge financial lie

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).

So was Huang playing along as part of some other US-Chinese plot?

Was he a pawn, or go-between, in US-Chinese relations.

Maybe the cheating was a cover, or pawn with benefits?

It may be the case that his ouster helps certain people. That has nothing whatsoever to do with how the blame should be apportioned or what the sensible course of action is.

That she is a "foreign agent" is not an established fact whatsoever. Sure does make for a good headline though, especially if you want to oust Jensen.

- he lied about one affair

- the other one was with a direct subordinate

BK fafo’d at Intel with a report and that was that.

Jensen seemingly took that as a challenge and doubled down.

If this level of ego is what’s necessary for this system to thrive, let it all burn to the ground.

There are many regulations, sanctions and restrictions I disagree with. That doesn’t mean I can or should try to bypass them on a large scale.

He may have been right, doesn’t mean he gets to break the law.

And then news came out that he was having an affair with a direct-report. Unfavorable and pretty unforgivable even before the spy story.

Why not CEOs at $73B market cap companies? And increase it with inflation?

I assume that "what they used it for" means "what they could do after they pwnt the computer in the TV". If that's what you meant, then _if_ there is at least one reasonably easy way to pwn the computer in that TV without really requiring interaction from the TV's user, then it's 110% fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the TV does out of the box and what it has the capability to do. Why? Because if it's easy to pwn, then it's likely to already be pwnt.

But. Even if there wasn't a reasonably easy way to pwn the TV, I'd say that it's still very fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the thing does now and what it can be made to do, because what it does tomorrow is up to the manufacturer... which has pretty clearly demonstrated that they give zero shits about the privacy of the purchasers of their consumer-grade TVs. Inevitably, the manufacturer will make the TV do everything it can do in order to continually squeeze as many pennies from that initial sale as is possible.

> People who care about hardware reviews have to go somewhere else.

You've probably missed the handful of videos where Burke is all like «We'd love to review hardware, but it's so damn expensive that no one can really buy it. Why spend time reviewing things that people can't really buy? So, we investigate this stuff because it's informative and important.»

But yeah, GN doesn't do many hardware reviews these days.

I also pray* that said reality has not breached an event horizon; blotted from the known universe, never to be seen again.

*figuratively

- https://www.youtube.com/@GamersNexus/posts 1 day ago.

Society should not tolerate powerful man taking advantage of powerless woman!

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.

The question you have to be asking is why was the memo leaked now and what political game are they playing.

In terms of ousting him - I know nothing about him as a person - but he has lead Nvidia for 30 years during which time it has wildy succeed in not an easy market - whatever this is about, it's not about competence.

Which suggests the formal assessment is it wasn't - they were investigating Megaspeed for sanction busting via chip smuggling, happened to notice the affair, and found nothing concrete.

Note sanction busting by buying lots of Nvidia chips and renting them to Chinese companies is perfectly legal ( and very lucrative ).

So that's the evidence about the security situation.

The real question is why leak the memo to the press now - and I don't pretend here to know the answer.

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

Where is the evidence that nobody in the security services did not know ? There is already history where Security services are not independent, and stuff that will be investigated depends on the current gouverement, what the timing of the leak seems to suggest.

Wake me up when that changes to actual spy.

Also turns out this wasn't the only affair the CEO had and it's not suggested the other woman was a spy.

The only reason not warn him would be:

1. There isn't a reason to.

2. You suspect him as well and want to monitor further.

There is no evidence of the latter ( either him being a knowing collaborator or him being directly monitored ).

I am with you until here. Since cuda they have had a strangle hold on the market. It's like Pepsi vs R.C. Cola, their nearest competitor is miles behind.

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 withing 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

"For the same price" may be an incorrect assumption. The middlem[ae]n in the smuggling process could have been willing to pay a higher price to Nvidia because the final destination customer (the Chinese government?) was willing to pay a premium.

He wanted to make sure that all the open source AI tooling is as married to CUDA at the hip as it could possibly be. He didn't want the Chinese to come up with a working open source CUDA alternative which was just as good, and just as usable by the non-Chinese.

Nvidia's playbook was to make sure everybody was focused on competing against each other and not against Nvidia. This meant larger allocations to small players than would seem rational at first glance, investing into those players to make sure they survived and could compete against the hyperscalers and frontier labs, spending effort and human capital on optimizations which made open models run better on Nvidia hardware, making them more competitive with closed offerings, that sort of thing. This was a big part of Jensen's strategy.

We were already into personal liability for board members territory (and possibly GC) BEFORE the latest allegations.

LLMs are seen by politicians as a national security issue.

Better models = better cyber offense/defense, etc.

