Scandal At Nvidia: Is This The End For Jensen Huang?

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Plus, a special guest pops on the pod to surprise Gabby. You gotta check it out. So check out this week's BursiView on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Profty Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is November 10th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The S&P 500 and the Dow rallied more than 2% and the Nasdaq rallied 3% shaking off last week's brutal sell-off. Chipmakers climbed despite a significant drop in Nvidia shares, more on that in a second. Meanwhile Brent Crude fell to $92 per barrel, and finally the yield on 10-year treasuries was stable ahead of the next inflation report out this morning. Okay. What else is happening? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted to having an affair, and US officials believe the woman involved is a Chinese spy. The woman, Alice Huang, no relation to Jensen, was a senior executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed International. Megaspeed is a cloud compute provider and Nvidia's biggest customer in Southeast Asia. US officials believe she was recruited by a Chinese spy agency to collect information on Jensen Huang. In a letter to employees on Sunday, Jensen wrote, quote, "I was unfaithful to my wife, my actions hurt her and our children, there is no excuse for what I did. Now, Nvidia's board has launched an independent investigation, and lawmakers have requested a closed door briefing with Huang on the company's security protocols and his interactions with Alice. Nvidia shares fell as much as 8% and then closed down 4%. Following us to discuss all of this, we're speaking with Ashley Gold, Semaphore's senior tech policy reporter based in Washington, D.C. Ashley, thank you for joining us, so this has just been an absolute bomb. There's so much we could get into. I guess it would be helpful to understand the facts of this case, whatever it may be, and maybe we should start with Alice Huang. Who is this person? What do we know about her? To what extent is she actually a Chinese asset? So she's being accused of being a Chinese asset. The Chinese embassy in Washington has denied that she was a TV reporter in China before she became an executive, and there's photographs of she and Jensen together over the years at various conferences and whatnot. So the Chinese side of things has denied that she's a spy, but US intelligence assessed that she was. I know that I read in the time stories that there's been many, many attempts to reach her over the course of their reporting, and she has not responded to any of those inquiries. So a lot of questions are evolving around her, way more questions than answers. And I think the main question that people in Washington have is, was she able to glean anything out of Jensen over the course of their relationship that she then fed back to China? What sort of trade secrets or information about NVIDIA chips? Was she able to actually pass back to China? And that's what's missing in the reporting so far, whether she was successful in what is alleged to have been her mission. Yeah, just looking at this company, Megaspeed, it was one of NVIDIA's biggest customers, bought nearly $5 billion in chips in 2024, and it sounds like the ideas that they have been passing those chips on to Chinese companies. I mean, there are sort of two elements here. One is the fact that he's had this affair, and you can think whatever you want about that. I don't think it necessarily says anything about NVIDIA as a company. But the problem seems to be, did he leak secrets? Did he work with this Chinese spy in some way? Did he aware of any of this, was there any, I guess, foul play by Jensen Huang? And I guess the question is, will NVIDIA be punished for that? What do you know based on what's happening in Washington about any actions or steps that the government might take to, I don't know, crack down on NVIDIA? A couple of things are happening. Congress just came back today from the midterm elections, so they have a lot of work to do. There are things on the list. But after this story exploded over the weekend, it's sort of shot to the top of the list of their priorities and of people they want to investigate, people that they want to come up to the hill for closed or briefings or potentially in person briefings or testimony that is open to the public. There was a gang of eight meeting today, which is the top members on national security on both the House and Senate side, and I know that this story came up. I spoke to some members coming out of that meeting who said they were very concerned about some of the things they had heard, but that investigation still had to be done before they were, you know, going to come to any conclusive decisions about what needed to happen as far as holding Jensen accountable. What Congress can do now is strengthen export controls. So there's a number of bills that have made it into the Senate National Defense Authorization Act, which is one of those bills that has to pass every year. So a lot of riders, they call them, a lot of bills hitch a ride on this bill. So currently there's about, I think there's three export control bills in the Senate version of the NDAA. It hasn't been clear whether the House would also support having those bills in the NDAA meeting. Leader Jeffries said today that he supports it, but keep in mind, he does not take over until January. So it's not clear that that would happen in the lame duck, but perhaps early next year. But, you know, there's trying to hawks on the Republican side and the Democratic side. And Jensen has been, you know, in Trump's ear and other Trump officials ear, you know, are denying the need for stricter export controls or for Capitol Hill to have a