The AI labs do not want any of that and there is one AI lab that certainly has never released an open weight model.

Take a guess who that could be.

This proves that not selling to China was a good idea, and throws into question every narrative pointing otherwise. It also should make it evident that yes, China is most certainly spreading propaganda regarding these points, there's just no way it's not happening.

Google execs had affairs, I think Sergey Brin had an affair with an employee, again nothing happened.

And w.r.t. Brin vs. Huang, Rosenberg was a comparatively much lower ranked employee that didn't have a stratospheric carreer.

Now, post-midterm, Trump's political power has waned considerably, so the knives came out.

This is clearly retaliation for not falling into line

These things can be handled in many different ways. In this case they are being used to achieve the goal of replacing Jensen because he wouldn't play their doom games.

I don't know why I feel this way. Something just feels off and I can't place it.

The cheating is just a bit of humiliation, the damning part is the knowingly circumvention of export controls.

The news made it sound like she was a sophisticated person using him as a simpleton, but if anything he was using her to move his products against sanctions.

And a lot of other shady things around nvidia, half of it we probably will never know about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...

Politicians also drop like flies. The only person impervious to consequences has been Trump.

The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.

Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.

And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.

It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.

And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.

And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.

You want leaders to be held accountable? Look, a leader who clearly made bad and dumb and wrong choices, and a simple opportunity to celebrate them facing accountability. Can you support that?

We're just gonna keep shoving the illegal GPU trade with China under the rug I guess.

But yes, the fact that Nvidia advocated for relaxing exports to China and that he sold billions of GPUs to shady Singaporean companies is now obviously under major scrutiny.

The jury is still out on this, re the circular financing mess with AI

We don't know his relationship with his wife, what their stands on cheating even stands.

You can argue its an image issue, but thats a problem of the press and marketing and not that he might have cheated.

His wife is an adult and is for sure not poor, so its not a situation were she has to stay with him.

I do believe it either has to do with the whole spy story or he did something he really shouldn't have.

I said that the missteps is having sex with subordinates and chinese spies.

Suspect by payment from ... TenCent? AFAIK. Her company got money from Tencent and after every longer meeting with Jensen, someone from Tencent flew in and had a meeting with her. At least that is what I remember hearing.

Was Alice's company supposed to be the only company getting Nvidia chips (which they deny doing anyway). Or one of many and Chinese companies did it with many different others?

If many, why is her relationship specifically important or special from that aspect?

Again, I can understand snooping for confidential early information from him. But "she got with him so that this single company gets chips"?

"Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that."

Fair though you didn't say cheating, but it undermined (at least by reading it) the main argument you brought up later regarding chinese spies

I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE

And: the public only knows what's made it out. Who knows what else has come out in private.

Go forth and consensually bang your coworkers. Knock yourselves out.

When you have the ability to fire or promote someone, however, you hold significant power over their life -- potentially impacting their ability to eat, house themselves, etc. In those cases, it's valid to ask, "Is there a possibility someone is being coerced into sex because they can't afford to say no?"

This is question of consent. It's not an allegation of rape. It's only a question and there are probably times the answer is no.

You don't have to knee jerk react to someone pointing out an obvious potential conflict of interest and go "so everything is rape now?"

Officials are corrupted? CEOs sleeping with other women including his subordinates? Snow is white? What's the deal? People at that level are basically playing politics, not laws.

However, the fact that someone decided to release all those information as PUBLIC, and followed that up with ANOTHER scandal, means that they are determined to get rid of them. As you said, it is indeed serious matter.

As the Chineses say: "Something weights as light as a quarter of pound if it's left alone, but can weight a thousand tons if put on the scale".

The problem is that you don't think it is a problem

If we (the common people) really want consequences, we will need to do a LOT more and put things in our own hands instead of relying on our representatives -- oh but that's too populist for HN's taste.

I'm with you on the first half, and see the second half changing. The fever may have broken in the US electorate.

Otherwise you end up thinking "should I start an affair with this Chinese spy I've been breaking US laws with? What are they going to do, fire me? They can't, I've got them trapped so I'm untouchable, I can do whatever I want. And if I'm in a helicopter crash then it sucks to be them, I'll not care when I'm dead".

well, yeah.

Conspiracy reaction: Something is going on here... obviously not due to sleeping with a spy...

Waiting to see how market reacts, I am selling my shares.

Dear Jensen, time to start another company.

No, the alternative is not to “not having affairs”. Remember, we don’t need evidence to spin a narrative.

Except that we have evidence in this case: he literally admitted to the affair. I don't see any "spin."

From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong

So it’s no longer about national security. What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care? Did Jenson reduce SpaceX’s allocation?

We all now know that Trump knew about it, that's what has changed. It was fine when this was private, but now his administration is starting to get questions around why his Commerce department punted the initial investigation to DOJ where it ultimately died as the opposition party is about to retake Congress with investigations top of mind.

Likely there was at least a feeling of mutual understanding between Jensen and key people in the administration. Now the wind has turned in a big way and none of that is on paper. And in fact what is on paper points in the wrong direction.

Probably the only thing protecting NVDA from prosecution right now is that nobody in the White House wants to pop the AI bubble. That might protect Jensen too because he would entangle the company. There will be an interesting tension with congressional oversight. Buy popcorn and NVDA vol.

It's hard to believe the US government was so incompetent that they didn't do the investigation a YouTuber did (But not impossible).

The export ban was always BS. Unless you are going to do a total ban and all parts are manufactured in the US, then it is just 1 additional hop to get stuff into China.

Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.

We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.

The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.

I've seen a theory floated online that somebody inside the government, who was part of the faction advocating for stricter sanctions on China, leaked this in a way to cause maximum damage to the anti-restrictions faction. Whether Huang (female Huang) was actually a Chinese spy in the first place is also up in the air, keep in mind that while the affair has almost certainly occurred, given that Huang (male) has admitted to it himself, the Chinese spy allegations are still unverified. It could possibly have been a "grain of truth in a sea of lies" play.

Everything only comes to light with the New York Times reporting on it. It would be fine if the government did it, but... they didn't.

If nothing else, this indicated to the board that JH is capable of thinking with his dick and that can be a problem for business.

> if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".

Hmm... I wonder why that is. Could it be because a bunch of CEOs, prominent politicians, and business people were found to have taken multiple trips to an island where the had sex with children and nothing happened to them? No, it couldn't possibly be that. I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age, while we excuse pedophilia.

Do we have evidence that his legally-recognized other half consented to these relationships? If so, fine. That still doesn't remove the problems with those relationships, like the possibility of Alice Huang being a PRC intelligence asset, or the fact that one of the affairs was with a company employee, which can, in a roundabout way, place potential penalties on her career if she doesn't consent.

>while we excuse pedophilia.

Excuse me, where the f*ck did I excuse pedophilia???

https://khanna.house.gov/media/press-releases/khanna-massie-...