But I ask out of ignorance, I’ve never been inside a Big Corp.

NVidia is Jensen's company.

> The State of Utopia is an AI-governed nation with goals that include acting in the best interests of all our citizens.

2, China isolating Taiwan with an ongoing military drill https://www.reuters.com/world/china/taiwan-says-china-is-con... https://maritime-executive.com/article/analysis-china-s-nava...

3, Trump meeting Xi next week on the 18th https://www.euronews.com/2026/11/09/donald-trump-plans-to-me...

well, they do this like 6 times a year, it just usually doesn't make the news

He's had the job since before GTA 1 started development.

We could certainly do with more competition in the space!

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

next move is navigating polycules.

There needs to be an else?

The fact that he slept with a suspected Chinese spy is not a crime either. Now, if he has enabled industrial espionage, helped circumvent sanctions or broke other laws it is a different matter. But marital infidelity seems insufficient as a cause to fire a CEO of a highly successful company.

I did not follow the story much, so might be missing some important information.

He's not being prosecuted; the legality or not of his actions is meaningless.

> His wife may divorce

Which could be awkward for NVDA if there is no prenup as I've seen reported.

> But marital infidelity seems insufficient as a cause to fire a CEO

If that infidelity opens you up to blackmail, it definitely gets up there as a fireable reason.

where are those epstein files, by the way ?

While there's nothing inherently incorrect about this position, the affair with an alleged spy means that he, personally and uniquely, cannot advocate for this policy without seeming compromised. Ironically, if nVidia agrees with him, they have to fire him.

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.

Does he have a secret bunker full of preschoolers?

Is he working for the lizard people?

Do nvidia GPUs exist?

With what we know, these are all fair questions to ask now.

Who cares? Consequences have actions, and hopefully that's not just based on which choice is gonna make someone the most money.

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 that makes his position untenable, especially if the board found out about the second affair via a source other than Huang himself (again, he should have spilled the beans on that when the first affair came out).

Goodness knows how his wife is feeling at this point. Certainly makes his apology from a couple of days back ring rather hollow.

If that's the case and she backs him up on this, then it's sordid but not cheating and _that_ part of the scandal can be overlooked, but espionage is a different matter.

What evidence have you seen that espionage has taken place? I've seen people speculating about espionage, but very little evidence to back this up.

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?

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

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.

Dating a customer and subordinate potentially undermines objectivity in customer pricing, customer chip access, promotions, performance, etc. That’s why it’s explicitly forbidden in Nvidia (and most companies) code of conduct

It isn't necessarily about morality if there are rules in place that all employees, c-suite or otherwise, are expected to follow.

I don't know Nvidia internal policy, but assuming their HR policies include such a stipulation it shouldn't be treated as a "rules for thee, not me for" situation.

His public statement about hurting his family suggests they did not.

If I was in his position and I did, my statement would be something like "We're not monogamous, and we're both content with that arrangement. That was meant to stay private, and I'm sorry it came to public attention".

Then I'm just eccentric instead of an asshole.

Cheating may be more conventional, but it's almost universally considered immoral.

As a large shareholder and world's 7th 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 be tenable.

Nvidia will do just fine with another CEO as they're deeply entrenched.

Had you said this maybe 5 6 yrs ago then yes, it would be firing the visionary leader before his vision was implemented

Nvidia is an extremely successful company right now. It was called the central bank of AI just a few months ago

It will be a pity to see the company go down because the board feels the need to pry into his private life.

Jensen was incentivized to sell as many chips as possible. He openly tried to sell as many as possible and openly lobbied to sell to China. As CEO, he is obliged to do that.

It's kind of hard for US techies to not have exposure to a company that accounts for >5% of the S&P 500.

failure of integrity is the operating mode for the most powerful corporate leaders on earth.

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.

I don't know. Some people have too much power to be held accountable for their actions, e.g. Trump

Does he have to be a monk to head this company?

Have you checked with his wife that they are not in an open relationship, or polyamorous?

The security aspect is a totally different story, but the rest is his personal life and none of your business.

But not with his employees or staff at companies he sells to, he’s the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, being paid billions, it’s not a big ask.

Random low level managers in a supermarket have been fired for sleeping with their staff.

Do you really think this is the same as sleeping with a random person at a company which happens to use some Nvidia products?

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.

That banging customers and execs is a huge conflict of interest and security risk. There is a good reason if C-suites typically bang escorts instead of their colleagues.

Mmm. Infidelity is very common. [0] What's fairly uncommon is getting caught in a way that requires the infidelity to be acknowledged. Just ask the French. ;)

[0] ...it's almost as if monogamy is an unnatural state of being for many (but definitely not all!) people...

