Speaker 1Jensen Huang is no longer the CEO of NVIDIA. After a week of reports and stories, a second affair revealed on top of the first. More and more details about the degree to which NVIDIA intervened on behalf of the Singaporean company that was reportedly giving China access to chips in violation of export control rules. All of this is added up to an untenable situation, and Jensen Huang is out. Today we are going to look at what happened, who might have wanted it to happen, and what changes now because of it. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, CDATA, Granola, and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai-daily-brief. And if you want to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at ai-daily-brief.ai. At this point, I am used to some crazy things. I lived through the crypto industry, including being directly in the blast radius of SBF and FTX. And one could argue that ever since the moment that ChatGPT launched, AI has been nothing but the unexpected followed by the improbable, followed by the unbelievable. And yet, had you asked just about anyone in the world a month ago what was the most improbable, unbelievable thing that they could imagine about the structure of this industry, Jensen Huang being booted out as CEO of Improbable. had to be near the top of the list. And yet, that is exactly what has now happened. This morning, just before the markets closed, NVIDIA made its announcement, as he would be leaving his board position as well. Now, alongside the announcement, the NVIDIA board announced its first-ever chairman in Harvey C. Jones, who had previously served as CEO and Executive Chairman of Synopsys, and the elevation of Colette Kress, currently NVIDIA's Chief Financial Officer, to additionally take on the role of interim CEO once the board had found a suitable replacement. The Thursday morning, the board announced that they would be leaving the board. The Thursday morning announcement followed some big developments from Wednesday. Most importantly, the New York Times reported that Jensen's affair with a supposed Chinese spy wasn't his only indiscretion. Five sources claimed that Jensen also had an extramarital affair with an NVIDIA executive that reports to him directly. The woman in question is Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's VP of Healthcare, who is also married. The Times reports that a bystander recorded Jensen and Powell being affectionate at a hotel during the GTC conference in March. And according to three sources, Jensen's security basically pinned down that bystander and tried to pressure them to sign an NDA. For those trying to keep track of all of this, this second affair has none of the geopolitical intrigue of the first, but of course establishes or reinforces a pattern of poor judgment coming from Huang. To many observing this from the outside, if the key question heading into Wednesday was whether Jensen was fit to helm a huge company with massive national security exposure, the second affair coming out suggests that the first affair wasn't an out-of-character slip-up, but indeed that Jensen might just be the kind of guy that's susceptible to falling for a Chinese honeypot. Later in the day, as the board convened, for an emergency meeting, the Wall Street Journal reported that they were in fact preparing to oust Jensen as CEO. This had been a big shift in tone from the NVIDIA board, who on Sunday expressed quote, confidence in Jensen and his leadership team as they opened an independent investigation. There was a flurry of reporting in the intervening days explaining that NVIDIA had no succession plan and arguing that keeping Jensen on might be the best way forward. Even the president called Jensen a very honorable guy and predicted he'll be in good shape. Clearly, that was not the case. Now, for the rest of the day, I'm going to be talking about the fact that Jensen was trying to take stock of the pile of allegations, especially if you happen to have been on vacation for a week. It's worth recapping exactly how we got here. Last Friday, the New York Times went to press on their definitive version of the Chinese spy allegation. They had a memo from the State Department which claimed that Alice Huang, obviously no relation, an executive for a Singaporean neocloud called Megaspeed, was in fact a Chinese intelligence agent and had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang. Follow-up reporting from the Financial Times added that the relationship was romantic in nature. By Sunday, Jensen confirmed that he'd been unfaithful to his wife but didn't touch the Chinese spy allegation. And of course, this set up two very different things happening at once. One was questions of how extramarital affairs and infidelity, especially with a customer, reflect the judgment of a company's leader and what that says about what might need to change. The other side, though, is this dramatized the national security dimensions that NVIDIA operates within. And obviously, for most folks, it was those implications that were itself. Which is why, as the week went on, more damning allegations piled on. We learned