In this day and age of no-fault divorce, co-parenting, etc, where is this moral outrage coming from for a man cheating on his wife / girlfriend? I'm just so confused TBH. 'Legally-recognized other half'.... in no jurisdiction is it illegal to cheat on your wife.

> like the possibility of Alice Huang being a PRC intelligence asset,

The sole evidence that she is a Chinese intelligence asset is that she is Chinese.

> he fact that one of the affairs was with a company employee, which can, in a roundabout way, place potential penalties on her career if she doesn't consent.

Forgive me for not feeling sorry for a likely deca, probably centi, millionaire. This is not some secretary intern.

> Excuse me, where the f*ck did I excuse pedophilia???

Because, if we're going to be witchhunting CEOs for their personal lives, there are a helluva lot worse people than Huang that need to go.

If Huang had just slept with someone other than his wife, it wouldn't be a story. The outrage here isn't from the fire-and-brimstone perspective. I'm a single guy in my mid-30s; even here in Middle America there are plenty of people who practice ENM, no-fault divorce, and coparenting. It's now widely recognized that people aren't necessarily monogamous as soon as they get married.

At the same time, it's still an expectation that one should not do that sort of activity behind a spouse's back. It could result in other issues that could cause them issues, like STIs, or planning life around a child they didn't expect, or estate planning complications. Being open with your partner in life about the feelings you have on the matter is important, and puts the "ethical" in "ethical non-monogamy".

We don't know what the Huangs' arrangement was. I hope it was understood between them, and that all of that was sorted. If not, well, Jensen's going to get to deal with the fallout with that. Which brings us to the problems with the relationships themselves.

> The sole evidence that she is a Chinese intelligence asset is that she is Chinese.

Let's be honest here: that's not enough to get a story going in 2026. There's the fact that she set up a company in Singapore that had revenue figures that far outpaced what's expected for a company of its age, and the fact that they may have helped Chinese interests dodge US export restrictions on Nvidia's products. This was important enough that it was known to Nvidia corporate and the US government. You don't get attention like that just by dating someone from China.

> Forgive me for not feeling sorry for a likely deca, probably centi, millionaire. This is not some secretary intern.

Cultures like this impact everyone. Do we know if the executive was promoted or otherwise benefitted because of her relationship with Jensen? No, but it immediately opens up a conflict of interest for any request she has of the c-suite.

At worst, Huang was operating a Weinstein-like casting couch for roles within the company. If you can make an executive have to perform those sorts of actions in order to advance in her career, what does the secretary intern have to put up with?

> Because, if we're going to be witchhunting CEOs for their personal lives,

This isn't a witchhunt for the reasons stated above. It's SV, bud. People do all sorts of non-traditional relationship arrangements. Hell, even the Alice Huang affair was probably passable once the next news cycle hit. When he's sleeping with people who report to him, it's a problem on its face. It's unprofessional and it makes everyone at the company wonder just what they'll have to do to get ahead.

> there are a helluva lot worse people than Huang that need to go.

We can actually take care of both groups of people. That is actually possible, believe it or not.

It is true for anything with a board, of course. But there is no rule mandating boards.

> If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out

There is no "* only applies to publicly traded companies". Hence, it is incorrect.

In theory, Nvidia shareholders, if dissatisfied with today's decision, could vote to oust the current board and replace it with people more sympathetic to Huang, who would, as their first decision, re-hire him as CEO, as would be their prerogative. This is... unlikely to happen.

None of the above is investment advice.

There are many examples where the outed affair resulted in nothing material when neither of the above was true.

This case, seems to touch both.

Marriages of 41+ years can get into literally any kind of dynamic.

His open letter about his infidelity seems to imply he has embarrassed his wife and family, have you read it?

He has also said so very many times in so very many ways that Nvidia was absolutely not involved in violation of export control laws regarding the export of its products to China. That -in fact- there was absolutely no smuggling going on and claims to the contrary were utterly baseless and without merit.

I agree with ohnnyApplePRNG's assertion that we know literally nothing about the private life and situation of Mr. Huang and his family.

> we know literally nothing

He "literally" wrote about how his actions hurt his family, I'm not sure why there's a second account parroting the exact same phrase.

He repeatedly and aggressively lied about violating export restrictions. "Our chips aren't potato chips. These GPUs weigh two tons. [So, how would you smuggle those? It'd be impossible!]" is an especially memorable deflection of his. He's obviously very willing to lie about very serious things when doing so is beneficial.

> He "literally" wrote about how his actions hurt his family...

He also spoke and wrote about how it was impossible to smuggle Nvidia hardware into China, and that everyone who was claiming that smuggling was going on were liars. CEOs will often lie when issuing Obligatory Standard Statements, whether they be brusque dismissals of accusations of the company's wrongdoing, or assertions of how shameful they consider their behavior that lead them to do whatever it was that they've been caught doing. CEOs make the expected public statement and get on with their lives.

Plus, given how most folks are -at best- confused by and -at worst- enraged by things like polyamory, why on earth would he publicly reveal it if his family was actually totally okay with regular extramarital sex and romance?

No, situations like this get the Standard Admission of Deep Shame and Regret For All The Harm Caused, regardless of whether or not what's said has any resemblance to what the family feels about the situation. The only folks who know how the members of the family feel about this are folks who actually know the family.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very much a promoter of monogamy.

I think it is naive to assume that such public statements are the whole truth of a matter.

People who fuck up a company (or have an affair, or get caught snorting drugs off a sex-worker) aren't really 'stepping back to spend more time with their families'. Historically the classic example of executive public statements.

If you have stronger evidence that the statement was untruthful when it said he hurt his family, you may present it.

Until such time, the statement only strengthens the bayesian prior, which is that his affairs hurt his family, and that is what we can conclude.

Yes, and it would have helped. These are entirely different stories:

"My wife and I have a non-traditional relationship and would prefer to keep the specifics private, but no harm was caused by my actions."

"I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."

It's clearly the CN link and/or the cosying up with a customer that is the problem; the board would not care about his private life (and neither should the public, tbh).

And the open letter sounds more like it was written the way the public would expect a CEO to write.

That's a very narrow view that's a function of one's religion, culture, and values.

When I was in school, (US) my very Catholic French teacher explained that his uncle, in France, had a mistress. His uncle's wife knew and was okay with it. What my teacher was explaining is that the culture around marriage varies considerably through the world, and you can't take for granted that what we were taught (monogamy) is the standard that others live to, or even expect from you.

Perhaps it’s you that is out of touch?

Please don't make the mistake of assuming that American culture is homogeneous: It's not.

No, there isn't.

There is a significant part of American culture that separates personal life from professional life. IE, an affair is treated as a private matter to be handled by the married (or committed) couple. (IE, this is why many people in this thread focus on Huang's job performance over the affair.)