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.

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

You could have been way less toxic in you comment any way. That was a very unnecessary tone.

Since you're not OP, I still don't understand how that's a smart person to look up to.

Everything you said is someone that had contacts and new how to put money in certain places. Smart of me is absolutely engineering and science. There is no product for him to sell it, if there is no research and each of those research are way smarter, in my opinion, than CEO.

But the world is a funny place, research also doesn't existe without funding so we need more Huangs, I guess?

NVidia was at the right place at the right time, nothing else.

P.S. As a linux user I ascribe to the "FU nvidia" Linus' school of thought (because drivers) and I am happily running a Framework desktop instead of an nvidia rig. But credit where credit's due.

Jensen has absolutely made his own luck here. They were in the right place waiting for the right time for decades before it hit.

Loads of intellectuals were also massive uncontrollable sexual deviants in one way or another

oh boy, get outside and take a deep fresh breath of air. how limited must life experience be if someone feels that having an sexual affair is about the same like completely imploding ones life

Jensen, like the rest of us are vulnerable to sin, temptation and suffering. No one leaves unscathed in this life

What is it about a Jensen.

Was anything stolen?

Is he like a Steve Jobs?

- 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 wierd and more egalitairan structure (it only has a 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

When big changes happen, it's because multiple vectors have aligned. One isn't enough.

When Congress starts having hearings about your affair, you have fucked up but good, as they say.

Doesn't have to be spies (which in this case is just conjecture anyway, and likely just trying to get him for political reasons).

That is The American Way.

Between losing tens of millions in future salary and hundreds of millions in stock while simultaneously putting his kids’ jobs at risk, she’s likely to cash in on her half and walk the fuck away.

Maybe his idea of asserting control is less about voting rights and more about family allegiance.

I think nepotism is toxic behaviour when you are talking about publicly quoted firms and especially one the size of nv.

Fiddling whilst Rome burns is not a good look and should be punished.

Rome was burning? Well, true, until a couple weeks ago the stock was catching fire

Also having been more capital intensive and founded further back, Jensen had less sway in the early days of the company and may have put off using the growth to his advantage.

Well, bigger than that, but yeah. The early 2020 market cap for NVDA was ~150B, vs. ~1.3T for AAPL. They were the dominant semiconductor design house in an important but still fairly niche area of the PC marketplace.

Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were unmitigated disasters.

Before that, he was known for spending most of his time, polishing his private plane.

He's been behaving like a sugar hyped child over the last 15-20 years imho.

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.

But as a counterpoint: AMD is very similar but hasn't benefitted nearly as much. They've been plastering "AI" all over their webpage for years, with little to show for it. So maybe there was something that Nvidia was doing right.

They've benefitted from being in the right place, but being there was not (or, not only) luck.

Compare to AMD which did not do that and has not had the same level of benefit from the AI wave despite everyone obviously wanting a competitor to create price pressure.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to try and get AMD cards working.

Self driving cars are poised to be huge, Nvidia simply didn’t have good execution or plan there because they focused on the hardware rather than data collection. Not sure how the ARM acquisition attempt was an unforced error. Data centers are buying Nvidia GPUs and AMD CPUs. Could have been Nvidia both. It was just in an unfavorable political climate.

I can't speak to why AMD is so massively incompetent or why they weren't a factor in driving a competitor

Beg your pardon? what does this mean?

https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-vi-gpu-co...

There would be no AI boom without Nvidia, their cards were instrumental to making it possible, that's why they're so dominant.

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.

Honestly this arrangement (total comp aside) is how it should be for all these companies. When Facebook went public the dual class structure (and Zuck retaining voting control) was a big point of contention.

You're describing the opposite scenario. Generally it's the founders who get a special class of shares which allows them to retain control over the company even when they own <5% of the stock. Without that the company becomes controlled by Wall St. who appoint the MBA to loot and pillage.

The MBAs get there often because it's who the board picks when the founder retires.

The main thing the special class of shares does is make it hard for them to oust the founder when the founder doesn't want to retire. Once they choose to, they either use their special votes to choose a worthy successor, or they stop caring and you get the default MBA you'd have had regardless.

> Honestly this arrangement (total comp aside) is how it should be for all these companies.

It's difficult to say based on the actual data in the past 10 years. The companies with dual shares seem to do well if we look at the companies of the same sizes.

Fair, I just remember the backlash to the FB arrangement more I guess. At least in the case of the Google Class B shares control was split between the two, but still, in my opinion, wildly inappropriate for the purpose of public markets.