that NVIDIA's general counsel had intervened in a Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed. The reporting wasn't incredibly precise, but it seemed to imply that NVIDIA had name-dropped a senior commerce official and made the investigation go away. Commerce staff told the press that they felt that this was a breach of procedure, to say the least. And to be clear, Megaspeed and Alice Huang did not come from nowhere. The Commerce Department had opened an investigation into Megaspeed in late 2024. The allegation at the time was that Megaspeed was actually diverting physical chips into China, not just offering them for remote access to get around export controls. And the scale of their alleged operation was not small. Megaspeed was one of NVIDIA's largest customers in Southeast Asia, with the information reporting that they bought at least $7.5 billion worth of advanced AI chips since their founding in 2023. The New York Times first reported on Megaspeed and investigations into their circumvention of export controls as far back as October 2020. The early part of the week, then, saw many in the tech and finance community rallying to support Jensen. There were essentially two angles, that having an extramarital affair is a human failing and shouldn't disqualify a CEO, and that Jensen has been one of the most successful CEOs in the history of U.S. capitalism, making him entirely irreplaceable. Others noted that the affair itself didn't matter. The central question was whether Jensen had compromised national security, in which case him staying on would be completely untenable. As the week played out, more and more came to the idea that Megaspeed was a failure, and that Jensen was a failure, and that Jensen was a failure, and that Jensen was a failure, and that Jensen was a failure. While yes, losing Jensen would be a huge blow to the U.S., keeping him on could be even worse. On Wednesday, The Economist published an article titled Jensen Huang Must Resign, and his should not be the only head to roll. They wrote, Jensen Huang is a brilliant man, and a fool. Like many powerful leaders, he came to believe that he was too important for the normal rules to apply to him. Politicians from both sides of the aisle joined in these calls, with senior Republican Senator Kevin Cramer telling Politico, The potential for extortion is so tremendous with something as sensitive as NVIDIA chips. I just think he's got to go. Charles Gasparino said the same thing on Fox Business on Wednesday, calling the affair reckless and saying he's going to resign. Now, one of the things that was abundantly clear is that the board was in an enormously difficult position. Axios business editor Dan Primack wrote, It is very clear that shareholders are unhappy with the idea of Jensen Huang being ousted at NVIDIA. It is also clear that the board of directors feel like they have to do something. Some commentators didn't think that it would come down to the board. Scott Galloway argued that when Jensen was staring down the barrel of congressional hearings with all of his text messages slapped up on big boards under the glaring visage of Senator Elizabeth Warren, that he would himself voluntarily resign. Now, obviously, Jensen is now gone. Although how voluntary it is, is much less clear. Dan Primack again posted this morning, Zero comment from Jensen in the press release. That's very telling about how not voluntary this was. A new study from KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin found that when people work with AI, similar skills don't guarantee similar outcomes. Researchers studied more than 500 early career professionals and found that the best performers consistently amplified the value of AI by guiding, evaluating, and refining its outputs. 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Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates had affairs, yet neither faced this kind of immediate coordinated pressure to be ousted as CEO. Tech billionaires having affairs or women problems is not new. I feel as though someone is deliberately trying to destroy Jensen's reputation and force him out of NVIDIA. Am I the only one who suspects something more coordinated is happening here? Replit CEO Amjad Massad wrote, Why are old stories that were not even covered up all, well, becoming sudden international and geopolitical news? The timing is suspicious, so worth asking, who benefits and why now? And then implying who he thinks might benefit, he continued, if Jensen, the premier champion of open models, is taken out, then anyone who wants AI closed, centralized, and controlled might benefit. Why now? The midterms seem relevant, but also perhaps the upcoming IPOs. Even some who were initially disinclined to see coordination in the whole thing found themselves leaning more in that direction as more and more targeted media pieces came out. Lost Landscape wrote, I was neutral-ish about Jensen resigning. It would really suck, but he put himself in this position. But the economist Jensen must go editorial swung me hard to his side. It's clearly and clumsily coordinated, and he must not give in. Never one for subtlety, effective accelerationist spiritual leader Beth Jezos wrote, Man, the deep state is doing a full coup of Jensen. They want to ban open source and centralize everything. Removing Jensen is how they pseudo-nationalize NVIDIA. But commentators outside the AI world piled in as well. Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who you might remember broke the Edward Snowden story, wrote, This Jensen-Huang NVIDIA scandal is quite bizarre. The most dominant CEOs of the world's most powerful corporations rarely fall, let alone as easily and rapidly as this seems to be happening. He's on the brink of being ousted with remarkable velocity and vanishingly little evidence. Over what? If mere quote-unquote extramarital affairs were sufficient for ouster, how many top CEOs would be left? Not many, hence the need for the sinister CCP spying angle. But is there any tangible evidence at all that Alice Huang is an asset or spy for the Chinese government? Anything beyond anonymous vague U.S. intelligence suspicions being mindlessly dutifully recited as always by U.S. corporate media? Boring business on X added, Absolutely no way all of this comes out at this exact moment with no ulterior motives in mind from a third party. And given how many folks are going in for some semi-conspiratorial or at least coordinated explanation for what happened, I think it's worth asking what different actors would get out of Jensen being defanged and dethroned, whether or not they had a hand in actually making it happen. It is worth noting for sure that Jensen is not the only one who has been disguised. That the sourcing for a lot of this is coming from U.S. intelligence. The New York Times, for example, is specifically using intelligence memos as their source information. But what about other big players? Why would they want this? Anderle founder Palmer Luckey argued, China wants Jensen out, so I want him in. Robert L. Peters asked, If Jensen Huang is kicked out of his seat and NVIDIA loses its dominant position, is that more or less of a win for China than the pro-China actions he took that he'd be punished for? Putting some of these questions a different way, does China benefit more from NVIDIA being able to funnel chips to them while officials turn a blind eye, or now that Huawei is starting to catch up, are they better off trying to disrupt the U.S. chip company with 90% market share, as well as the financial backer for large sections of the industry? For folks who model China as having plans that span decades, it could be tempting to think that there's some Chinese conspiracy at play here. But for those who model China on Catch-22, it might just be a happy accident that could break their way. What about the Democrats? A lot of folks are drawing the connection to the midterms. Anti-AI populism is of course massive right now, and people are out for blood against the tech oligarchs. It may not have been the deciding issue, but Democrats, I think you can argue, were voted in on a platform that included fighting back against the AI industry. The question of course that those new leaders face is how to bring the industry to heel, or be seen to be doing something without actually crashing the U.S. economy. Maybe a Jensen show trial gives them their perfect way of placating their voters. They get to tie it to a Trump national security scandal, aka Russia take two. They potentially even get to claim a few scalps in the administration, as we'll talk about in a moment, it seems like Howard Lutnick could be facing the Jensen treatment, and they can schedule hearings for all of next year on the back of this. But they don't have to go in and do hard and potentially really disruptive things like passing a national data center moratorium, banning RSI, or breaking up a major tech company. Worth caveating here again, by the way, that I am not in this particular segment sharing what I believe. I am making the steel man argument for why various parties might be inclined to be in the Jensen trial. I am not in this particular segment sharing what I believe. Regardless again of whether they had any hand in it. Hillary Clinton, for her part, didn't exclusively lay the blame at the feet of Jensen himself. On her new podcast with Kara Swisher, she blamed the Trump administration. If your government knows that an American citizen is a target of an espionage operation, and you have reason to believe that he does not know that, then you owe it to him to tell him. They didn't tell him. Which of course brings up the question of if and why the Trump White House would want this. The White House has been a very confusing set of factions when it comes to China and the U.S. AI policy. Rubio and Besant, and the recently fired Susie Wiles, have been gunning for a China crackdown from the beginning. They can't get anywhere because of the obstructionism of Howard Lutnick, as well as the president being friendly with Jensen and or taking advice from tech execs. Now it's hard to see any reason that Trump himself would have changed his tune, but certainly in that internal power struggle between the hawks and the doves on China, this