And I agree with the latter: The affair is a matter between Huang and his wife; it's a signal of his trustworthiness and honesty, and raises concerns about national security. But beyond that, it's not my place, or your place, to judge.

Well we don't know that, you are not legally required to love someone you are married to and I have no clue what their relationship is like or whether they have any sort of "arrangements". I could hardly care less really since its their private matter.

> just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?

I don't really see a correlation between those things. All sorts of immoral degenerates (e.g. Musk, (potentially) Gates and I assume plenty of other lesser known CEOs) have generated massive amounts of value for their shareholders.

Where?

Look at the NVDA stock chart. There you go! That's why affairs are relevant to business! Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.

Why? I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?

Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.

Maybe I don't understand enough the US culture.

In 2016, the choice was between Trump and Clinton. Clinton famously excused her husband's infidelity by calling the long list of women who claimed they were assaulted as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty".

In 2024, the choice was between Trump and Harris. Harris got into politics by being the mistress of a CA governor.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if the US presidential election offered a choice between someone who was moral and someone who was as immoral as our existing political class. But that has not happened in my lifetime, and I don't expect that to change.

But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.

> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.

This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.

Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.

And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now.

In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.

If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.

Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.

*Everything on a spectrum.

It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.

Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.

Markets care about predictability.

To that end, it's the secret and the reveal of that secret that's the issue for a leader. If a CEO is open about his socially-unacceptable behavior from the beginning, there's no shock to absorb.

I'm jealous!

Seems like a real analytical breakthrough that I'd legitimately love to learn more about.

Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.

You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.

The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.

My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.

At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.

That is the unforgivable lapse in judgement.

If you can't adhere to the terms of a voluntarily-entered personal contract, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy in other impersonal contracts?

- Signed, another European

In a Goffman Front Stage/Back Stage sense, you are supposed to keep the front stage presentation on the level of a pious monk or nun.

The irony to me is this just another asymmetrical advantage for Chinese culture.

There's a reason why government background checks looks at financial records. Someone that has trouble paying their bills due to a gambling habit might be easy to turn by the enemy with some cash. Or someone that regularly cheats on their wife might be willing to do some favors for a pretty girl if she lets him sleep with her.

"Haha you mean the Chinese spy guy? Hey ask if you can get a discount if your secretary sleeps with their CEO haha"

"It's not the crime, it's the coverup."

Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes. I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents, and he pretty much encouraged the agents to publish the photos.

You don’t have to be a prude to think cheating on a spouse is condemnable.

In general, it also doesn’t really matter what society thinks. You can just threaten to reveal the affair to the spouse. And even in the case the spouse doesn’t really care it’s fodder they can potentially use in a divorce to get a better deal.

For better or worse, this is the world we live in.

Sukarno. "Project Happy Days", lol.

He (Sukarno) thought it was hilarious and sent copies to his friends.

CIA was pissed w/ him because he killed a lot of Communists but then started leaning to China and beefing with Malaysia, which irritated the British

Although if you read his Wikipedia page, he had many, many wives, some concurrently, and the youngest was 19...so it's probably true, lol.

Then you read about a certain EV company CEO and his escapades and repopulating the planet, and you don't know what to think.

Or Charlie Sheen...

I guess politicians, celebrities and CEOs are another world from us mere mortals.....

No? All it requires is for Jensen to want to remain with his wife, and for his wife to be willing to divorce him if she finds out he has an affair. Very little involvement from society in that one.

he was fucking a spy

he was fucking one of his direct reports

what are two things you shouldn't ever do as a CEO of the biggest company in the world?

this wasn't Cindy the random waitress from the Palo Alto Ruth Chris', these were literally two people he should never be fucking

he put the company at risk of national security issues and HR lawsuits for what is otherwise painfully mid-tier pussy. he's gotta go.

https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/china-dismisses-spy...

This is an extremely unnecessary misogynistic comment.

This is how things change. Slowly and then all at once. If the board were more in love with him, they'd probably have been willing to turn a blind eye for just a little while longer. No such luck for Jensen, but we make our own luck in these things.

I can hardly imagine anything more stupid than judging the aptitude of the CEO of a 5T$ business based on his private love life.

You should be concerned about corporate crime.

That doesn't change that there is a conflict of interest here and any company should fire someone who has a conflict of interest that they are not carefully managing to ensure they don't become real.

It's not entirely about humiliation.

Having an affair (or multiple, in this case) demonstrates poor decision making. You don't want someone who can't make wise choices running your company.

Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.

no regulation?

regulation without representation?

If you've had a career in congress, parliament, whatever, you can live comfortably off of the various media appearances you're likely to have for much of the rest of your life.

Representatives in government should be able to keep it in their pants when it comes to investments at least while they're in government, and have a thick, thick wall between their jobs running a country (or state, or whatever) and the management of their investments. Blind trusts should be the bare minimum.

What I'd prefer to see is that while actively sitting in government, representatives must keep their savings invested in funds so diversified into low-risk instruments that almost no regulation can benefit them significantly more than it would an average passive investor.

However it is looking like his fellow adulterer donald knew and kept it under wraps for personal gain.

0 – https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy...

Congress members only have to submit their trades every 3 months.

You will only know that Nancy Pelosi was up to since the beginning of October next January.

If the Chinese Communist Party are going through such great lengths to obtain these advanced Nvidia chips, it further invalidates a lot of what I've been reading here and elsewhere about China "catching up" or that being the leading models isn't what matters (commoditization). You don't do stuff like this unless you really need something.

Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA - and leave Taiwan in a much weaker position in the near future.

Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?

Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.

If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.

The ever closing gap between the capabilities of frontier models vs chinese open weight models.

That's not a strategy that leads to actually being the best.

The phrase is “fait accompli”, without a D, and is French for “accomplished feat”.

Suppose you want to build something that requires technical knowledge (a GPU, a fighter jet, ...). You have engineers, but they don't yet know how to build it.

If no one on earth has ever built this thing, you need to consider the possibility that it can't be done at a cost you can pay. Perhaps it violates some law of physics, or it can't be manufactured without knowing some chemistry/physics that we are 100+ years from discovering.

If a company in some other country is already building this thing, you can be sure it is possible to build it. That is a critical piece of information! It means you don't need to discover (much) new physics. It means you can buy/steal a working copy and look at it to learn about it. It means there are engineers you can hire/spy on to understand their design process. It means you can more easily convince a bank/government to fund development, as they have proof your goals are achievable.

Inventing a thing is much harder than inventing a clone of a thing. The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.

Which broadly leads to two conclusions:

They can't do it. If they could they would. If you could invest and create your own Nvidia, ASML, TSMC, &c. you would do that especially if you are China due to its stated goals and actions it takes that we can all see toward those goals.

They can do it and so selling them the chips doesn't matter other than helping to speed up their ability to do it, so we don't want to sell them the chips and thus speed up their capabilities.

