Nvidia is a profitmaxxing company in a profitmaxxing economy and so it is going to profitmaxx; the criticism should lie with the US government: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/republican-senator-urges...

* Megaspeed was evading US sanctions against China

* Megaspeed CEO was a Chinese state agent

* Huang was sleeping with Megaspeed CEO

Therefore, one of the following must be true:

(1) [Unlikely] Huang knowingly supported the evasion of sanctions. If so, he should be fired for breaking the law.

(2) Huang was tricked. If so, his judgement is now suspect.

Huang's argument is (2). In this case, the evalaution of his judgement is:

(A) Is this a one-off mistake? If so, he should be retained - he's human.

(B) Is this a pattern? If so, he should be fired - he's an ongoing risk (e.g., via regulatory action).

Huang resigned because the second affair indicated (B) - he's an ongoing risk.

As a result, the question of "who knew what when" is actually beside the point. Retaining Huang risks ongoing, overwhelming government action for evading sanctions - and the board members want 0 personal liability in that investigation.

(1) [Unlikely] Huang knowingly supported the evasion of sanctions. If so, he should be fired for breaking the law.

(2) Huang was tricked. If so, his judgement is now suspect.""

No - it's absolutely not a choice between those two things and neither are likely.

A company bought some chips from Nvidia - and illegally moved some to China.

That's it.

Jenson knows many of Nvidias customers. Probably thousands.

He's not 'tricked' because he doesn't have some magical 'judge of character' - the insinuation is preposterous.

--> Companies do illegal stuff all the timee; this one was skirting export laws.

That's it.

He's not a mind reader, and she's probably not a spy either, I'm sure she told the CCP some things because that's how it works in China, just as US citizens tell US gov a lot of things as well.

Ultimately he bears some responsibility, and there's enough concern to look into it, but this is Occam's Razor - the lady was back door shipping gear, just as thousands of business do.

Just as more than 50% of the materials in Russian cruise missiles are 'made in USA' - and illegal 'smuggled' into Russia, and by 'smuggled' I mean sent in the regular mail.

I used to work at a company where the sanction was around something mundane like Excel or something, and we had to make it an urgent priority to ban all users from Russia to access ... spinning the wheel ... our spreadsheet functionality.

My co-workers and I found it funny that US decided to ban Russia from using an online Excel-like functionality.

The idea that he would somehow not know that they mostly end up in China is ridiculous to me. That guy must be connected up the wazu

original article: https://www.axios.com/2026/11/11/bessent-lutnick-megaspeed-n...

full article: https://archive.is/tAVBq

A multi-billion dollar deal in Singapore would absolutely require some folks to physically go out there and do some inventory at the very least. It needs to be in the realm of, "We walked the data center and counted how many of our products were installed and we were shown their yet-installed inventory" documentation. "It matches what we sold them." A great big, fancy report. With pictures.

How much would that cost? Basically nothing compared to how much trouble they could get in for not doing that due diligence. Compare how much it would've cost against how much their stock just dropped.

I expect them to follow the law, which, in this case, appears to be a bit more complex than "you can't sell to china but it's okay if you sell to someone else who sells to china."

Not to mention the fact that he was sleeping with the Megaspeed exec makes it all extremely suspicious.

Because the woman he has an affair with happens to run a shell company that funnels chips to China and skirts the export ban. What a coincidence, huh?

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that.

Everyone involved has to be CYAing. It's pretty likely that a whole boatload of people were involved and none of them want to be the scapegoat that gets to go to jail for it. If they can sell this as something as simple as Jensen getting tricked by a cute spy, then everyone involved can sleep easy and Jensen will probably keep controlling things behind the scenes for a while.

"Oh who cares who he slept with, he's been great for Nvidia. Nothing has been proven."

He's one of the most visible CEO's in the most visible industry in the world, and the entire AI economy is dependent upon them. The perception of him as stable is incredibly important.

Merely the suggestion that he is having affairs with people with close ties to China's government, given export controls, is a huge PR problem. Adding in an additional affair with someone under him. And the likelihood that there may be even more out there.

I doubt the Board wants to get rid of Jensen Huang. He's done incredibly well for them. But right now, there's a huge PR shitstorm swirling around the company.

Maybe in six months it all dies down and he comes back, who knows. But right now, you really can't just ignore the problem and hope the media doesn't care about the whole "well she was only sort of a spy" situation.

China won big with this one.

The CEO's personality is irrelevant if they're selling something that's in high enough demand. Money matters more than anything.

This particular scandal is an issue for Nvidia because:

1. Actual espionage, national security, etc. is potentially in play - criminal charges cost money.

2. Liability from potential lawsuits around in-office affairs - civil suits cost money.

With the recent midterm / AI crash, I'll leave this stock well alone. Might buy at sub 100 if panic sets in.

What a load of crap. Elon Musk is deranged and nobody bats an eye. Zuck is proven to steal and sell data illegally for political gains in authoritative countries with Cambridge analytica and nobody cares. This guy has 2 affairs and is out.

Musk also has significant voting rights as opposed to Huang. Musk is also part of a company that does weird, wacky and wild things, Huang isn't.

Nvidia is seen as a massively stable company with a respected CEO. That's what has been eroded.

My theory is the rest of the oligarchy was getting scared of NVIDIA's stranglehold on AI development and the broader economy and felt they needed to knock Huang and the company down a peg or two. Maybe install a bit of a crony CEO (a la Tim Apple).

Jensen was the sober boring AI leader everyone could count on

When perception of that changes then “the market” will re price

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

If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, 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
  

Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.

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.

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."

The lies may be part of it, but if you didn't fire them for the COC/SH violation, you would be in for near infinite liability because it ends up as evidence that the culture from the top was tolerant of violations, etc. THis is not conjecture, it's what has basically always happened in the legal realm when companies try to work around it.

In my company, it's explicitly not forbidden, but the relationship has to be disclosed to HR early on (source: yearly training). That being said, I'm not sure what HR is going to do with the information.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...

Some people get to have affairs with subordinates, others don't. It's a question of if they have the support of the people pulling the levers or not as to whether it's considered acceptable. Universal rules are for little people, once beyond a certain position they are merely tools for selectively shutting out opposition.

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

They can't legally not fire him. But they can legally re-hire him after firing him. So ironically the ONLY way he can continue at nVidia is by being fired - we just have to wait a few days and there will be an Altman-like resurrection.

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

Don't live in Silicon Valley though.

I don't think this has anything to do with trust. It's absurd not to trust Huang as the best possible CEO for the company that he brought from zero to 5 trillion dollars in value. It's about being afraid of public opinion, and especially fear of being blamed for not taking the expected decision.