I may have an antiquated view of how the capital market should work given how long I’ve worked in the space, but I’m strongly of the opinion that going public should be synonymous with surrendering private/individual control of the company. The company is effectively spreading the risk of failure, and I think the average investor doesn’t appreciate or understand the voting vs non-voting differentiation.

Then again there is a monstrous amount retail participants in the market don’t understand and frankly the SEC has done (in permitting these sorts of listings) a poor job of executing on its mandate.

There's certainly a hypothetical principal-agent risk if someone holds voting power / control without holding any financial risk. In practice, holders of preferred voting power shares usually also have financial interests at stake, and thus are aligned with long-term financial interests.

Proposals that forbid holding control shares without parallel financial interests are more compelling than proposals to outlaw multiple share classes in public companies in general, but again, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find cases where having the law would force de-facto changes, and then the question becomes whether the law is worth its compliance costs.

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.

I'm all for banning these super-voting companies from the 401K/index funds. But you should know that many poor and average people would've missed those superb returns.

I'm not against forbidding index/401K funds from investing in those companies since many people (including you) deem those companies as "bad".

Many average people don't actively manage their funds. 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 it. Because this would've translated to less competition for house and stuff.

It's not really surprising that companies that print huge amounts of money with fairly little need for funding 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.

In the end it comes down to leverage, Zuck famously didn’t sell early so people were pounding down the door to invest when they finally got the opportunity.

I understand Zuck made many failed bets but he had a few big bets paid off. And those big bets paid off so well that FB is a $1.4 trillion company.

It's like people here are still stuck in school where you have to score A+ on every subject.

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 ;-)

I love Taco Bell though, so she is probably doing a good job.

I won't trust anything you say. I have seen what I needed to.

Huang's net worth is over $200B, high enough to be in the world top-ten. He has been very well compensated by Nvidia. Either he decided he has enough money at some point or his current compensation numbers are just marketing. The real numbers were clearly much higher in the past, if not presently.

I suspect he's going quietly because the scandals haven't finished emerging yet[1]. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if somebody has photos of secret Nvidia bunga bunga parties. I do find it interesting that Americans will tolerate lies, murder, and all sorts of other things from their highest elected officials but, if a CEO is revealed to be overly randy, he's got to go.

______________

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/kimberly-powell-nvidia-exec-...

For all the complaints about him you can't argue he hasn't delivered a lot of value. Lots of corp CEOs make more with falling company performance and valuation, because they aren't really paid for performance.

Lies are one thing, but murder?

What China really needs is semiconductor equipment like ASML EUV and more precisely the Zeiss mirrors.

so all noise about Huang affair is just pretext to steal control over the multi-trillion $ company built by a Chinese immigrant and hand it over to a white American with ties to Intelligence and deep state (aka Larry Ellison or some other person like that).

A warning story to all immigrants who think they will ever be accepted as proper Americans, despite not having a white skin

Another theory is that Nvidia doesn’t want their ceo to sleep with business partners and subordinates?

Which one do you think sounds more likely?

The fact that him staying is even a considerable possibility, although made much smaller by the second affair if it is true, is a testament to that.

Combining these roles is extremely poor governance, and it shouldn’t be legal but unfortunately it is.

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 board should punish Huang without punishing the industry and the nation. For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/1s7sgg0/nvidias_jensen...

   In this case, Fridman had offered Huang a very unusual metric for AGI: Could AI start and grow a technology business to the point where it was worth $1 billion? Fridman asked if Huang thought AGI by this definition could be achieved within the next five to 20 years.

   Huang said he didn’t think that amount of time was necessary. “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI,” he said. He then hedged, noting the company didn’t necessarily have to remain that valuable. “You said a billion,” Huang told Fridman, “and you didn’t say forever.”

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".

Ahh, looks like the midterm results are still smarting!

>> 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

Doesn't matter if he is. He presents it as some kind of big issue that "No one of character can respect or trust him anymore", which even if true had almost zero impact for all other CEOs doing the same and worse.

Otherwise nobody gives a shit and it happens all the time.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/majority definition 1.c

Secondly, no one sane defends our pedophile president so not sure why you bring that up as supporting fact.

And almost all of big CEOs sleep with stuff or not-their-wives. Many do worse, think certain private islands...

Are there a lot of these types of people at the top?

Shit, can we even claim people gambling on stocks are "of character"?

There's a lot of gray here. I don't care that he chose to probably capitulate his marriage, but it does matter that he is somewhere between a honeypot buffoon or commiting light treason.

Who cares?

Except, it happens frequently and most of the time people ignore it. In practice, it is accepted most of the time.