could have represented a unique opportunity. And going back to that side story I mentioned, which sees the Trump administration being dragged into the story explicitly, also on Wednesday, Axios reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been the obstructor-in-chief when it comes to a full-on crackdown on illicit chip exports. Their reporting states that Lutnick met in the Situation Room last Thursday with a group of four other Cabinet officials. They included Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. This was before the New York Times blew the story wide open, but they'd already done some preliminary reporting, so it was probably clear that this was coming. Besant reportedly confronted Lutnick about why his department had resisted enforcing export controls, especially on Megaspeed. Lutnick reportedly agreed, but added under his breath, I need to check with the President. Sources said that this had been a constant problem with Lutnick, with Cabinet officials believing Commerce would crack down on chip exports only for nothing significant to happen. One official called Lutnick's bluff, suggesting they speak with the President immediately. Now when presented with the situation, what do you think President Trump did? Well, of course he did what anyone would do, and called Elon Musk for advice. Ever the wildcard, Musk reportedly sided with Besant and others against Lutnick, and the President approved, stating, let's get it done. Lutnick again delayed, proposing that he come back with some options. But one source told Axios, everyone was like, no, no, the decision's been made. Go effing execute. Well, it still hasn't happened. The big revelation from the reporting was that, quote, on at least three separate occasions, in May, August, and November 5th, Trump approved taking action against suspected diversions of NVIDIA chips to China, and Lutnick found a way to drag his heels so that it didn't get done. One of the more Occam's razor explanations for all of this does just come down to the China hawks seizing on a moment of leverage. Reports suggest that Chinese firms are rushing to rent capacity at data centers in Southeast Asia to get ahead of the remote access loophole getting closed. That's the loophole in export controls, where while they are not allowed to actually buy NVIDIA chips, they are allowed to access them remotely without running afoul of those rules. And yet even with those changes, the China hawks are not satisfied, and this very much gives them leverage they need to force serious action that they haven't had before. The one other faction that has been frequently mentioned as having an interest in Jensen's ouster is Anthropic. I will give the basics for the sake of completeness of the episode without getting into what is at the moment the most speculative of all of this. Dream 1984 tube on X went viral with a post they called, Who is really behind the hunt for Jensen Huang? They wrote, At first I thought it was just China hawks and the media teaming up in a midterm year to go after NVIDIA and Jensen Huang, but the coverage kept getting stranger and some of it was openly racist. Dream said that they started to pull the thread, beginning with the New York Times reporter Anna Swanson who broke the spy story and effectively arguing that for many previous pieces of her AI coverage, one of Swanson's key sources was Anthropic's co-founder and policy chief Jack Clark. Now one part of the argument here is just straight up that Dario and Jensen do not like each other. Kevin Roos' book The AGI Chronicles talks about the first time they met in San Francisco when they butted heads and it set the tone for their entire relationship to follow. Jensen has been extremely vocal about his utter and about Anthropic's characterization of the risks of AI, and they have been at basically exactly opposite positions when it comes to China AI policy. Additionally, NVIDIA has emerged as the leading advocate for open source in the United States, while Anthropic has been decidedly against it. Although they would argue there is some nuance to that, with them arguing in the past that they support American open source, just not Chinese open source. These were the threads that a lot of folks picked up on, but I do think publisher Sam Koppelman's post is worth keeping in mind as you wander down that path. Sam wrote, NVIDIA is anchoring the Anthropic IPO, OpenAI's big investor, backstopping neoclouds like CoreWeave, guaranteeing Stargate data centers. Deals negotiated by Jensen personally. One implication of his argument being that if this is coordinated by someone in the AI industry, they are playing with fire in a very interconnected space. Now, however it has happened, Jensen Huang has left the building and we are very much in a new era of AI. Rather than spending all our time speculating about who had it out for Jensen, I think it's much more valuable in this particular moment to try to understand the winners, the losers, and the people for whom this represents big change, even if it's too early to tell whether it's good or bad. One of the biggest implications is of course around not