They know that media and politicians were asking for his head, and that it was riskier for their own asses to resist than to concede. It's that simple.

I dunno, I bet the stocks would recover from the affair in less than a month. That they will recover from losing Huang as the CEO is less certain.

This is why martyrs are so praised. You have to overcome this instinct of self preservation to give up your life. I suspect most people can't do it in the heat of the moment.

Basically what others have said, it doesn't matter if Jensen is good at his job or even if nVidia prospers under Jensen. I don't think the board members care one lick about that. What matters to them is their own self interest and it takes a lot of experience to realize that executive leadership and even the board does not instinctively value the goals of the organization above their own self interest. I submit this is true because of the massive amount of bribing err I mean incentive alignment that the organization gives in terms of like stock options or bonuses for meeting certain targets.

He can barely stay coherent to reality during interviews and on stage. Especially when the AI generated slides don't make sense.

My god, how much more spectacular could his mistakes be? Does he have to eat a baby live on TikTok while proclaiming "transistors are dead, we're going back to vacuum tubes" or something?

There are very few human beings in history who could have taken nVidia from zero to megatrillions like he did, but the idea of him continuing to run the company after this is absolute absurdity.

it took a vagina. it literally just took a vagina.

everyone can be fished.

the simple fact China had to deploy an operative to get yo him means he and Nvidia are well secured. its an expensive and risky option, not the first by far and intelligence agency would take to get to someone.

go shout in all caps in call of duty -_-

But.

He put together a string of frankly insane mistakes that are now endangering that 5 trillion dollar company from both the inside and outside. There's no chance in hell that they're going to go from $5T back to 0, but you are not understanding the trouble they're in.

Internally, boinking your direct reports (who also happened to have a string of recent promotions) is incredibly ruinous to a company's internal culture, destroying notions of internal meritocracy. How would you feel if all your hard work was apparently not as important as putting out for the CEO? Do you think that would make you eager to do your best work for that CEO? And that's even before thinking about the insane legal liability.

Externally, he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed to simultaneously mess with national security and, it seems, circumvent export controls to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. nVidia is in some extremely serious shit, and will have the government breathing down their necks between now and the end of time.

Jensen is actually extremely well respected by his staff and has the highest staff approvals in almost all of tech.

I'm certain that his personal foibles won't engender him any love, but it's not unheard of.

Elon Musk has had sexual relations with at least 4 staffers, children with one - while he was having children with his wife.

Where's the scandal?

"he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed "

Where is the evidence of this? Give me one specific allegation?

His mistress was passing information to the government, ok, as will many nationals that have met with him, and as US nationals often do as well.

Elon is in direct contact with Putin several times a year since 2022 - and there's no good reason for that.

Consider putting all of that in context vis-a-vis much of the rest of corporate America and consider the rest of his contributions.

Obviously it's fair to bring all of this up, but it's intensely hypocritical for the most part.

https://archive.ph/c4kmF

---

Next to the Nvidia chief was a woman named Huang Le, or Alice Huang, an executive of a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed, which was poised to buy $2 billion of Nvidia A.I. technology over the next year. Though Ms. Huang and Megaspeed are little-known players in the A.I. industry, their association with Nvidia and its chief executive has recently become a preoccupation in Washington.

Commerce Department officials have been investigating whether Megaspeed, which has close ties to Chinese tech firms, is helping companies in China sidestep American export restrictions, according to more than a half dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the companies, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an examination that is not public.

The inquiry, which is active, calls into question how closely Nvidia is tracking where its A.I. chips end up and highlights the possibility of American export laws easily being sidestepped. Megaspeed is also facing scrutiny from Singaporean police, who told The New York Times in a statement that they are investigating the company for breaching local laws, without elaborating further.

It's absurd to suggest that Nvidia would need to secretly ship a handful of chips to some sketchy actor when Nvidia chips have a a mile a line long for sales.

Jensen can sell his inventory 10x over. You have to have buying power just to get a hold of them.

Anything is possible but it would be extra stupid for one of the smartest people in the world to risk everything for literally no reason at all.

Huang betrayed 38 years of trust his wife put into him and recently betrayed the Board by lying to them. That's already admitted, no ifs or buts. He clearly had reasons, as he is a sane person. His reasons were romantic engagement with (alleged) spy. Since he is a sane person, he must have weighed pros and cons and still engage in an affair, even though it jeopardized his marriage and his job. The Board needs to do bunch of "what ifs" in such situation, including paranoid ones, such as "what if this woman had such access to NVIDIA tech stack that each cheap is infused with some form of Chinese virus". We simply don't know how far this goes, but this firing certainly shows much further than just a consequence of a romantic fling.

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

https://glonce.com/nvidia-bankrolls-its-own-customers-the-ec...

Perfect timing: https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...

That seems to be the most natural guess based on public information, but it's equally plausible that the board knows more than the public already, whether because they drove investigations, received disclosures from Huang, or received insider tips once the heat started rising. Trust aside, they may already might know worse and more materially or legally impactful things.

That's the kind of thing that a healthy class of professional journalists can help uncover and trace in a way that our post-journalism world is losing the opportunity to do. Even still, I wouldn't be surprised if further scandals for Huang or Nvidia started being reported in coming days and weeks. You might be right that it was just too many sex scandals and general loss of trust, but we just can't expect to know yet.

That assumption has not held to date in this presidential cycle, and Jensen Huang has openly had the backing of that president. From a financial perspective, that would considerably lower their financial risk estimate of either having to pay a fine and/or hand over one or two C-level executives for some rich person prison-vacation time. I would assume the board is competent and has verbally, off the record, discussed how many billions of dollars they expect to be fined in the worst case and accepted that as the cost of doing (corrupt) business, but we could get lucky and find they did so with a paper trail that’ll come out in court someday :D

Coincidence?

Reports are just breaking that this is indeed the case.

> Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with a second employee, according to two people familiar with the matter, Reuters has learned... Reuters is not naming the employee.

don't has to be a journalist, it could be a spy too... :-)

Hasn't Musk done this multiple times (including having children with subordinates)? He's still the CEO of a few companies. Bill Gates married one!

Boards don't care about this kind of thing unless they are already looking to get rid of someone. Worst case they pay the person off, and the cost will probably be less than a principal engineer earns in a year.

This doesn't pass the smell test. My guess is damning evidence was discovered which incriminates several high-level individuals at Nvidia with willfully bypassing the export ban. The second affair was leaked as a cover for why they were letting him go.