But your viewpoint also holds true for the United States and Europe. Anything China can do we can also do, otherwise you're just supposing Chinese Exceptionalism.

If the US or China developes an AGI that can leverage RSI, the game is over. It is over in the same way that WW3 is over as soon as the missiles are in the air: it doesn't matter who has the fastest or highest yield missiles, because there is a finite amount of time before the is nobody left to care about the advantages of one side. Except at least WW3 is over in about an hour, whereas an AGI could take years or decades to complete whatever thing it has misaligned to desire.

AI alignment research is still in its alchemy era, and global cyber security is underfunded and bad. As a species, we simply do not have the tools to deal with AGI that can self-improve.

No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War, and then managed to subsequently starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then managed to right themselves. They then spent three to four decades lifting about thrice the US population out of extreme abject poverty, and then in the last 20 years catching up. And catch up they have; they are already the leaders in green technology and EVs, already manufacture some of their own chips, already have indigenous military aerospace capability, which they are now expanding to civilian use.

Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?

China is a trading partner but there is still a serious catalyst for war in the form of the South China Sea. If we went to war with China in 5 years time, why would we sell them the tech they need to match our ability now? Let them figure it out on their own.

An economy kept dependent on American tech is unlikely to drop bombs on America and vice versa. Co dependency prevents war.

"Good thing China doesn't have a long memory or anything!!"

Good luck with that folks...

Soon, China, if they aren’t already, will be the premier developer of Thorium reactors courtesy of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and they also are now number one or at the least 1A when it comes to high-speed rail, and if the Russians and the Ukrainians weren’t fighting each other, that high-speed rail probably would be already built out all the way to eastern Europe.

For another example, the reason Chinese are not allowed on the 'international' ISS is because of the Wolf Amendment. [1] The idea was that if we just allowed them onto the ISS they'd steal all of our elite tech or something. Within a decade they had launched their own space station and carried out various revolutionary space activities.

And of course all of that happened while the ISS itself continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight. And when China did an unprecedented sample return mission from the far side of the Moon and offered the whole world access to samples, US researchers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to receive them, again thanks to the same law.

It's just myopia.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

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

Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed.

There’s also the minor quibble that restricting food exports to starve another country are illegal under international law.

That sanctions only harm the civilian economy is not an argument against them. Kinetic sanctions agains oil refining are also primarily impacting the general population and the military have enough oil. But they still impact the ability of the Russians to fund the war. Civilian infrastructure and economic assets are used by militaries too.

China catching up does not mean they are not still behind.

Also, China is a big country with many companies. While some may be trying to catch up via local development, others may still prefer getting western hardware right now e.g. in order to get a competitive advantage over those catching up.

But here's a link to the podcast episode if you want to give it a listen. It will inform a lot to the discussion taking place here and help you understand a few of the things he said that are probably now wrong: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jensen-huang

If they don't need NVIDIA then why is the now former CEO of NVIDIA trying so hard to allow exprt controls to be relaxed.

And it's because brute forcing only allows you to not fall behind, but you can't catch up to frontier models or surpass.

Let's assume for a second that the compromat story on Huang is true, how much would that have cost? It could be everywhere from 10k to 10m $, depending on how difficult it was to get access, but it would still be a rounding error for AI invest.

Chips aren't what maketh SI anyway. The US is ahead because of a trifecta of having the best (most) hardware, best data, and best talent. You might also throw in business culture. But the same way Google is leading from behind in the US AI eco system, China is behind the frontier on LLMs, but laying foundational work in robotics, multi-modal models and integrated factories that might prove a big advantage down the line.

WSJ reports that U.S. intelligence says Chinese intelligence approached Alice to become an asset after she met Jensen in March 2024. So, she wasn't targeted.

Unbeknownst to them, the Russian was actually at that time trying to make contact with western intelligence, as he was keen to defect! He was just a bit too awkward to respond to flirting.

He did eventually manage to defect to Britain, and died in 2025. His name was Oleg Gordievsky.

That said, I don't have any special insight into the specifics of who was driving the demand backing Megaspeed.

One other little crack in the dike. Was Sam Altman saying regular computer users shouldn’t have memory all memory should be allocated to data centers.

What will be the third crack in the dike?

Now that I explained it detail for you, shall move on to addition and subtraction? Or do you need a short pause because your head is hurting you?

Watched the interview and as far as I see he was getting 'heated' because he was speaking the obvious truth and being frustrated by poorly informed questions.

This is entirely expected from somebody like him who has a long history of being on the right side of technical argument.

He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US - replaced by a ex-CFO.

I don't see it. Nvidia has a lot to answer for, and the fact that Jensen was very successful as a CEO does not shy away from the cracks in the structure.

It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move.

But how do we know he wasn’t being whispered to by the smoking baddie he was trying to impress? Maybe he’d not have taken the risk were he not having this affair but we know what men do when their ego is on the line. Case in point: Musk paying people to play PoE for him and losing his shit when he was caught.

Do I think money is a good enough explanation? Yes. Could I believe that what’s in his pants also played a part? Also yes.

If the sanctions are to prevent buying the products of slavery, that's a moral issue, and violating the sactions is also a moral issue.

Same deal if the sanctions are to prevent selling things that will be used to carry out genocide/etc. That's a moral issue, so violating the sanctions is a moral issue.

I don't think there's an alegation that the GPUs will be used for immoral purposes, just that the US government has national security concerns. Those concerns may or may not be valid, and may or may not be served by having trade sanctions applied effectively, but I don't think that's a question of morality.

It's not de facto immoral to violate the law. It could be immoral to violate the law and conceal it.

But then it would be the thing that is sanctioned that is the immoral activity, not the breaking of a sanction, right?

It's like you said, unlawful != immoral.

It's arguable either way, morality isn't a formal logic. There's no right answer, and it's mostly judged by popular consensus... If there is a final authority, they don't publish their notes. :p

Unless you're saying that disloyalty and betrayal are not issues of morality.

It's very interesting to read here that Jensen is immoral for betraying his wife but not for betraying his country.

IMO it's not a terribly strong case to make while Boeing sells whole jetliners to China, but the law was put in place for both moral and practical reasons.

In this case, though, I think Huang just believed these sanctions were the wrong move, and would end up long-term helping China and hurting the US. Which is fair to believe, but believing a law is counterproductive doesn't give you immunity if you break it.

This is a significant philosophical point.

  The thing about that Lord Moulton said is that there are a bunch of things that are wrong that are not illegal, and we have to do that because people have to be capable of self-control. Patrick Deneen, in . . . The Failure of Liberalism said that he thinks liberalism is failing because it has come to the view that anything that is not illegal is moral. 

What if he "believed fidelity was the wrong move" and that he'd end up divorced eventually anyways?

When is disloyalty and dishonesty immoral?

The relationship with his wife is neither here nor there, unless she wants to make it public. If she feels betrayed, wants a quick buck, or otherwise wants to for any reason, she will sue for divorce and, considering the publicity of the cases, she should get a favourable judgement.