role in deciding how export controls are managed. But I think that this incident is going to make that bipartisan interest and strengthen export controls a lot, you know, louder. And we could see some action there by the end of the year and if not by early next year. It's interesting because Trump was supposedly briefed on this in 2025, specifically this relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang who at the time was presumed to be a spy. Like this is only kind of getting out now, but Trump knew about it and he chose to not do anything with this information. So the only difference now is like we now know the information or I guess Congress knows the information too. So do you expect that anything that any action will be taken because I'm looking at the stock price just getting hammered right now. It seems as though Wall Street believes that something's going to change. Maybe they're not going to be able to sell chips to China anymore. Maybe Jensen Huang is out as CEO and maybe that's another conversation we should have. But do you think the realistically something will actually be done on the legislative front that will really significantly disrupt Nvidia's business? I do think export controls are going to be strengthened. I just don't know whether it's going to happen before the end of the year or maybe later into the future when the Democrats are actually in charge on Capitol Hill. As far as from the administration, Trump is not someone who is easily scandalized, especially over allegations of cheating or things like that. He and his colleagues and his circle have dealt with their fair share of scandal as well. So it's not so much the cheating scandal that's the problem. The question is, is Jensen Huang still able to be trusted as the head of this company that is important to so much of the economy when this lapse in judgment led to this much scrutiny. Ultimately, that's something his board has to decide. It's not Capitol Hill's job to fire him as CEO that that's up to the board, which is doing an investigation. But I do think the playbook of sort of co-zing up to Trump as a tech executive and getting your way that this is like going to chip away at that, especially as the Democrats take control. It's not going to be like it was where you could cut a check for the ballroom where you could be a donor to Maga or other Trump-affiliated PACs and hope that you know, regulation goes your way. I think there's going to be a lot more scrutiny on tech companies dealings with the administration. One thing that was really interesting that I'd like to get your reaction to, we were just looking back at a very interesting moment in his interview that he did with Dwakash Patel, where he was very normal, calm. This was, I think, almost a year ago, and then suddenly the topic of China comes up, and you see him get very, very defense, and very flustered. I just want to play you this clip. Actually, this is from April, where you kind of see him react to the question, and it seems to strike enough. If it feels like you're making two different statements, one is that we're going to win this competition with Huawei, because our chips are going to be way better if we're allowed to compete. And another is that they would be doing the same exact thing without us anyways. Right? How can those two things be the same true at the same time? It's obviously true. In the absence of a better choice, you'll take the only choice you have. How is that illogical? But so the reason they want, in many cases, they're better, better is more compute, more compute means they can train better. It's better because it's easier to program. We have a better ecosystem, but whatever the better is, whatever the better is. I mean, for someone who is so calm and confident most of the time, that moment really stood out, and looking back on it now, it almost makes me think that he knew that there was something nefarious going on, specifically in terms of relationship with China. Maybe he actually knew that this woman that he was having as a fair with was in cohorts with, I guess, the CCP. I mean, what does that tell us about what's happening here? What it tells us is that we obviously don't know if he knew that he was having an affair with the spy. He could have been taken by surprise, like everyone has. What we do know is that his on the record statements made many times, not just in that podcast interview played. He has been pro-doing business with China, pro-selling trips to China. He's sort of still alone in that, among other tech executives in Washington, AI companies in Washington, who have wanted to strengthen in limit export control, so that American trips can't flow to China the way that they do, the way that Jensen has been able to convince this administration to allow sales of the H200 trips. So when you look back at everything he's said about that in the past year or so, it's like, why? Do you genuinely believe that it is better for American competition that the Chinese have access to some of your trips, because then they're reliant on your trips and they're not developing their own, is that your true health belief about the way American first China competition works or is something else at play. And I think if he had a relationship with this woman who turned out to be a spy, I don't know how you look at his statements and say, well, he's just not a China hog and that's what he believes about the way global business works. So the fact that you sort of can't separate that anymore is the problem. He's going to appear before the House committees on November 18th. They want him to. I don't know if he'll show up. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, that's important too. Just as we're up here, your predictions for what's next, especially this question of, does he stay? That seems to be the thing that Wall Street is most anxious about. It's really hard to say. I think if he was up to Congress, he would go. I think if it's up to his board who have a fiduciary, do you need to end video shareholders? He stays. I think Washington and Wall Street are going to have very different priorities here. Ashtagold is semaphores senior tech policy reporter based in Washington. Ashley, appreciate your time. Thank you. After the break, we break down the tech sell-off. And for even more markets and sites, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Simply put, go to edridelson.substakt.com. Support for the show comes from Vanta. 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After an initial post-election rally, the S&P 500 then suffered its worst trading session since Liberation Day, ending down more than 4% on Thursday. Every sector in the index fell. The NASDAQ lost $2.3 trillion in market value, a single day record, and Big Tech had its worst day since the covid sell-off. All in all, American markets ended last week significantly lower than where they were before the midterms, with the tech industry leading the losses. Yesterday, however, markets rallied yet again, with the S&P climbing 2.5%, and the NASDAQ rallying 3%. So, what exactly are investors betting on here to break this down? We're speaking with Robert Armstrong, US financial commentator for the Financial Times, and author of the Un-Hedged newsletter. Rob, good to see you. So, a lot to get into. We'll get to Jensen Huang and his extramarital affairs in a moment, I think. But what we're seeing in the markets is it seems to be a lot of panic and a lot of confusion. Last week seemed like maybe this was the moment, maybe the AI trade officially unwinds. Last Thursday was scary. But now it seems maybe not. I mean, what do you think? What are investors? What are the markets telling us? We are still laboring under all of us the single great uncertainty, which is what is the return on investment on these immense investments being made in AI. This involves the most important companies in the market. Nobody really knows the answer, and anybody who does tell you they know the answer is trying to sell you something. So, as we've said, I think we've talked about together before. If the revenue and profit eventually appears, all the stuff we're worrying about now and the circular financing and the anxiety and the valuations and Jensen, Wang's love affairs and everything else will slip into memory and we will be okay. If on the other hand, the money doesn't really appear, nothing will save us. But we don't have the information and it is very normal for a market operating under a very large uncertainty like that to vacillate like the one we are living in right now. That's point number one. Point number two, as I've said, attire some infinite number of times on your show. The longer term trend on the market is sideways. We're stalled since May, right? And so, again, about like you'd expect, we don't know what's going on. We're kind of frozen in place during the headlights. There has been some moves in the market towards diversification. That's a good sign. Some sectors have moved up that are far from AI. People are hedging their bets. But we don't know what's going on. And until we do know what's going on, this is the world we live in. What was that sell-off last week? Because it seemed to be a reaction to the election. But my takeaway is we had essentially a referendum on data centers, Americans said we don't like them. A lot of these data center proposals lost, and I think a lot of investors are thinking, "Oh, so the data center construction buildout is going to come to a screeching halt. It's going to fall off cliff. We've got a governor in Texas who wants to pause data centers and Texas is where we were going to build all of these data centers." And so that's our problem, sell like crazy. But then this week they say, "Actually, maybe not. Maybe we overdid it." I mean, is that what's happening, or is it something more fundamental that was maybe pre-existing? Day answer, both of your questions is yes. So starting with your last question, is there fundamental, something fundamental pre-existing? Yes, risk appetite in markets has gone down. You can see that in, as we may have discussed before, you can see that in investors moving back to the safety of treasuries somewhat over the last month since about the beginning of October. So in the background running, we have a change in risk appetite. Point number two, I think you're quite right about those local results. It was at 40, there were 47 local ballot initiatives about data centers. The data centers lost 46 of them. People do not feel good about this technology, rightly or wrongly or in between the people have spoken, right? Right now, we're frightened about this technology, we don't want it in our neighborhood. That is an issue. But this is one of the interesting things about markets in general, Ed, is that we are taught back in finance school that markets instantly assimilate all the available information into a set of prices that captures everything all at once. But in reality, markets act a lot like people, meaning it takes them a long time to digest all this stuff. And last week, we just got such an enormous amount of news that it's like you're going through step-by-step digesting different pieces of loot. And it took people a day to be like, at first they're like, yay, we have an answer. Right. Whatever the answer is, we're not contesting it. It's not uncertain. It's Democrats, it's Republicans, it's done. The uncertainty has disappeared, hooray. And then you can sort of see the market starting to go through the details and be like, well, life ain't so simple. So for this to take days and weeks is normal