I'm sure it will all come out after a bit.

But in the big picture, isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?

All 42,000 employees should be held to the same standard, otherwise you will end up with all kinds of problems within the company.

Company leadership should lead by example as well.

  > isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?

All of them are big deals, but being deceived by a spy isn't the same as choosing to break an important rule.

Plus possible other events known to the board but not us. We’ll know eventually.

Once I worked at a company where the sales VP got caught embezzling by setting up (large amounts of) fake affiliates.

It boosted the overall revenue numbers, and I think they were impressed at how long he had gotten away with it, so they let him be ‘stolen’ by a competitor (who didn’t know the circumstances) while they swept it under the rug.

Easy 8 figures of revenue impact per year.

Pretty ingeniously evil, IMO.

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

Nobody trusted Trump yet he had the loyalty of all the tech giants because they needed him to make money.

And likewise, AI, and thus the global economy, are dependent on Nvidia. So there was no financial incentive for him to leave if it were just a matter of trust over his inability to keep his penis in his pants.

And let’s remember, this isn’t new news. Nvidia have been aware of this for a year already and it wasn’t a problem until recently.

So what’s changed? The obvious big thing is American government. The Democrats have made it very clear that they’re not going to tolerate any more shenanigans. So removing Haung is a great way to reduce the risk of any financial penalties for Nvidia’s deals with China et al.

This is the right line of thinking, but I don't think a second affair is enough. To me, it says there is more we don't know. Possibly a lot more, and a lot worse than a second affair. Apart from anything else, that is the only reason to act this fast. You don't fire a CEO like Jensen in 24 hours over an HR indiscretion.

So I think both you and the parent are correct, but its a combo: he didn't come fully clean, but there is a non-public part that probably looks a lot more like treason that the board knows and we don't.

If someone has been: 1. Managing the company well 2. Attracting and retaining good talent 3. Making money for shareholders 4. Building strong company fundamentals

Then forcing a resignation over this seems... odd. I was under the impression that barring this infidelity, Huang was one of the more sane tech CEOs. I feel like I could to literally any other CEO (Zuckerburg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Gates, Jobs) that have done something equally bad or worse, and haven't had to resign.

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"

- 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...

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

Huang was famously loyal to the gaming GPU markets, and there's been a subindustry of people running open inference on high-end consumer GPUs.

If NVIDIA kills those product ranges that subindustry will die, AI hardware will be limited to corporates and the small number of individuals who can drop five figures on an AI rig, and open models will become less valuable/dangerous.

Meanwhile I find it hard to believe the board had no idea what was happening and they're suddenly shocked - shocked! - to discover that Huang was plugging his CPU into the corporate motherboard.

If we're just going to be purely speculative anyway, it could be the case Jensen is the one who himself leaked the 2nd affair, in order to continue this distraction strategy.

I wouldn't be surprised if 100% of the info we have on this is Jensen's PR. 1) Anonymous "leak" tweets are all PR agency slop -- real jouranalist scoopers would take credit to draw attention to themselves. 2) Any Federal investigators aren't going to say 1 word to the public. Ergo, it was always Jensen trying to keep the narrative on his affairs.

And if you want to be TRULY conspiratorial about it, perhaps one or both of the affairs never existed, only the smuggling.

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)

Also, implies anyone not posting on HN forfeits personhood by default

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.

https://youtu.be/_BypvatagNQ?si=1CDGUZKSd6r3jz_n

This isn't a story about the sex

For a lot of people, it's about the sex. In fact if you only read the first paragraph, you'd come away thinking it was solely about the sex.

At least on HN the sentiment is more nuanced though, which is good.

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

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.

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.

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

There are certain lines CEOs of this level absolutely cannot cross, and a relationship with a subordinate is one of them. Hiding it, putting the entire company at risk for it, a board can’t trust a ceo that puts their extramarital dalliances ahead of the company’s interest.

Chips to China, on the other hand, is in the company’s interest. That’s what lawyers and lobbyists are for, and when they behave enough, that’s also what “rockstar” CEOs are for.

Jensen got too big for his leather jacket. Simple as.

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 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.

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.

OT but one thing I didn't realize until reading this comment:

Those used CMP 170HX 8GB were advertised in front of crypto server rigs. Those were probably spread across South Asian scam malls(shopping mall buildings built in literal sovereignty contested areas of non-China/Japan/Korea/Russia non-India non-African non-Muslim Asia, under guises of Chinese tourist destinations, that are literally rented out to local Chinese-speaking gangs engaging in all sorts of gang crimes from tech support scams to human and organ trafficking, straight out of the fictitious Chiba in Neuromancer), and they would happily sell or rent compute to Chinese AI firms if only those were more valuable than 8GB VRAM they have, which they all had all along.

GPU export to China must have become significantly less meaningful since the 170HX unlock became a thing. That alone must have provided petaflops of unsanctioned untraced junks for parts priced compute to Chinese AI startups.

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...

"About 600,000 of Nvidia's advanced artificial intelligence chips are stored in Hong Kong awaiting shipment to mainland China, two people familiar with the matter said, as Beijing withholds approval for large-scale imports despite demand from tech firms" [1].

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

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.

Both China’s geopolitical situation and technological history point towards them cutting any reliance on a foreign tech stack as soon as they can.

As I see it, giving them chips just means they have less of a gap to close when their own EUV fabs come online, it can’t have any delaying effect on their plans.

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.

It's not a completely dissimilar argument to selling them the nukes or F-35s because "it will deny oxygen/money to the Chinese nukes and fighter jets market".

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.

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.

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.

Cheating on your wife of 40 years OTOH...

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. 

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.

I'm trying to point out the inconsistecy with the OP who implied sanctions evasion is not implicitly immoral but that "cheating" is.

Huang may have had an agreement with his wife that this was fine.

But he did not have an agreement with the justice department to flaunt the law and funnel GPUs to China.

Neither did conscientious objectors? I don't think you mean to claim that the justice department is the final word on morality? Just that on this topic, you agree with the justice department (which is fine), but they will do things that you disagree with. They are no final arbiter and have helped enforce plenty of immoral laws in the past.

There is even a case to be made that flooding the Chinese market with advanced GPU's will hamstring China's ability to build their own, just like they have done to our ability to manufacture. In fact that is exactly the case Jensen has made plenty of times. By holding back exports you are actually creating the market conditions in China for building advanced GPU's indigenously, CCP doesn't even have to do much, the market is responding. Who's immoral and unpatriotic then?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a $5T (well, I guess $4T now) company we are talking about. What is the board being paid for?