It’s easy to impose our morals on others. But more than half of republicans believe that gay sex is immoral just as strongly as you believe that adultery is.

They had an idea which they thought will be valuable. And they worked bery hard on making that idea a reality.

People complain that companies don’t have leadership with long term vision. The leadership of NVIDIA heard the idea of GGPU computation and put the resources behind the idea to make it a practical reality. Here the gap between “nerdy idea” to “product sells like hot-cakes”, is measured in decades. That is not just luck.

Jensen Huang cheated on his wife AND conspired to evade arms control regulations, but he's still a genius.

Since NVDA had such a flat corporate structure with Huang having ~60 direct reports, I expect that the company will be lost for a period of time as they try to get their bearings. This is an opportunity for AMD, INTC and others.

Ma Bell without the anti-trust (yet!).

Let's be clear, she is just the interim CEO (primarily because Huang neglected to ever even start a transition plan) while NVidia searches for a permanent CEO. The names I've seen floated are Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, and Ian Buck, the creator of CUDA.

Let's expect better of leadership than to be criminal.

Jensen has two core points:

- stopping selling NVidia chips to China isn't going to stop China developing AI

- stopping NVidia selling to China will ultimately ceed US leadership in chips as Nvidia's commercial edge is as much about the dominant developer ecosystem as it is the chips per se.

ie the real risk is the default world tech stack shifts to open models on Chinese chips. End result Chinese lead in both. I'd be animated.

He has spent his entire career competing and winning and he is being told he has to stop competing in order to achieve a goal that he knows won't actually be achieved by sacrificing NVidia.

Nvidia thrived because it paired great hardware with great software.

AMD and Intel think hardware is enough; it’s not. There’s a reason neither has ever been able to compete with Nvidia.

They have a giant ego, but I’d argue it’s probably well deserved.

Apple is/was similar. They also see that hardware without great software is useless. Spend as much; if not more on software to make your hardware shine.

Another thing is wrong was thinking that Apple should run in and build some type of AI model that’s proving to be well wrong the only thing in Apple’s way right now is memory. certainly isn’t money, and they certainly have the talent and house to fix the memory problem. The question is whether or not they have the will to do so.

No one equals Apple at this point in time when it comes to seamlessly integrating multiple devices in a useful way. Be it a desktop computer, laptop a smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, Apple Vision, AirPods with each iteration, once again in comparison to their competition, they seem to have the best hand at this time.

Memory cost is the biggest problem Apple has right now and it’s not like they don’t lack the money and with the Apple Silicon design group they certainly have the capability to fix it, or I should say design around it.

Yes, it might take 2 to 5 years to do it, but it’s not impossible, the main question is, do they have the will? And they’ve certainly shown it when it comes to processors, GPUs, modems, and other support chips that they can execute over time.

They may not execute on what you want or what I want, but in comparison to their competition, who is out there right now that can combine both the software and the hardware at a high level across the board?

You can say it was luck but it was definitely not "average".

Yeah, it pretty much does. CUDA is why they are positioned where they are. Other players like AMD and Intel could have done that, but they didn't, and if they had, they wouldn't have persevered for 10+ years with essentially nothing to show for it.

He may not have 'invented' CUDA but he saw the potential and gave it resources to be created and continually developed.

How many "CUDA-like" ideas have be squashed at other companies by leaders that don't see the potential or are willing to take a multi-year loss?

IMO, it's like SpaceX vs other rocket companies - especially Blue Origin.

Bezos, at least at first, had just as much money if not more than Musk. So why did SpaceX do so much better than them and every other rocket company. I despise Musk personally, and he's generally not as smart as he makes himself out to be - but there is something there he does differently than others in his position, some with similar resources as he does as well.

Western companies have had that problem. when the visionary CEO bites the dust. I think the Eastern companies are even more susceptible.

Note: Nvidia is the very definition of a one trick company I think they were in trouble long-term no operating system, Microsoft is in trouble in the other direction. No real in-house hardware ability. Long-term you have to have the ability of both in-house to adjust and iterate over the long haul with the changing conditions in tech.

You can criticize his recent question actions all you want, but you can’t believe he is “average”.

Due to sanctions there’s one Chinese company that seems to have become a multi-dimensional company we won’t know for sure for another two years.

Being a vertical computer company appears to be coming back in style bring on the 1980s. early 1990s.

Nvidia is a highly technical company we’re gonna find out how important Jensen really was to that company tech wise?

And if you look closely at their company, what have they really innovated on over the last five or six years? from a distance, like Intel, it seems like they just turn up the juice/Wattage in short, they are just cruising along.

It clearly didn't - don't you remember the Deepseek launch where it came as a rude shock that the much vaunted concept of a compute capacity moat was blown away?

He kept repeating that while he made the best chips, computer science was more important.

Oh no.

Anyways...

Unless it's like super far in, if this counts as heated then I just don't know what you expect.

For the record I think that less than half of the people who thought the dress was black and gold were being influenced by the Chinese government to take that position.

If the sale is not about money or share price then maybe it's ideological.

https://youtu.be/HjurAWAr_nY

Money is like oxygen. If you deny oxygen/money to the Chinese chip market, they can't grow as fast. By supplying China with chips, all the money will go back to the US and not enough money will go to Chinese chip manufacturers to help them advance the way Nvidia can.

This is what Jensen was saying and he is 100% correct here. The chip ban to China will really help them catch up because the money will recirculate since they have no choice but to buy Chinese chips, and in the end it will make them much stronger.

The best way of hampering China technologically has always been about keeping them completely dependent on foreign chip supply chain, e.g. ASML, TSMC, NVDA, ARM, AVGO, INTC, etc.

If you simply ban them from getting any western chips or chip tech you simply light a viciously hot fire underneath them to develop their own TSMC equivalent and their own chip designers, and we are now seeing them catching up rapidly. In fact, they are pretty close to catching up now, basically within one or two years...

The best reason to NOT ban exports is that it really doesn't work against a peer state, and China is close enough now to count. Given the significant economic trouble in the PRC (youth unemployment, unwinding the property bubble, overproduction of EVs) the US could definitely have played this better instead of creating a vibrant full-stack domestic AI sector in China.

They hired old asml employees.

This has crashed, check the markets.

They do not need a ban to light a fire under them. The fire is already lit and burning and nothing the west can do will even slightly dampen it.

You yourself claim they are within a couple of years. If that's the case you think they will stop developing if we sell them chips? That's laughable.

The fundamental contradiction of the AI maximalists like Huang is claiming that AI does not need regulated while simultaneously supporting chip exports to China. The supporting claim for the former is that we need to compete on AI with China and move as fast as possible and every day matters, while the latter implies that slowing down their compute is inconsequential.