just China policy, where Jensen was a major advocate for more open policy with China, but also as a person and business leader, Jensen has been one of the key bridges between the US and Chinese political and business communities. Outside of even just the policies he's advocated for, losing him as a person inside of those conversations feels significant. Same with our relationship with TSMC and Taiwan, where Jensen himself represents major connective tissue. I think it's fair to say that with these changes, the single most important architect of US chip leadership has been taken out of play. Jensen didn't just do things that were obvious to do. He, in many cases, made contrarian early bets that set Nvidia and the larger US to be in the position of leadership that it was as the world evolved around them. Which is not to say that in the longer run, this couldn't potentially strengthen and diversify the sector in the US. A lot of the key man risk that was associated with Jensen came from the fact that Nvidia is such a linchpin of the chip industry. And so as over time, companies like AMD and Google reap the rewards of a less powerful Nvidia, there is reason to think that, call it five or ten years down the line, the overall sector is actually in a healthier spot than it is today. When it comes to open source, I think people are rightly concerned. There are powerful forces in Washington who not only do not see the value in protecting open source, but who see it as an obstacle and an obstruction to control the world. And so I think it's important to think about that. And as an unacceptable risk when it comes to safety, the folks who believe the opposite just lost their biggest and best advocate. Likewise, the enterprises that had started to actually turn towards open source just lost at the moment their best path, potentially have new issues with what had been their best path to open source built here in the US. We talk about Nvidia mostly in the context of chips, but it has been heavily investing in this ecosystem, such as its Nemotron models, and they had started to see increased adoption among enterprises. Now, of course, Jensen leaving doesn't mean all of us are going to be able to turn away from open source. But given how challenging it is to get corporations to wrap their heads around and figure out the governance and guardrails needed to get comfortable with something that's not just a very traditional closed third-party vendor type of relationship, you still have to think this is an impediment, even if Nvidia doesn't stop offering or developing Nemotron models that could slow enterprise open source adoption down. Certainly by the same token, Meta and Thinking Machines Lab benefit from reasserting their place as open source leaders. And even if one rejects entirely the idea that this was some anthropic-coordinated deep state operation against Jensen, it does seem likely that in the halls of Washington, anthropics' influence likely grows as their chief philosophical opponent within the AI space is neutered. Now, maybe Sam Altman steps into that role and picks up the mantle left by Huang, but historically he has existed somewhere between these two poles, and also for a variety of reasons been less influential over the past couple of years. The folks who are most focused on existential risks just lost their strongest denier, which could have big ramifications for their influence in Washington. So, I don't know if that's a good thing, but I think it's a good thing. And China hawks certainly get more momentum to force through their policies, including tighter export controls. Which, by the way, don't just have implications for China, but the entire world, and especially regions like the Gulf, which once again have the screws put to them to choose sides. But what happens to NVIDIA? Now, for investors, maybe the most pertinent short-term question is what's going to happen to NVIDIA itself? It feels very likely that in the next day or two, we find a bottom. As Pompagen put it, there's a good chance today is the bottom of the AI sell-off. No greater capitulation than the resignation of the CEO of the largest company in the world. And if that happens, as some amount of normalcy returns, strong earnings reports, interim CEO building confidence, we're likely to see a stabilization. Maybe it stabilizes at a lower repriced level, but stability will return. And yet it is very hard to see how in the long run, NVIDIA's destiny is not diminished. Yes, there is a multi-year plan that the company can continue to execute on, but the importance of Jensen as a figure was not just as a manager or coordinator of the company. It was much more about providing the momentum for those longer-term bets, which are very hard to come from the sort of replacement leadership that they're likely to put in. Investor Naval Ravikant wrote, you'd think we'd have learned from Steve Jobs and Travis Kalanick that one does not just simply replace the founder. Finally, there is one other more short and medium-term implication that I don't think is getting nearly enough attention. In short, the AI industry just lost their federal