This is a $4T company for Pete's sake!

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.

They absolutely got incredibly lucky.

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

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.

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.

In that scenario, where somebody is suggesting you throw away your life's work for nothing - I think anybody would be animated.

As someone who isn't based in the US/EU and whose job is to deploy LLMs on premises, I can't wait for the moment when China starts selling its GPUs globally en masse with a proper CUDA equivalent. It's going to be cheaper in the long term and without all the export control drama.

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.

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.

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

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?

So did they round something you wanted to see square, or vice versa?

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.

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.

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.

Whether CUDA will continue to maintain dominance is less clear. It may become a literal victim of its own success, as CUDA-based models gain the ability to migrate themselves to new platforms.

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.

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.

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

https://youtu.be/HjurAWAr_nY

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

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.

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.

WSJ reports that U.S. intelligence says Chinese intelligence approached Alice to become an asset after she met Jensen in March 2024. So, she was an opportunistic info source, not targeted in advance.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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 could leave Taiwan in a much weaker position in the near future)

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

Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?

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

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.

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.

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 there 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 been 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.

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

NVIDIA’s commercial interest is pretty clear… it’s beneficial to them. to sell everyone to maintain the dominance of CUDA. That is not necessarily the national interest. And remember that espionage and infiltration is not a one-sided affair, the US may well have the ability to sabotage Chinese development efforts. You just don’t know.

End of the day, corporate CEOs are very powerful, but they’re not as powerful as the government. My guess is that Jenson truly didn’t think that this individual was a spy, and figured that the questionable legality of chip exports to Chinese proxies could be addressed by ingratiating the administration.

No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War. Subsequently they managed to starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then righted 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. They make almost everything in the average household.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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. Huang became the fall guy for corruption at a ludicrous scale, while Donald Trump ponders installing Tim Cook (?) as his replacement.

The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This is the Kardashian-ization of the American tech industry.

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

But this is how corruption works. The mobster pays 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...

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

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

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.

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.

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

Corrupt from top to bottom.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.)

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.

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.

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 hope nobody in the presidential administration needs to resign because of their role in the largest scandal in US history but if so, that is what is best for the country.

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.

At most companies it does. HP. Intel. McDonald’s.

The only consistent exception is Musk.

That said, I disagree this is why Jensen was fired. The national-security cover-up is a far bigger deal.

Even Bill Clinton faced relatively minor consequences, considering presidents should be held to a higher moral standard

Could be, but that requires time to investigate. Banging employee is different because the board would just have to ask Jensen if the reports are true.

True. The combination probably did him in. But I don't think he'd have been fired if he only slept with an employee. Or had a couple affairs. That's just speculation, though.

Dumb is apparently totally normal at that level.

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.

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.

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.

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, which means that the remaining shareholders are a self-selecting set who is okay with his behavior as long as it keeps making them money.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 with a person to whom you've promised utter faithfulness, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy with regard to some boring, impersonal business contracts?

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

- Signed, another European

Really?

"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.

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.

Or, even if we suppose he doesn’t care about his wife’s feelings at all, he might be very incentivised by losing half of his assets in a divorce. It’s worth many, many millions to him.

Very little involvement from society in that one.

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.

One thing worth pointing out is that in this case in addition to the affair with the Chinese spy he was allegedly having an affair with a subordinate, which is always problematic.

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.....

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.

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.

The bigger point I am trying to make here being that not everything is investor-driven. People can run businesses without that. It annoys me greatly that HN regularly forgets that.

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.

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.

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.

He is an immigrant, he holds dual citizenship in Taiwan, and regularly travels there.

I didn't go so far as to find out if he married in the US or elsewhere, or if his wedding was Christian.

What I do now is that in some cultures in that part of the world, it is acceptable for a man to visit a prostitute during a business trip. It's not something I condone.

I should also point out that in the US, there's no standard wedding vows! I don't think you know what vows Huang made with his wife; nor do I think you know what their expectations were in their relationship.

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.

Perhaps it’s you that is out of touch?

Both partners in this case know and/or participate, you don’t want drama at your games night after all. There is no wrong here, it turns out that many partners like seeing their partner have a great time.

That’s not quite true. A more accurate statement would be: A marriage may be annulled in some U.S. states if one spouse entered the marriage with a concealed, permanent intention not to consummate it, and that intention constitutes fraud going to the essence of the marriage.

If the couple was having sex after marriage, and then one partner decided to cease having it some time later, that is generally not grounds for annulment.

If it were permitted, this would make many, if not most, late-stage marriages subject to annulment. People get sick and injured or just incapable in old age.

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.

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.

This is an extremely unnecessary misogynistic comment.

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

It’s unambiguously a good thing that the next NVIDIA CEO (even if just an interim CEO) is a woman, and that the AMD CEO is a woman.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Uh... but we do!

---

I owe my family and all of you an apology.

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.

Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.

To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.

To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.

Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.

My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.

Jensen

---

Source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company

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.

Yes, and it would have helped. CEOs have "exciting" relationships all the time, and folks seem entirely willing to accept this.

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."

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 strengthens the bayesian prior, which is that his affairs hurt his family, and thus that is what we can conclude. We need not be 100% confident to conclude this absent further evidence. >50% confidence suffices.

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 philanderer donald knew and kept it under wraps for personal gain.

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

She is up 934% since 2014. This congresswoman is the greatest financial genius in the all history of mankind. She was beating S&P steadily, every year and since 2014 she is up more than 600% compared to the S&P.

For context, the probable next best investor - after all these great financial minds in congress - is Warren Buffet, and he is actually down 34.8% compared to the S&P since 2014.

You will only know that Nancy Pelosi was up to since the beginning of October next January. Congress members only have to submit their trades (their SEC fillings) every 3 months. [1]

[1] https://www.online-tech-tips.com/track-congressional-stock-t...

It doesn't, however, show sales of nvidia stock prior to this release. Thus no such sales happened, unless you have any further evidence.

It is, however, looking like JH's fellow philanderer donald knew, and kept it under wraps for personal gain. Probably insider trading. I mean, just look at how much donald and his family's wealth has increased compared to the S&P500, or Warren Buffett.

Congress members are not mandated to fill a trade as it happens. If Nancy Pelosi latest filling day was Nov 6 (as you are pointing out), it means that she is only forced to show trades up to 30 days before (and that is mostly what she does as her median filling delay is of 24 days).

Also, as you are so keen to bring Trump into the discussion for some reason. I must sadly tell you that the chap is only 4.4% up compared to S&P during all his history as a member of the government/representative. The guy is not nearly the same financial genius as Nacy Pelosy.