Keeping adversaries X-behind discourages adversaries from developing a new ecosystem since X-behind is better than building new. If an adversary with tremendous resources must recreate the ecosystem, it will be adopted by US+global companies since it will be lower margin.

If this principle were true, then autarchies like North Korea would be the most advantaged since they never have to worry about international competition in their domestic market.

Your confidence is not backed by any data or observation, it's just an unfounded inference.

I do not know full details, but China did exactly that. There were articles about limiting Nvidia chip imports more than a year ago. It really highlighted the absurdity of the export ban.

To my non-expert knowledge, the reasoning behind the export ban has never been explained beyond a vague assertion that China would do some sort of evil with AI if they have bigger GPUs than some arbitrary number of transistors, and also some silliness where paying a 15% tax made some of the GPUs safe to export. It has been pretty great for Huawei.

There are. A lot of Nvidia chips are still stuck in Hong Kong.

What the government does is not always what corporations follow.

https://nationaltechnology.co.uk/Nvidia_GPUs_Sitting_Unused_...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/u-s-commerce-secr...

Yeah, no. No one in Beijing will let Nvidia or the White House have that kind of power in the long run because the free market knows best and golly gee where will we get the money and whatnot. They will buy whatever they can to bridge the gap to a time when they own their own tap.

Even if this is just a coincidence, Jensen himself came out and said he donated to the ballroom, but kept the amount hidden. In internal documents, Jensen and Nvidia said to keep the amount hidden and it only came out due to disclosure documents from the government.

The audit on the main contractor for that "ballroom" must be wild. I guess that auditor is going to make a pretty penny.

Corrupt from top to bottom.

birds of a feather, and all that

cost of doing business. kiss the ring, get the blessing, make fat stacks -- illegally.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think that the risk is not nearly as real as it-- as they talk. And I think the risk can be managed. And it's managed, you know who? By who? The DOJ. We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said, "Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night."

ROSS DOUTHAT: Who was this person?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you--

ROSS DOUTHAT: Or this company?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you. But we said-- "Do you like the color orange because get rid --" said, "Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give 'em a kiss good night, and--"

ROSS DOUTHAT: If--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"that's the story because--"

ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"because tomorrow morning--"

ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"you're goin' to jail."

ROSS DOUTHAT: If the-- if they--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me tell you--

ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted to make a deal--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person--

ROSS DOUTHAT: --to put that (UNINTEL)--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person totally changed everything. Totally. "Yes, sir. Yes, sir--"

ROSS DOUTHAT: "Yes, sir"?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay--

ROSS DOUTHAT: Was it a leader of a major AI company?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. Yeah.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. And--

ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --and-- and I don't think--

ROSS DOUTHAT: --said, "We wanna put th-- we wanna--"

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't--

ROSS DOUTHAT: --"codify this into law--"

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't think it was--

ROSS DOUTHAT: --would you work with them--

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --done maliciously. But it coulda been malicious, but--

---

This is what losing the Rule of Law looks like by the way. The sitting president is on TV saying that he found out someone rich and powerful is suspected of wrong doing serious enough to get a call from the president threatening him with prison, but that that's the punishment. Once that rich and powerful person bent the knee, said "Yes sir" with the right tone of voice, all was forgiven.

Equal Justice under Law means that we shouldn't punish people we don't like with harsher sentences it also means that wealth and power shouldn't be sufficient to skirt the law.

We often speak of a two-tiered justice system, but I've never seen the president go on TV and tell America in no uncertain terms, it exists, I'm a part of it, and it went very well, he said "Yes sir" just the right way and so you don't need to worry about it.

You're just NOW noticing that we have lost the rule of law?? The constitution has been continuously violated for over 100 years, we are clearly a post-constitutional republic? I guess? I think we entered full clown world in the 2000's where the currency, government and war systems started glitching out.

What I am noticing is that the high trust society we inherited has finally eroded to the point that we no longer tell ourselves that we have rules and laws that are equally (or sanely) applied.

Which is a good, scales dropping from eyes, innocence ending sort of thing. Makes me hopeful for change, in a way.

https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/trump-lutnick-nvidia-china-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...

As a business, why shouldn't they advocate for export to a relatively huge market? It is an expansion for them and from a business perspective completely expected.

Is the problem that Nvidia was not making it as hard as it should have?

Realistically, how much does that even matter?

There's is no argument to be had about this specifically. You can argue whether this is true or not, but that's not relevant to this subject. If Nvidia still decides to ignore the government, it'd be not only completely, absolutely fair, to nationalize the corporation, but the country itself has a duty to its citizens to do such thing.

China should have infiltrated ASML, not much they can do without them until they get the blueprints. Unlikely they aren't doing it already.

these are actual weapons, does anyone use GPUs to kill humans?

There is more spelunking to that situation, but that's a different thread.

US congresspersons and international media outlets condemned the use of AI warfare against Iran, including the Department of Defense's (DoD) Project Maven—a target tagging system integrating elements of Palantir's Maven Smart System and Anthropic's Claude large language model.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

I doubt it has anything to do with it really. China is a huge market and by not exporting to China they were missing out on tens to hundreds of billions in revenue. Any CEO would have advocated the same.

Particularly in the current political moment, saying essentially "we were using high demand in a market we can't legally sell in to increase prices for American customers" is not a good look.

(Yes,obviously, not all of this is Nvidia's doing, and demand at this volume through smuggling/front companies would still affect the legitimate market. But being an active participant in it is not a good look.)

OK sure .. obviously sleeping with Chinese agent is a security issue .. very bad .. but Nvidia's position on the export ban was sound. The export ban does not make sense. In fact, it is counterproductive because it closes a huge market to Nvidia and makes China less reliant on US Tech - forcing them to accelerate development of homegrown GPU business.

If Nvidia was skirting the law, then they should held accountable for that.

If Nvidia merely held a position that the particular law is, say, counter-productive and lobbied against it (but followed it) - what's illegal about that?

in corporate america haha

Jensen had the ear of the President. He could have lobbied this properly.

Doing so by obscuring Nvidia’s Singapore business, failing to apply for an export license to Megaspeed, corruptly quashing a Commerce investigation into Megaspeed, all while sleeping with its leader who turned out to be a Chinese spy, and then only coming clean when the Congress flipped…I don’t know how he could have flipped the bird stronger at the American people.

I'm squarely blaming the federal admin for this. Lutnick and Rubio both knew about this way ahead of time, and their negligence is what ended up screwing the American people over. Removing Jensen doesn't prevent this corruption, it just shuffles the blame around.

Everyone is. It's increasingly clear the administration helped Nvidia break the law [1].

But this is how corruption works. The mobster pays off the mayor to let him break the law. That doesn't mean they aren't both breaking the law.

> t just shuffles the blame around. Huang became the fall guy for corruption at a ludicrous scale

Fall guy implies innocence and the end of the line for blame. Neither looks likely with this case. Jensen wasn't innocent. And there is is bipartisan fury starting with Lutnick.