I know another case when a lady working in a multi national cheated on her husband with her boss. Soon enough her boss had to “tackle a few challenges “ … in a different country LOL. The bosscame back to the Borg a few years later.

If China is the enemy then why do we have entire stores selling nothing but Chinese made goods in the US? Why is everyone running to China to manufacture anything? If China is the enemy the whole world is in bed with them.

All that talk about competition being good for the market goes out the window when it comes to China seemingly.

China adopted an intentional strategy where western companies for benign reasons of profit leveraged China’s immense human capital to produce products and lower costs for everyone across the planet. This was a win for many. China got to industrialize and lift citizens out of poverty, and companies across the world were able to deliver mass produced good (eventually high quality) for cheap. The United States for example was the champion of China joining the WTO.

But China because it’s a communist dictatorship restricted its market and began doing things that were long-term oriented toward depriving others of power and manufacturing capability for their regime’s private gain. For example today we see that China has over-built its manufacturing capacity (like it did with housing) and has used artificially cheap labor, unjust laws, and currency manipulation (among many other things) to prevent entry into their market while running companies from other countries out of business leaving them dependent on Chinese manufacturing. Prominently you can look at Germany today where sales in China have collapsed, and at home their vaunted manufacturing industry is going through what happened in the US in the so-called “rust belt”. The US has smartly enacted tariffs and other measures to protect its market to some extent from China’s strategy here.

So when someone says something like “all this talk goes out the window about competition when it comes to China” you’ve got to understand a bit more about how China has behaved toward other nations and the egregiously unfair trade practices it has enacted to understand why many countries ranging from the US, to Mexico, to Australia and of course the EU have enacted various restrictions and industrial policy to combat China’s embarrassing and poor behavior on the global stage with respect to trade.

Anything but actually stop having a complete dependency on China for their entire way of life of course.

Everyone wants more independence to some degree, it’s just that not everyone is prepared to pay the same price, or is willing to accept the same compromises. So yeah, if you personally put the line somewhere, you will be disappointed if a given government sees things differently and puts it somewhere else. It does not mean that everything is terrible and they are lazy or stupid.

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.

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.

Perhaps you believe that, but it doesn't come across in your writing. You spent your entire post discussing and criticizing the United States, but your only mention of China has been "well America did it anyway" and "China was smart". Both true but besides the point - unless you want to continue cycles of mercantilism, in which case your criticism of the United States can be thus rejected. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say.

I'd challenge you if you truly equally dislike the dominance to spend a similar amount of time criticizing China. If you are unable to do that, it's difficult to take your statement and attempt at positioning yourself as "I don't like either" at face value.

Nonetheless, right now, as an European, I know about bad past actions of China or suspicions of bad future actions of China from hearsay, as I have never been affected directly from any of them.

On the other hand, by what I consider as cheating, USA has already stolen a lot of money directly from my pocket, by many actions during the recent years, all of whom had only the purpose to eliminate competition for US companies, restrict the supply of various kinds of consumer goods and raise their prices. Millions of ordinary people all over the world have lost money because they were forced to pay inflated prices for consumer goods, as a result of the anti-competitive actions of USA. The money lost by those people were eventually transferred to the shareholders of some US companies, and also of a few South Korean companies, which were the only beneficiaries of these US actions.

These anti-competitive actions have started with the sabotage of Huawei, exactly in the moment when it was predicted that it will pass soon from the 3rd position to the top of the smartphone vendors, in front of Samsung and Apple, while using their own chipsets, which were superior to those of Qualcomm.

The result of eliminating the main competitor for Qualcomm and Samsung has been a great increase in the price of the "flagship" smartphones. Before that, I could buy a "flagship" smartphone with e.g. $600, but nowadays smartphones that cost much above $1000 or even above $1500 are considered normal.

The second big step was the sabotage of the Chinese makers of flash memory and DRAM memory, also exactly in the moment when they were positioned to take a significant share in the memory market.

This action has preserved the dominance of Micron-Samsung-Hynix, which has created the necessary conditions for enabling the huge price increase of memories after the AI companies have hoarded most of the DRAM and SSD production.

To top all, the war started by USA has diminished a lot the supply for a lot of materials used in the electronic industry, which has raised a lot of prices. Now even the PCBs have become much more expensive than in the past.

Like many people, I was forced to make a few upgrades this year, even if I will delay any other upgrades as long as possible, so I already lost a lot of money.

So yes, for the moment, when I look at my accounts, I am more inclined to criticize USA for what they have already done, than to criticize China for what they might do in the future, if we are foolish enough to become dependent on them.

Why would, for example, the United States demand that Huawei be removed from the networks of NATO allies? Could you think of a couple of reasons why that might have occurred?