So now, the onus is on you to convincingly back up the allegations you're making regarding sales of nvidia stock, and you haven't. If you have some sort of evidence that Nancy made the trade alleged, and is delaying reporting, whether allowed or not, please share it.

The evidence is, however, looking like JH's fellow philanderer donald knew, and kept it under wraps, probably insider trading for personal gain.

The allegation is that she sold nvidia stock right before this happened. Is there any evidence for this?

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.

That's not the reason either.

They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc. And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.

Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?

As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?

They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.

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.

I think NVIDIA lose more things by firing Jensen.

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.

My god, the god complex

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.

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.

He controlled the trade and price for a global asset more valuable than gold as a single person. Some people didn't want that, it's that simple.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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

Of course, but perception matters.

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.

You could be right, but you're putting way , way too much faith in the board etc.

These people can be clowns. Don't over estimate how ridiculous, petty, thin skinned and arbitrary boards can be.

Like everyone, they have a COC/sexual harassment policy, and that is basically always a firing offense in practice. They cannot place him above it, or else they would be in for infinite liability.

This is why literally nothing mentioned firing until that was discovered, and then it instantly became about firing him.

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

Sleeping with a Chinese spy or subordinate turns a personal problem into a workplace problem.

“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 problem is that Jensen destroyed Nvidia's plausible deniability.

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

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

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

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

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.

dark ops [well, maybe these are really very bright out in the open 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

we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race

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.

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.

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

The second affair with an employee likely just dealt a death blow (if it hadn't already been dealt) to Jensen in terms of his ability to ride the crisis out.

Plus the fact that there's absolutely no evidence that the lady is a spy. All media report anonymous sources but treat the allegations as fact. Singapore said their investigation of the lady is not due to spying, but no western media picked up that story. The lady traveled to Taiwan with her Hong Kong passport, and the Taiwanese govt also said they have no evidence she's a spy. The Chinese spy agency just started investigating her due to all the commotion (likely for smuggling chips, which China also doesn't want, see above), and also has no idea who she is. Despite all this, the public still treats the spy allegations as a fact.

Jenssen Huang is a victim. Those who wanted to get rid of him and set this up, have succeeded. But everyone is under the mistaken belief that this hurts China somehow. China doesn't give a damn. In the mean time, all Chinese Americans lose. Jenssen is not the first such victim, and won't be the last.

Is rumor and conjecture enough?

If our own government officials can't face justice, why should the CEO of a company?

That suggests no treason.

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

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

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.

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)

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 redirected or 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.

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

So the only thing selling to them accomplishes is give Nvidia more margins. At the cost of boosting the Chinese AI sector - possibly to the point of parity.

China at the moment has the capability to do infrastructural rollouts far faster than US or Europe, but doesn't have the chips to stuff new datacenters with. So it's easy to see why China would want the chips. But it's not like Nvidia is having trouble selling their AI accelerators outside China - and they can't ramp up accelerator production on demand. More demand for accelerators would push the prices even higher, and that would reflect in the margins, but the benefits for Nvidia weren't even that large.

So it was a questionable push all around - even before the spy scandal.

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 grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?

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.

In 50 years from now, some declassified documents will maybe shed light on this specific incident.

I would imagine it being a form of "So, China, we'll let our Jensen guy sell you X in chips, and in return, you do Y in relation to Russia, and Z in relation to Taiwan. Oh, and we need to use one of your spies, in case someone f*cks up".

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?

It's an odd situation where, yes, they're breaching national security mandates, but they're also being protected by the man at the top of the organization that makes those national security mandates.

We're living in a comedy film, where the outcome of said comedy film has an effect on the world economy, so we're actually living in a tragedy film.

That's how corruption skews the reality that the powerless are forced to live within.

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.

Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.

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?

It's just unlikely that an affair would nuke his CEO's position.

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

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.

If an executive suddenly starts wearing a leather jacket, watch out!

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!

"Trump/GOP lost their ass in midterms!" and "Dems intend to investigate GOP/Trump!"

Also provides news channel attacks on Dems; Congress should be looking into national security issues over here in CEO land! Not dividing Congress with partisan hackery!

Important to call out the social engineering going on among all the tribal groups.

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".

We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.

wong?

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

According to who?

Of course they are why wouldnt they.

>NATIONAL SECURITY REASONS

Clipper Chip Mark 5 nonsense.

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.

That's literally how the world works? And has worked for many centuries or longer. By "value" you mean wealth, and wealthy people can get away with murder. They buy and write the law and have the best lawyers in the world.

We won't have billionaires/trillionaires/kings AND rule of law for /everyone/ equally - the world doesn't work that way.

That being said, I think resigning yourself to this sort of behavior because "muh power and world works this way" is just kind of stupid. It is not in your best interests, as a regular person much like the vast majority of HN posters (besides the AI shill bots), to just be content with that state of affairs, if there are little things that are relatively effective at reducing those kinds of corruptions of social systems.

One of those things happens to be general distaste of an authentically Christian society against hedonistic behavior, but that has been on a noted downtrend lately, and I don't think that's been a very good thing. Similarly, I think Protestantism is to blame for a lot of nutty justification for the rich and powerful getting away with stuff like this, but I'm going to be vague about what I mean by that because it would be an essay length post.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 also confident that instead of doing that you'll continue spreading information that is now obsolete and incorrect: in your original post you said that Musk has a bot, but when confronted with the current state of affairs continue to cite Wikipedia about what Musk had a year ago.

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

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? It is the spy affair while Huang promoted an open export policy.

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

None of them care about a CEO cheating.

Also, being fired from the company you founded is a serious consequence.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.

Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.

Jensen provided a platform and roadmap to help advance AI. His selflessness and leadership attracts talent.

Money might help pull talent away but it's silly to think money taken away from Nvidia will suddenly be reinvested into other pursuits.

If you don't think talent is an issue, why hasn't anyone begun seriously competing with SpaceX, TSMC, ASML?

At worse, progress stalls for a year or two.

NVIDIA was at the lead and took most of the revenue and valuation because of it. But the same process would have happened with or without NVIDIA.

Now go back five years and substitute an NVIDIA collapse. Do you think that we'd be in a very different position for AI? I don't think it would be far off at all.

There were many game accelerator companies when NVIDIA started, they were just slightly better than the others, and the efficiency gains of consolidation resulted in those other companies being sold off.

ASML is definitely a one off though. And perhaps TSMC is a unique one off, but they got there by taking the most customers. If it wasn't them, then somebody else would have done it.