> while Donald Trump ponders installing Tim Cook (?)

I think he got this idea from a joke Kara Swisher made. In the end, Trump would love nothing more than for a media circus around Jensen's succession to distract from the above.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/12/business/nvidia-megaspeed...

Could you tell China this? Because they seem to not agree at all, given what we are seeing

It's not just NVIDIA that's extremely weak on China, the entire Executive branch is both weak and incompetent on what they claim is a chief concern, and Congress has been completely absent on the oversight role that it should be performing according to the US Constitution.

The incompetence and/or corruption is inexcusable. Teapot Dumb Scandal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2aC8lAOQbg&t=1458s

All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.

Sad day for developers.

This combines with the fact that it requires actual effort not to think China spreads propaganda regarding AI at this point, I'd rather err on the safe side.

I said the same thing a few days ago and got heavily downvoted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50417959

> Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. Ha! Who's going to wait until Jan? There's already a congressional hearing on Nov/18 https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/press-releases/chairme...

I may sound arrogant, but I am not. Many people are a bit slow to catch on to these incidents or can't see beyond one layer, like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418215

How does it make sense that Jensen is compromised while advocating for exporting GPUs to China, which is something that primarily benefits NVIDIA (and arguably the US) while being against the Chinese interests? If he were compromised he would be like "well actually maybe I shouldn't export chips to China after all and give their domestic semiconductor industry a chance".

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-chips-pile-up-hon...

[2] https://ng.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/nvidia-ai-ch...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...

That’s not the same as China not wanting them legitimately.

As a public company its job is to sell as much stuff as possible to as many people as possible, they had every incentive, arguably a duty to advocate for exports to China. The incentive is there regardless of outside meddling.

Skirting the sanctions intentionally would be bad.

I don't really buy that. China was already like Nvidia's #2 or #3 market. It didn't take a Chinese agent to convince him that he wanted to sell to China.

but china refused to buy nvidia chips

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-12/china-urg...

I think it was the affair with the direct report that did him in.

That's a bigger no-no than selling to spies, especially when the administration knew about it and did nothing.

I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossy negligencent and avoid having a cartoonish level of naivety. So that they can pretend that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?

This is obviously something that has been postponed for after the midterms.

He put US national security at risk just because between his wife and his other mistress, he couldn't keep it in his pants.

There are some things more important than stock valuation.

It is far far worse than that - he lied to shareholders.

Or maybe he just simply wanted to make more money by increasing demand for Nvidia's GPUs by tacitly allowing for them to be exported to China though Singapore.

Given that the economic growth of the USA during the last few years was entirely due to this man and his technologies, I'm going to say nah.

China having access to GPUs is not a national security threat. It's an economic threat. Not sure why people treat China as some enemy nation. It's just a competitor.

My god, the god complex

CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?

While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.

* — We did a test of it after similar claim a few weeks ago, and what pushed us to do a research is because my friend who works in a hotel industry was getting moderation blocks on Grok left and right — they now use only AI images to not bother with copyright trolls ever again who threaten lawsuits for things like improperly credited bought stock photo — and in their case moderation was a serious hindrance for creating images.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal

I'm rather confident that you would not be able to do that.

However, I'm confident that instead of doing that you'll continue spreading information that is now obsolete and incorrect.

Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?

Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.

His argument was “we must not make it more convenient to develop a fully domestic stack”

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer is a fairly reasonable adage

According to who?

I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.

Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:

> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two

[1]: https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535

Hah. He doesn't have a prenup. That's going to lead to serious enough consequences for him in divorce court.

For someone not familiar with American law: How the fuck is that a bigger problem than the Chinese spy ?

Is there any explicit rules at NVidia forbidding that in a code of conduct somewhere ?

You really think Nvidia would let Huang go (without a replacement matching his skills, experience and knowledge in the field) because he cheated with an employee?

Plus thanks to Huang, Nvidia is now under investigation by federal agencies.

None of them care about a CEO cheating.

A famous guy had an island and it was extrajudicially a place where alot of powerful people internationally could come to his island and interchange info and ideas and make deals and things could occur and he collected up all that kind of stuff, including arms deals and the sex stuff.

But Americans are only right now aware of the sex stuff in what he collected up.

The sex stuff is essentially a distraction, the oily film on the deeper ocean of truth.

But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.

That's not the reason either.

They never did it in a way that's not technically legal.

And the administration allowed the exports later anyway.

If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.

I know it's just speculation, but the fact that Nvidia hasn't tried to scapegoat some random compliance officer strongly suggests to me that Jensen did know, and that the board has seen the paper trail that proves it.

...maybe. Or maybe not. Consistency in application of the law is not exactly at an all-time high right now.

What changed is the publicity about the affair. So this is about the affair.

So for example, a stolen Porsche could end up being driven by a Russian oligarch.

Porsche is not on the hook for this. The car was stolen by a third party.

If a Porsche exec instead had sex with the thief and tossed them the keys to a brand new 911, then they might be on the hook for violating sanctions.

NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...

The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.

The problem now is the very public optics of that coming to light in the context of having an affair with a maybe spy.

Why does it have to be a single reason? The business world doesn't work that way.

    > Nvidia has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration

(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.

(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.

I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.

Are they though? As long as they're in the good graces of Trump, is the Justice Department going to do anything about it?

In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.

Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.

But this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

This story has more to it that will come to light .. I'm sure of it.

Gamer Nexus looked at it like a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

This seems very silly.

In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.

What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".

The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.

And Jensen isn't just any CEO, he is the founder and has run the company for thirty years.

He would have survived the affairs if it wasn't for the export control violation aspects.

People refuse to understand it. Every single thread is full of the same comments. People are obsessed with culture wars.

Remind me: when did Huang direct NVDA funds to the Trump ballroom fund?

If the second affair didn’t come out, this wouldn’t be a discussion.

Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.

The more sane explanation is that Jensen Huang just wanted to capture more revenue.

Abuse of power in the case of the second affair to the extent it could've easily turned into a rape scandal and is a big reason why it is a big HR no-no, and in the first case, the affair not being public is exactly the kind of thing a honeypot wants in order to keep you quiet about the kinds of threats that may end up implied.

Either way, the dude is going to be getting investigated and will not be able to effectively lead NVIDIA in the course of what's coming.

For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.

Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.

The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.

Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy

It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.

wong?

It would have been simpler and more profitable to sell China the GPUs.

One woman from the CCP just burned a couple of trillion out of your 401Ks. Have you said thank you even once? Are you sick of winning yet?

Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.

dark ops may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned

If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.

Of course, but perception matters.

Lots of this has been known since may, and it sounds like the president was informed she was a spy a year ago.

One wonders if this happened now since the Dems took control of the investigation bodies.

If they had not, would they have kept right on as is?

Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.

The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.

Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.

So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.

All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.

Sad day for developers.

NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.

His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.