If your concern is only cheap products, I have to assume you're also in favor of removing minimum wages, removing trade restrictions that the EU has enacted to for example protect its auto industry, dismantling labor unions in Europe, and removing other European market restrictions and protections which affect the United States (for example)? Would you be in favor of ASML being able to license out its technology to China? What do you think might happen? That will get you lower prices that you want. Why might you not want to do that? What is your answer for the destruction of Germany's automobile industry (and probably Italian and French automakers - remember you can't have protections in your world view here) and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that people will lose?

It seems like you're just cherry-picking things to be mad at the US about but not holding a very logically consistent position while ignoring the actions of other actors on the world stage. It's a bit like having blinders on - the US is shining so bright and it's so important to everything in your life that you're neglecting the actions and policies of others, which of course is leading you to more extremist positions (low prices at all costs even if that results in crises in Europe).

However, what matters are the actions, not the words. The US "sanctions" had major effects on the markets for various consumer products and on the profits of certain companies, but they had little or no effect on anything that truly matters for national security.

Attempting to prevent Huawei from making smartphones has absolutely no relationship with the US national security.

Forbidding the use of Huawei communications equipment in critical infrastructure has absolutely nothing to do with the US "sanctions". Choosing what to buy is an internal matter of USA or of any other country that institutes such regulations and only incompetents will use in critical infrastructure black boxes that may be controlled by another country.

Trying to equate a measure taken against the world and in favor of Qualcomm, by sabotaging the production of smartphones at Huawei, with an internal regulation like forbidding the acquisition and use of Huawei equipment for infrastructure, is a logical fallacy. Only the second of these 2 is justified.

> Would you be in favor of ASML being able to license out its technology to China?

ASML is free to license its technology as they please, but obviously they would be very stupid to do so.

More than twenty years ago, Huawei entered the smartphone market by licensing the technology for making smartphones from Siemens. Siemens sent engineers in China, at Huawei, who stayed there for a half of year or more, to teach the Huawei engineers how to make smartphones.

Already at that time, I considered what Siemens was doing as being incredibly stupid. Of course, a few years later Huawei was making better and cheaper smartphones than Siemens, while Siemens decided to abandon the smartphone market. All that is the fault of the management of Siemens, not of anyone else. The worst part was not the licensing of the technology, even if that was very dumb, but the incapacity of the management to prioritize the continuous improvement of their products, both by becoming better and by becoming cheaper, while Huawei was very motivated to do this, so starting from at most the same position they still pulled far ahead.

I have seen plenty of companies which were forced to abandon markets, or went bankrupt or were acquired by competitors, and which blamed their fate on supposedly unfair competitors, e.g. from China. But in all those cases I have never seen any attempt from those companies to really compete. All were complacent to have products that were successful in the past and now they were making only negligible changes to them, especially from the point of view of the production costs, hoping that those products will continue to make money forever, even without any significant improvements.

I hope that the European car industry will survive, but if anything happens to it it will be only due to mismanagement, not due to China, because what should have been done to make competitive electric cars was known for decades and in Europe there was more expertise in power electronics than anywhere.

You accuse me of being in favor of things that directly contradict what I have said in my first comment.

I have already said that one of the things that I dislike at USA is that it has fought for decades to dismantle all protectionist barriers in all countries, to enable US companies to sell more there, which has lead to the destruction of many local industries.

I have also already said that I consider the availability of locally-produced goods, to avoid excessive interdependencies, more important than the lower price that could be achieved when all the production for the entire world of a certain item would be concentrated in a single giga-factory.

But protective measures must be chosen wisely. As long as there is no local production, there is nothing to protect. And also, if local production is protected from competition, there must exist alternative legal means to force them to design and fabricate competitive products, instead of exploiting the privilege of being protected.

Until I will see the resurrection of the European industries of memories and of smartphones, I would prefer to buy them cheap from China, instead of being forced by the actions of the US government to buy them at triple prices from Micron and Qualcomm.

So what? The EU and China use their own bespoke language when they want to do something that doesn't in the minds of perhaps outsiders have a good justification.

> The US "sanctions" had major effects on the markets for various consumer products and on the profits of certain companies, but they had little or no effect on anything that truly matters for national security.

Which sanctions specifically? The ones we put on Russia which raised the cost of oil and gas and other commodities? I'm sure you are not in favor of those since it caused prices to rise. Right?

> Attempting to prevent Huawei from making smartphones has absolutely no relationship with the US national security.