reserve chair. One of the major bear cases for the AI trade among the bears has been the web of interconnected backstops that find their way back to a very small handful of companies, but specifically NVIDIA. NVIDIA is the adult in the room guaranteeing a variety of different financing for smaller companies like the neoclouds and the model labs. And there is absolutely nothing to say about whether those sort of backstops and aggressive financial maneuvers to speed up the rate of the buildout will continue under new leadership. In fact, one has to believe that it is highly likely that the new leadership, including both the CEO and the board, will use this moment to try to totally reset expectations and get them back in line with Wall Street desires rather than continuing to take the tone that folks like Jensen have, where they've basically said we're going to build out as fast as humanly possible, regardless of what shareholders think. Now, whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing very much depends on your vantage point, but it is a change whose implications are hard to overestimate in my opinion. There will be much more to come in this story, I would not at all be surprised to see continued delvings into Jensen and NVIDIA around anything and everything that they might have done wrong or even slightly not by the book. And I do think that it is worth noting here that the reason for that doesn't have to be a coordinated campaign. When people ask the question, why did this all happen at once? I think it's important that we remember that when one shoe drops, it triggers a set of incentives that tend to lead to lots of other skeletons falling out of the closet at the same time, even without coordination. When you find out that a previously unimpeachable CEO has potentially been involved in this incredibly egregious situation, not only a huge moral failing, but one with potential national security implications, you are not as a journalist or a publication just going to sit back and say, wow, what a story. You are going to absolutely hammer every source you have access to that might have any insight into anything else that said CEO and said company might have also done wrong. And by the way, on the flip side, those sources who maybe have that information recognize that there has never been a more resonant moment for them to share that information should they wish to. This is a self-reinforcing cycle where the more that comes out, the more likely it is that more comes out. Point being, it's very possible that we're not done. But one line of discourse that I want to leave you on, because I think it'll be more important in the months to come, was embodied by a couple pieces of content that I saw. One was a TikTok from journalist Jacob Ward, and another was an Atlantic article called The Scandal is Bigger than Jensen Huang. Both pieces are, in one way or another, livid, not because of the specifics of Jensen's behavior in any of its dimensions, but because it triggers what is a broad and I believe growing sense that the biggest private companies have too much power right now. Now, this is not shocking, this is not new, but it has been getting bigger and bigger as a political force for some time. If one views political history as in some way, a constant jockeying for influence between different sets of actors, civil society, public government actors, private market actors, even military actors, I think that since the rise of social media, there has been a growing national sentiment that these companies, who touch more lives than any companies ever did in the past, have grown, in short, too powerful. I think increasingly, people on both sides of the political spectrum are willing to use government to try to recalibrate that by proportionally increasing the power of the government to do something about it. Jacob Ward is in his post effectively arguing, that the people whose lives are impacted by a company that is so significant for the markets and so significant for national security should have some democratic say in decisions like whether its CEO goes. That is completely outside the norm of any American private market, certainly in recent history, but gets, I believe, at this idea that there has to be a redressing of the current balance away from the power of the private sector. I get into this a little bit in both of the first couple episodes of How We Got Here, so go listen to those if you haven't yet. But it's certainly a theme that I'll be continuing to keep an eye on, because like I said, I think it's going to grow in importance. For now, my friends, take a deep breath and sit back, because you are living through one of the most consequential moments in modern American history. Or not. Maybe we're all freaking out for no reason and the wheels just keep turning, the CFO slash interim CEO picks up right where things left off, and all of this seems wildly overblown in just a couple months' time. Let's hope. For now, however, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching, as always, and until next time, peace. you
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