The key selection function was "this is the best option at the time" and if the best option hasn't existed, somebody else would have been chosen path that time, giving that other company the capital to build somethjng.

(Notably, it kind of already has done so -- just in China rather than the US.)

He's an incredibly accomplished entrepreneur and leader, but I'm not sure what he's done to qualify as selfless.

To quote the late, great philosopher and renowned businessman Eugene Krabs:

"Money."

Maybe for a short window between the establishment of strong labor unions and Reagan era deregulation.

This whole saga has been a ridiculous waste of everybody's time and energy. There's no compelling argument that points to these new innovations not otherwise happening if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.

The demand for high-ram consumption applications is higher than ever and rising. That demand is not created by nvidia, but nvidia's customers. nvidia's customers are buying nvidia parts built with other's ram because they have customers renting the compute.

Whoever nvidia is buying ram from will simply sell to the next highest bidder, and the ram will still be sold out through the coming years.

Contrary to the AI-bubble-doomsayers - most hyperscalers and neoclouds seem to be at capacity for current demand and even have already booked future demand.

If the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/ram-crisis-one...

"The lawsuit also points towards similar collusion between the companies in the past. In 2005, SK Hynix and Samsung were fined $180 million and $300 million respectively after pleading guilty to price-fixing DRAM pricing. It is suggested that the same occurred between 2016 and 2018 when prices spiked again, ..."

You don’t know this with certainty, do you?

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

Companies (CRWV, etc) are borrowing at 10%+ interest rates to buy NVidia GPUs that NVidia makes 75% gross margin on. I repeat, companies are selling junk bonds to buy GPUs at a 300% markup. Cocaine dealers probably don’t even make 75% gross margins.

Other companies (OpenAI, etc) are also borrowing at 10%+ interest to rent the GPUs to train LLMs.

All of these GPUs need a ton of RAM. There is a fixed supply of RAM. There is insane demand for RAM.

Besides, when demand outstrips supply you don't have to fix prices. Why would you? They cannot deliver all of the RAM people want. Think about it for a minute: how would price fixing even work?

(and don't get me started on the ridiculous "they're switching from DDR3 to HBM" part of that wikipedia article...)

Harming Nvidia would only make us more compute constrained, and raise prices further.

It seems it's impossible to get a certain type of person to understand this regardless of whether it's housing, education or chips.

Harming the producers of [thing] or disincentivizing profits will not make [thing] cheaper if demand remains the same (or if it is growing, like in all of the areas I mentioned).

What type of person are you referring to?

"We" don't. Media narratives over-focus on individuals and personalities because that's what humans focus on.

Markets can overreact emotionally on daily headlines and weekly narratives but tend to correct quarter to quarter. There's lots of data and examples: Apple after Jobs, Microsoft after Gates, etc. Even after losing iconic, long-time leaders, most industry-leading companies continue to make even more money, more profitably than ever over the following decade.

> That's what humans focus on.

I struggle to understand what narrative you're correcting here. "We" in this context seems to collectively mean "humanity". Markets, media narratives, etc. are all run by humans. That's "us", whether or not you personally want any of the blame/credit.

I agree that markets shouldn't do that, and further, I believe they don't do that in any meaningful way. NVidia's price drop of ~20% is short-term volatility. Tracked against the NASDAQ, NVidia will likely post new all-time highs within the next 100 days.

No. They have the same 24 hour day as you and I. They think at the same speed and talk at the same speed. Their "workload" whatever it may be, is finite, evidently finite enough to juggle several romatic relationships at the same time, with much actual work and decisionmaking delegated and informed by domain experts who will be there no matter the CEO.

So yes, you or I could in fact be CEO of NVIDIA. It would be easy. Reports would be made for us by the worlds experts in the fields on what is going on. Departments would be ran by the best available talent on earth. My emails are being read and written by a dozen plus secretaries. Every presser I make I have an ivy league grad writing me the speech making me look like Hemingway out there. Every decision I'd make informed by a team of experts. Every plan thought of already by a hundred people smarter than me. All we'd have to do in the role as NVIDIA CEO is smile, waive, and read the lines handed to us on the sheet of paper by someone else. The ship runs itself even though we all pretend it's the CEO paddling 24/7 making it possible.

Really, that's all any of these guys are doing. Very similar to say the job of a pop star. Are you charismatic? Can you read lines? You'd make a great CEO then.

We had Democrats who are more skeptical of data center construction elected and now the CEO of one of the largest AI companies forced to step down.

If investors were already wondering if AU stocks were over inflated, these events could have been tts impetus they needed to act.

He has no magic, but he did make some good strategic decisions.

Everyone is a god and a genius (in retrospect) if they found a multi-trillion dollar company, but the causation seldom runs that way.

Jobs founded Apple to great success, left and failed then returned to Apple to great success, then he died and Apple was fine. The company is more important than the individual. Nvidia will also be fine.

And clearly the US economy doesn't rest on the shoulders of Nvidia or AI, no matter the level of hype.

This is, frankly, an outlandish statement.

> Behaves like a fool, risks national security to get his dick wet, has unethical affair with subordinate.

> The problem is that people like this get held accountable for their misdeeds instead of being left to do what they want!

Respectfully, I don't engage with conspiracy theorists

Pumping billions of dollars, the source of which is obscured, into it looks like a cut out, is not just a national security problem. It undermines confidence in the numbers that you claim are the basis of shareholder value.

the stock value just represents what people think the company is (or will be) worth, them selling products at 50% margin is what brings the money, the stock value doesn't give NVIDIA extra cash (unless they're selling or leveraging their own stock reserves to get even more cash?). And definitely shareholder value is not the economy.

and also, how is the efficiency bad now? surely that allows for innovation and other companies and people to get cheaper hardware (assuming they somehow have to lower their margins because Jensen left, still don't get that argument)

It's not just a chip company. Those trillions of value represent bets across the entire economy. When the casino goes bankrupt, all bets are off.

Also you act like those bets were group / government decisions. They weren’t my bets. They were NVIDIA’s bets. Equity holders should lose value if the bet fails - that will not be most of the economy by a long shot. The stock market is not the economy. The Casino should not have existed in the first place at the scale it did. This is the correction everyone has been talking about when discussing “bubbles”

So indeed, if he was not CEO, likely whoever would have been would be given the same information as Jensen that lead to him saying yes on tensor cores. And in all likelihood, the same exact decision would have been made, or at least a coinflips odds chance if it really were a matter of "yes" or "no" with no clear winner.

Many, especially the "non-founder" CEOs, are risk-averse.