The US didn't prevent Huawei from making smartphones, the US required that Huawei not be utilized in major infrastructure because of security concerns. The Chinese are obviously adversaries to the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, and others and so utilizing their infrastructure which would of course have backdoors and permit Chinese spying on allied activity isn't acceptable. Seeing how Russia went on to invade Ukraine (supported by China) it proved to be a prescient move.

> Choosing what to buy is an internal matter of USA or of any other country

Exactly like how utilizing tariffs is an internal matter of the United States or any other country and allows us to choose what we buy. So you can't criticize American tariffs and also hold this view.

> ASML is free to license its technology as they please, but obviously they would be very stupid to do so.

They're actually not free to license their technology, believe it or not, because some of their key patents are American, but that's besides the point. But just to be clear, if allowed you would support ASML setting up shop in China, licensing its technology, and so forth to Chinese companies. If they did that, how long do you think it would be before ASML began to suffer the same fate as many other companies are now?

> I have already said that one of the things that I dislike at USA is that it has fought for decades to dismantle all protectionist barriers in all countries, to enable US companies to sell more there, ...

The US (along with Europe) worked to remove protectionist trade barriers over time to lower prices which you've advocated for. Europe wanted those removed (and then went on to add protectionist trade barriers back in while the US didn't) so they could sell more products to the American market.

> which has lead to the destruction of many local industries.

That's actually the fault of China. But I'm confused because you also support the destruction of local industries as long as it means lower prices. Why pay triple the cost for hand towels which could be manufactured in Portugal when you can get the same thing from China? Europe then allowed the imports of those products and your local industries collapsed or relocated manufacturing to China.

> I have also already said that I consider the availability of locally-produced goods, to avoid excessive interdependencies, more important than the lower price that could be achieved when all the production for the entire world of a certain item would be concentrated in a single giga-factory.

You said that but your comments don't support those claims. For example you want and are ok with the European car industry being destroyed by cheaper Chinese cars, but that would create excessive interdependencies (bye bye auto industry) and would remove locally-produced goods such as automobiles and the factories, raw material inputs, machinery, and parts used to create those vehicles.

> would prefer to buy them cheap from China, instead of being forced by the actions of the US government to buy them at triple prices from Micron and Qualcomm.

Europe chooses to engage with the United States for security. Europe also supports democratic Taiwan. You are blaming the wrong entity here. If Europe would no longer like the United States to support it militarily it can choose to do that. If Europe wants to support China over Taiwan they can do that. Spending 5x more on your military will result in some sort of cost increase or standard of living shuffle, but maybe that will be counteracted by additional cheap imports from China as you stop supporting democratic Taiwan? I guess it remains to be seen.

While EU and the other definitely need to deal with Chinas and its practices, the worst threat right now is USA. Speaking about egregiously unfair trade practices and poor behavior.

Obviously many businesses are working around this, but it raises questions about whether Alice Huang was actually a government spy vs someone doing shady import business. Why was her day job circumventing a government policy if she's a government spy?

Because geopolitics is a lot more complicated than leaving a group chat? This is like the inverse fallacy of Trump's take on trade deficits. Trade volume isn't the sum total of foreign policy.

> All that talk about competition being good for the market goes out the window when it comes to China seemingly.

I'm no fan of the "but muh free market" arguments, but generally competition is seen as good for the market only when it's "fair"...

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.

> 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.

Violation sanctions, and likely knowingly, is not good for Nvidia.

If a legally authorized customer later breaks the law, that doesn't make the supplier guilty of something they didn't do. It means the regulations and enforcement are ineffective. MegaSpeed has apparently been extensively investigated by both the Commerce and Justice Depts for some time and no charges have been filed so far. If the US Govt suspects MegaSpeed is a problem, they can add them to the blocked entity list at any time with no evidence or justification.

Frankly, I agree that someone in Asia has been diverting GPUs. But the US Govt has all the power here and can block anyone they want. If NVidia was knowingly violating export controls by back-channeling GPUs, that's serious jail time and personal fines up to $1M per card. These things have the same penalties for export violations as cruise missiles - and the same national security investigative powers. If NVidia was under suspicion, spooks have been reading all NVidia's company and personal emails and texts, tapping phones, bugging conference rooms, etc. If NVidia was knowingly subverting U.S. export controls, we'd be seeing arrests and perp walks not anonymous leaks about who Jensen's banging.

They're not OK with it, they're about to pressure Singapore, Malaysia and others to ban this too. Why? Because they're a bunch of losers petrified of open competition.

But if what they discovered wasn’t usable in a prosecution, pressuring the board with his affairs isn’t unthinkable.

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.

And this is an obvious example.

Wasn't it Anthropic or OpenAI that sent a warning about this exact possibility to regular employees?

Why do you think we always have to do those trainings every year about not taking supplier to strip clubs?