I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.

That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".

Interesting times

Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got forwarded on to China.

It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.

“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.

The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.

As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?

> ban for national security reasons

These don't sound like they are on the same order of magnitude in terms of severity?

Mr. Huang, you’ve admitted that you violated Nvidia’s policy on relations with subordinates. Why should we believe you were faithful to Nvidia’s policy of compliance with national security export controls?

I don't think that is the least bit difficult for a board to ignore.

Time and time we saw executives having affairs and dodging consequences. Elon Mask, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos. All faced much less severe consequences. Definitely not something blow over like this just after a few days it's being reported.

This is a coordinated attack on Jensen and it was very successful.

The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.

If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.

The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.

Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50464121

Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".

Allows the influence of selection of next CEO that is more aligned with long term Chinese goals. Or punishment for not going along with the plan.

Im not much for conspiracy theories, but if you think about it, in the state that US is in, there is absolutely zero chance US will do anything retaliatory to China if they do spy shit on US soil. China is basically free to play spy games. My guess is that they have their fingers in Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, SpaceX, and AMD, and probably other agents within NVIDIA in high places.

Their game is basically rearrange the pieces so eventually China becomes the world number one superpower, while keeping the status quo as much as possible

bipartisan bill[1] needed to decapitate[2] opposition[3] to expanded controls/moratoria and install “neutral” caretakers[4] until passage

[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/09/10/2026/bipartisan-ai-saf...

[2] https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2120745928722087948

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035303

[4] current CFO Kress or former Apple CEO Tim Cook (suggested by president in social media post)

This was blatantly obvious. Do we really think Malaysia was using Billions in GPUs on some secret AI project?

I'd be more inclined to believe the spy thriller narrative if he sent the RTL of their top designs to China. Selling goods is not a one chief op.

Of course, not a year went by before the UAE and Saudi invested heavily in the Trump crypto fund and, very coincidentally, the ban was lifted.

Fear not, Cerebras managed to get another investment from OpenAI!

If you dissect the timeline of the events and various, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.

This is the timeline:

  Nov 8 :  Jensen issues apology.  NVIDIA allows him to use nvidia.com for this

  Nov 8  :  The Board of Directors publicly backs him up with a "vote of confidence" by stating:  *"no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that "The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team."*  -- from https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/statement-from-nvidia-board-of-directors

  Nov 11 :  2nd affair gets exposed in the news

  Nov 11 evening :  emergency meeting of Board of Directors is called to fire Jensen Huang
  

Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.

Yeah, this seems likely. It's also quite possible that he not only "didn't come totally clean" but outright lied to the board i.e. "this was a one-time thing"

Powerful interests want Nvidia to change directions and my guess is that they didn’t think that would happen under Jensen.

Nvidia’s Board is not a list of power players. They were, until now, largely pliant to Jensen. They flipped because they saw what everyone outside Silicon Valley did—that they personally, and Nvidia broadly, would pay the price for Jensen’s failures and potential crimes if his brand wasn’t severed from Nvidia’s.

Now that Trump looks like a weak lame duck, and congressional subpoenas are coming, the entire calculation is different.

Jensen Huang wasn't on board with that so now he's gone.

So no, it's not literally about his sex life, but pretending like that doesn't factor into the whole things seems like a very strange point for people to keep making. It may not be that 90% of the cause is "he had sex out of his marriage" but it's also not 0% (it surely doesn't make him a "good leader(tm)" if he's having sex with subordinates)

- July 25: Amid the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP publicly stated that Hayward had the board's full support.

- July 27: BP formally announced that Hayward would step down as CEO, with Robert Dudley replacing him.

Similar situations with Bob Chapek, Travis Kalanick, the Boeing CEO in 2019 when all those crashes were happening, Carol Bartz, Bob Diamond...

I've not fired very many people before, but deception removes any ambiguity as to whether or not someone should be fired.

My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it. From all appearances, NVidia was playing ball with the Trump administration. He was a frequent ally of President Trump, Trump supposedly knew about this information for the last year and sat on it, and even the CIA leaks that started it stressed how much Huang had praised the Trump administration. Reportedly they had already voluntarily stopped exports to MegaSpeed [2] as of June 2025. China, however, has a lot more to gain from his departure. It's going to harm NVidia very severely: reportedly he's very hands-on, "the conductor that makes a very complex operation work", and as a founder the whole knowledge pyramid that the company is based upon rests with him. If they want their domestic hardware industry to surpass NVidia, the easiest way to do that is to take out NVidia leadership.

I suspect that he was compromised by both the CIA and CCP, and with tensions rising between them, eventually found a situation where they each wanted him to do different things, and he couldn't satisfy both. Likely the CIA got wind that the CCP was going to move with their leverage, and published to stave that off. This also has the nice side benefit for U.S. power of letting the other side know the extent to which the CIA knows what you're doing, and showing that even the CEO of the richest company on earth is not immune to U.S laws. But it's still a net negative to U.S. power to have Huang out as CEO of NVidia, simply because it's such a net negative to NVidia. This is only a desirable outcome if he's going to be ousted anyway, or if he is otherwise compromised to become a Chinese puppet.

I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes. First affair, okay, it could be an indiscretion that happened in the past, cut ties and do damage control. But if there's a second (and third and fourth and many others?) affair and everybody knows about it, it becomes impossible for Huang to lead the company because everybody has so much leverage on him.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50462327

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50464121

No they don't. They just lost access to Nvidia chips that they still rely on (even if not said out in the open). Alibaba's stock tanked on the news for example.

> I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes.

The role was to get the agenda off spying and export (the things you'd go to jail for)

They would prefer their companies buy local, as it will advance their local semiconductor infrastructure.

However, these companies would prefer Nvidia if they are allowed. All the advances in the past few years are due to advanced chips being restricted, so they had to step up.

They already do. Local produces maybe >5% of the volume needed. It's NOT prefer or not. It just doesn't exist.

Some people believe that the key moat for AI is the model, and under this model (hah) torpedoing NVidia would be bad for China and good for the U.S. because they won't have access to cutting-edge NVidia hardware for model-training. Other people believe the key moat for AI is the hardware, and under this model torpedoing NVidia would be good for China because it'd allow Chinese hardware makers to catch up and bad for the U.S. because it destroys our key competitive advantage.

Interesting that a policy decision depends so heavily on a question of fact, but that isn't unique to this issue. (I suspect that left and right would agree on abortion if they could agree on whether personhood begins at conception or birth, but they don't, so). There's also an element of time preferences here too: it's likely that model training is dominant now, but hardware will be dominant when you project out a few years, and so both factions could be right but on different timescales.

Exactly my read as well. "If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two."

After they caught him in a lie, they may not have been able to not fire him.

More seriously, I was also curious. A quick search seems to say the earliest recent source is https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535

https://nypost.com/2026/11/12/business/ousted-nvidia-ceo-jen...