There's likely many CUDA-like ideas from internal engineers shot-down or ignored by leadership at companies like Microsoft, Google, etc.

While Tim Cook certainly drove the valuation of Apple up during his tenure, one of the most common criticisms was that Apple stopped innovating and more recently their quality bar has been dropping.

Again, credit for putting yourself in the position to capitalize. Credit for executing. But it's pretty likely that the world would not be substantially different if Nvidia has been another company and Jensen was some guy working at MS.

They basically invested in pickaxes a decade before the gold rush, and people only found out about the gold because pickaxes were pretty convenient

Bruh. He is a co-founder and he led that GPU company to a position where it can produce the best GPUs on the market that power the whole industry. You are making it sound as if he happened to be there by accident. This is ridiculous.

> This would happen even if the counterfactual CEO was incompetent.

Tell that to Intel's ex-CEO.

  Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.

Nonsense. Nvidia's employees created that value, not Jensen. Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created, just like in every other company. CEO worship is absurd.

Like it's an extremely common sentiment when working for a large company to look at the SVP or CEO and go "that person is a dumbass, everyone in charge is a dumbass". Yet when looking at other companies somehow we forget about that and put the companies success on the CEO or top level execs. Instead of remembering "no, it's probably the small army below them figuring out how to manage upwards to prevent the idiot in charge from tanking everything"

That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?

A lot of people play crucial roles in a company. HR, accounting, leadership, PM's, engineers, support, etc. All of them contribute to the value creation.

If you've ever been in a company with poor leadership and one with great leadership, you'd see the impact of it on everyone working there and on the value being created.

>That's a very limited view of value creation. Have you ever lead a team of people? Coached someone? Raised a child? Written a technical architecture?

I can assure you that the people you are targeting the question at, have never/rarely done any of the things you asked. I call them the socialists. They sit in judgment of people who do things while they lead their petty lives and all they look forward is the next Superbowl game, or next Netflix series.

(p.s you might like the writings of author by name Ayn Rand, Disclaimer: I'm no worshiper of Rand)

The children yearn for a tyrant I guess.

Not sure about HR TBH

Yup, all of it. And at no point have I considered myself as 10,000x more valuable than any of the team members I led. Yet that's exactly what is done to billionaire CEOs.

You'll notice I did not say Jensen didn't create ANY value.

Critical / hard decisions are worth more than just a manager telling / trusting his team to execute on x,y,z task.

Do you know for sure that Jensen personally was involved in recruiting Ian Buck and starting up the CUDA project? A project that's largely attributed to John Nickolls? What other major decisions did Nvidia even make over the last, say, 15 years?

It took the corporate structure and top-down direction decision ATTRIBUTABLE TO JENSEN to allow them to work so productively together.

Leadership matters. Labor Talent is only able to operate at 10% effectiveness with shitty leaders in place.

CEOs in large companies do not play a role like that.

I prefer the view that the engineers that made GPUs have a bigger hand in the value creation.

If you think about that for 2 seconds you'll see that this is just wrong?

Besides, individual contributors aren't incentivized to innovate insofar as we're not structurally positioned to capture a windfall.

I recognize the narrative that an army of world-class engineers is essentially inert until an executive visionary breathes purpose into them, but that's a structural property of the firm. It's a choice to route all surplus through the board and major shareholders, and to starve out any innovation that happens outside of those venues.

I agree: we must do everything we possibly can to aggrandize the already wealthy and powerful. The glory must accumulate in their account, and the less that goes to their subordinates, the better.

Tell me you know nothing about running a company without telling me. Just because one CEO got caught screwing over a Chinese spy that doesn't mean all CEOs are useless people. That's just lazy generalization.

Edit: Guess I am arguing with a bot lol

Sure it might be hard to run a company - it wasn't like he actually did most of that though was it?

Any other idiot in his place would have made the same amount of money.

Unless you are a subsistence farmer, everything you have in your life is thanks to the economy and "shareholder value".

Its strange to me how many people will say stuff like "who cares about the economy, I care about people" when the economy is the thing that ensures people have food and shelter and dont starve.

No it's not, shareholder value as understood as owning a piece of a publicly traded company doesn't produce anything on its own and it's definitely independent of the economy of a society. Could even be argued that the wealth stuck in the shareholder value is reducing the investments that could be being made in the interest of the rest of the economy.

I can easily make something and sell it to you without creating shareholder value.

No one is talking about anything being easy or redefining a market (which, since you bring it up, has been done infinite times by private and state funded companies as well)

Alternatively if the company tanks the board will have a reckoning similar to the OpenAI debacle.

Let's find out if the money exists next week when everyone tries to cash in.

That's incredibly unlikely. NVidia and Megaspeed's relationship has been under constant separate parallel investigations by the Justice and Commerce Depts going back to the Biden administration. There have been no charges and Megaspeed was never even added to the blocked Entities List which would instantly ban all sales, despite the US govt being free to do so at any time with no justification or explanation needed.

It appears two things are simultaneously true:

- Thousands of banned GPUs were diverted to China.

- NVidia meticulously verified export licenses and complied with every U.S. law, export control and KYC regulation.

The under-reported fact is that while the US Govt chose not to add Megaspeed to the banned list, NVidia voluntarily placed Megaspeed on their own blocklist and stopped selling GPUs to them in June 2025. This was because the law requires NVidia to block any company they "know or reasonably suspect" is violating export controls. There is an extensive framework of Red Flags a supplier is required to check and certify are 'cleared'. The penalties for failing to do so are the same as violating export controls on cruise missiles (up to 20 years in jail, $1M per GPU ). And they can apply personally to each employee who knew. So, NVidia cut off one of their largest South Asian customers ~18 months ago, despite Jensen banging the customer's board member.

No, I can't explain it either. But those are the facts per WSJ & NYT reporting. The meta-subtext here is there have been two opposing factions on China policy inside the White House, NSC, and U.S. intelligence community since the Biden era. They are each constantly trying to sway Trump, who vacillates between them (as seen by inconsistent US policy swings). One of those factions leaked the 6 month-old Alice story a week ago in the hope of blocking Jensen's influence and access to Trump. It worked (probably better than expected). Now that Jensen is both out of NVidia and politically toxic, neither faction cares about him.

  Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.

  I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. 
  ...
  But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were

This is demonstrably untrue. Jensen is an engineer through and through, and contributed significantly to Nvidia's early accelerators: from the NV1, at least to the earliest GeForces.

In the slow evolution of the human race into the Ferengi, it is absolutely a milestone!

Absolutely correct. That's why I mentioned the niche in my comment.