If you break the rules but bring in business you get to stick around. That's the actual rule.

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.

Was anything confidential leaked?

I'm not sure why Jensen is getting this kind of treatment.. did he treat people worse than Steve Jobs?

Would there be others who might benefit from Jensen not being at Nvidia?

But a Steve Jobs

Given what her job was, it’s hard to think that conversations were not technical in nature. Every action JH made toward China will now be examined, and he’s lost all credibility going forward. There really is no path to keep him.

The other thing this highlighted was the complete lack of governance which is the board’s job. So right after they fire JH, they need to replace most of the board with people who can handle the governance of a company of this scope.

Poor judgement is the kind of shit Zuckerberg or Musk do, and their poor judgement actually impacts the whole world in big ways, but they can't be fired because they don't give their board any control.

Jensen's management of NVIDIA has been good, and NVIDIA has generally been a great force for real innovation without much rent-seeking or corruption like the others. It's kind of sad to see Jensen be the one we topple at a time of rage against corporate power when he's among the good ones.

In fact sleeping with a subordinate creates substantial legal risk for the company.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/ho...

[2] https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst

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.

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.

If NVIDIA doesn’t fire him, I have a feeling a lot more women from a lot of other companies may be showing up with various proposals.

Was it driven by this, as opposed to what everyone thought at the time: pure shortsighted profit-seeking? We don't know. But no one likes that it's even a thing to be concerned about.

jfc she was a spy and the new administration is going to smash nvidia for this

There are solid arguments for treason here... "doesn't affect the company", how blind are you?

There's more than one kind of shady person.

Yeah no. This doesn't even come close to treason. Treason in the US is incredibly difficult to prove, which is intentional.

That was not the case here.

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 evidently does. You may think it shouldn't, that marital fidelity has no bearing on ability to execute as CEO, and you may even be right. But it's clear that most people disagree.

That is not a surprise. It's a known fact that these kinds of things become scandals that can hurt their careers and companies. That they nevertheless still decided to do it, is therefore a professional failure.

It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy in that way. People think it matters, therefore it does. Again, you might believe that it doesn't have a direct impact, and so people shouldn't think it matters, but still they do, and you have to act in the world as it is, not as you wish it was. Simple as that.

Wild take. To me, that isn't clear at all. Most people - including me - who simply don't really care aren't loud about it online.

It's like saying that obviously, everyone agrees that JK Rowling is a bad person that shouldn't be supported and needs to be boycotted. If your world view is made up of online forums that might very well seem to be the case, but in reality, the absolute vast majority of people couldn't care less about JK Rowling's political opinions, which is quite evident given the insane sales the Harry Potter franchise keeps pulling in.

The most likely scenario is that the vast majority couldn't care less about the Jensen Huang situation, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't care enough to demand he resign or be booted.

The evidence is their stock being down 8% since the news came out.

How else would you explain that drop?

If you don't see how secret affairs with spies and employees impacts the company then you're being willfully ignorant.

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.

If that was the case, IMO he wouldn't have come this far.

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.

That's less than a slap on the wrist.

I dont like this crummy idea that you can do no wrong as long as stock price increases.

Why did NVDA fare differently than AMD or Intel?

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

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.

I’m a gamer and I want my fucking GPUs back.

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?

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.

Why? There were the reason why NVIDIA GPUs became so successful at the first place.

Who knows whether Jensen's current leadership isn't generating today's CUDA for NVIDIA?

The situation only exists because regulators in the 80s-20s believe that hardware should be a sanctioned monopoly. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, and Microsoft were all involved. If it's not Jensen it'd be someone else, there is a good reason NVIDIA is called NVIDIA and not JENSEN. Jensen's leadership is as much resonsible for CUDA as G. W. Bush's.

More directly on topic, I can't help thinking this is also a question of "what have you done for me lately" versus "what are you going to do for me tomorrow". It's hard to doubt he and the company as a whole have executed a vision and reaped the rewards, but have they been planning and doing the groundwork for another act.

A nontrivial part of which is pumping up an infrastructure bubble with NVIDIA money. It wouldn't shock me if that very aggressive and increasingly questioned strategy plays a role in whatever happens to Jensen.

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

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.

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.

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.

stopped reading

moralism blocking progress once again

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 mind-bending wealth and influence, yet some people don’t want to give them a pass when it comes to holding them accountable for what they do in those positions of power.

who built it?

I do think that "eventually" AI will be open-(source, weight, something) and most people will run at least some of their workload on their own hardware; but his leaving might delay that day considerably.

There are many more companies that signed the letter, see the bottom of this pdf

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/wp-...