But no bubble ever has been predominately detractors.

So online discourse doesn't matter much.

I dont get how you can talk about the "hacker spirit" but then talk about "late-stage capitalism" (essentially the flat-earthism of economy) and tech founders.

Can you elaborate on why you think not a single aspect of late stage capitalism is true in any capacity, like flat-earthism?

> An engineer who singlehandedly created one of the most valuable companies on earth

Nvidia has 42k employees.

Nvidia chips are not the only chips AI runs on. Google for example runs everything on their own TPU's.

I don't know how you can talk so much out of your ass. Simping for billionaires is not "hacker spirit".

By analogy: the amoral VC nitwits that own the HN servers could try to enforce their values on the discussions here, but doing so with a heavy hand would quickly drive the true 'hacker' community elsewhere. Dang has a very light hand, especially when it comes to topics around YC that get discussed here.

Sure, there are no shortage of bootlicking CEO cargo cultists here looking for the right turtleneck/leather jacket combo to ascend to their rightful place at the top of the pile with PG and Sama... And being associated with the HN community's ethos certainly gives an undeserved glow to YC, which like all VC accelerators really is just a predatory tool of the wealthy investor class to maintain control of capital (a poor kid that grows up and founds a company that creates a ton of wealth could have dangerous ideas, best to capture them early and give them an approved board and structures to constrain them...)

That said, I frequently come across things here that subvert the platform's owners. For example, I think pretty much every member of my anti-VC founder alliance [0] found it through my own comments here. I get personal joy from promoting that here, subverting YC's own platform to challenge their golden goose.

So yes, know who's house this is, but stay aware of who has the power (us).

[0] https://NOVC.fyi

Anti-capitalists appealing to bourgeoisie values in their zeal to destroy a capitalist icon is pretty freakin' rich.

Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.

The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.

It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.

For real? Anthropic sounds more evil that my wildest imagination. If true, I hope this kind of evil company gets destroyed sooner than later.

Either through technical means, or simpler: by law for American providers. It's hard to believe the administration was not aware of Jensen's affiliations all this time. And time is pressing for Anthropic and OpenAI.

Only conjectures for now, time will tell

Makes you wonder what would happen if the US ever wanted to enforce "certified US AI" on its chips

Most of the hardware functionality from a GPU that models need is generic and used every time you use a GPU for any compute. You can implement language models in a GLSL shader; modern GPUs have been programmable for 20 years, that's the point of their existence. The best thing they could do is just literally nerf the consumer hardware substantially to make tokens unusable or stop selling consumer hardware. They don't need spyware to do that. It would also make their products dogshit.

More broadly, "Compute" is basically a resource that our economy relies on to a large degree, it has been that way for decades. And it turns out it's very bad when you just destroy the thing your economy relies on. And doing so doesn't solve problems like "Current computers exist today" or "Other people make computers". So who gives a shit about Jensen? Comments here talking about "taking him out"? What's actually more likely is just that really powerful people today are often corrupt and also really fucking stupid. He played a stupid game and lost.

None of this stuff is putting the current open weights genie back in the bottle IMO. Amodei using RoboStormtrooperGruppen9000 bots and going door to door to take peoples GPUs at gunpoint is a more plausible method of doing so.

Open-weight models, at an absolute minimum the ones that already exist, are here to stay, and will continue ([0]) to get drastically cheaper to run.

[0] I shall continue to reference one my favorite articles in recent months: https://jyn.dev/tokens-too-cheap-to-meter/

Nvidia can certainly put up some guardrails that will sound impressive to the dinosaurs in Congress, but can it really stop China from using those GPUs anyway?

This is a simplification, but is this not in some way similar to how the Switch 1 has hacked due to a design flaw on Nvidia's Tegra chip?

In the same way, even if their GPUs get this protection, wouldn't a state actor figure out how to get around it?

lol had to read this several times due to all the negatives

finally got it - "I hope NVIDIA continue to allow inference..."

It's sad that people talk here about some personal affairs when it's clearly about governmental control, but it's not the first time a scandal is used as a weapon.

Sounds like this was known or suspected at the highest levels of the administration (Rubio was discussing it per recent reporting). So the question becomes: did Nvidia use a cut out to knowingly avoid the export ban, and if so, did the administration know this?

A relationship with a foreign agent

An inappropriate relationship with a subordinate

Two of these potentially have serious legal consequences.

Oh sorry Jensen you broke one of the rules in the HR handbook we have to fire you now nothing we can do.

It isn't an arbitrary policy.

This is a CYA move by the board as all this is becoming public.

They did ~$90B in revenue last quarter.

I sometimes can't imagine the avarice it takes to do things like this. Could you imagine having a $100 bill in your hand and going "Yea, I'll break the law and possibly destroy my life to steal $7.50"

Another way to put it is the difference between 75 MILLION and 7.5 BILLION is rounded to 7.4 BILLION.

The scale of numbers is huge and it is not just another 7.5 billion dollars.

It's worse than that. Much much much worse than plain greed. Supply of manufacturing capacity for this kind of hardware is severely limited. TSMC can't produce enough to meet all that demand. NVIDIA not selling 7.5B worth of chips to China does not mean they would lose the 7.5B worth of chips. They could have sold them to American companies, which are all in a frenzy to build datacenters.

No, this is just a classic case of treachery. Jensen Huang, whether bought, blackmailed or because of tribalism, has decided to support China. In an interview, he was getting very angsty when someone asked him why sell chips to China, and said "victimizing them, turning them into an enemy, likely isn't the best answer":

https://youtu.be/Hrbq66XqtCo?t=3517

People refuse to believe it when it's a billionaire, but they too can be very tribal, even if they lived most of their life in the so called melting pot of the United States of America.

This stuff has probably been going on behind the scenes for a while. The leak about the affair is just the catalyst that accelerated it all.

Sleeping with subordinates exposes the company to risk from employment-related lawsuits. He'd be in just as much trouble if he'd done that while single.

I’ll believe it when I see it. In the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, a single low level executive was prosecuted during the whole ordeal.

China just needed her to sleep with Jensen, so they could get him fired. Nvidia is at a loss without him. Knock Nvidia down a peg.

If China wanted more Nvidia GPUs you really think sexy spy was their strategy? You think China is upset right now they lost their sexy spy? No, this went all according to plan for China - Jensen is gone, and a weaker Nvidia remains.

This is like Apple losing Jobs. The company remains, but the vision is gone.

It might just as well come as a big surprise to them how much chaos an incompetent board can bring that far exceeds a spy's capability.