market behavior, whatever they may have taught you back in school? Well, this probably segues us quite well into what's happened with Jensen Huang because this is another example of we've just been dumped, a whole load of news that isn't totally clear what it even means or what the implications actually are. Like, oh, he was having an affair like, okay, like that's not good of him. But also the woman he was having a affair with is allegedly an intelligence asset of China. Did he know about it? Did he know it? I mean, all of these questions and yet the markets have reacted and they've gone, oh, bad sign sell and we've seen hundreds of billions of dollars in market value erased in a matter of hours. I mean, what do you make of the market's reaction to that? What actually are the implications or are we just kind of in sort of panic mode? One thing we know for certain is that Jensen Huang, who is an immensely important person to the AI economy and to one of the three or four largest companies in the world. I don't know where it ranks as of today, but it's in that race there has committed an act of bad judgment that will go into the bad judgment hall of fame for all time. Do you know what I mean? This is a politically sensitive business. It straddles an incredibly important geopolitical line, which is the line between the United States and China and his affair went over that line in the sense that the person he was having an affair with is a Chinese national. And what's more, a Chinese national in the semi the advanced semiconductor business, which means they would be having every reason to be having discussions of technical details, right? And then you get to the allegation that she's an asset of a foreign power. And it's like, I want to ask you a question right now. How many employees of any company in the world from CEO on down would have survived this disclosure even to this point in time? Let's count them. So like clearly the CEO is of most companies who were fired instantly, right? Yes. You know, so who could survive like maybe Mark Zuckerberg could survive something like this, maybe Saul Maltman, maybe Dario Amade, maybe Ensen Wang could survive something like this. But like other than maybe less than five or six guys in the world, you're fired already. Right? Okay. And that's precisely the problem. The question I'm asking myself is because he knows he's one of those guys. Is he more likely to make this astonishingly stupid mistake? Like does being and I'm saying this in slightly humorous ways, but this is a serious question. Like the culture of the imperial CEO might it make that CEO less trustworthy? I think in addition, the imperial CEO who has been handsomely rewarded for sweet talking the president on the phone every other week. And so if you, I mean, this is part of the problem with the Trump culture of cronism, which is that I mean, if you give these individuals these huge amounts of power, where decisions are made not based on some institutional or deliberative committee or any sort of semblance of an actual system, it's basically just like, who gives me a call? Who do I like? Who's a good guy? Then suddenly rules start to go out of the window and you maybe don't have to worry about these things. But I do agree it's like if he was going to have an affair with anyone, did it have to be the Chinese spy with the giant cloud compute company in Southeast Asia? Is that really the right decision? It's just agonizing to think about it. And on the corporate side, it's like, was it, you know, does Nvidia have a successor? What was there hit by a bus plan with this guy? And if you've gotten as an important guy as Mr. Wang walking around the world, you better have a hit by the bus plan. And if the answer is we were going to wing it, that's a terrible indictment of the governance structure of that company, right? I just feel like this is another example of one of Armstrong's truisms, which is when things are going well, corporate governance does not matter. And then all of a sudden, boy oh boy does it matter, right? And now Nvidia is having that moment. So you're the board or you're the whoever and you're the shareholders, by the way, Nvidia very nicely does not have a dual class shareholder structure like some of these other Silicon Valley monstrosities. So you know, it really is owned by the shareholders, which is how companies should operate in my view, right? So something can happen now. But what do you do? It's everybody saying how flat a company is. The guy has 60 direct reports or whatever. Everything runs through him. You can't just wreck the company by disappearing him, right? Because that's a real problem. This is a very important company. We need it to keep working. But if he stays, it looks like we've appointed these four or five people at these four or five big tech companies as gods who could just destroy the other thing, can do whatever they want. So I don't know what you do here. I think it's the whole thing's a disaster to be quite honest. He's completely compromised a faith and trust that he may or may not have earned over the past several years. But certainly, he's not credible. And I think he did earn it. That's the thing. He's done an incredible thing with this guy. He's obviously an incredible CEO. Look at what he's achieved. 100%. The credibility on export policy is officially out the window. And that seemed to be one of his big things. There's advocating for, no, there's a reason we should have a relationship with China. It's like, oh yeah, that makes sense now. Just moving on to what comes next, you, I mean, you wrote in your newsletter following this sell off, coming out of the election. I mean, you asked this question, like, is this the big one, capital B, capital O? Is this the moment where this bubble that we all thought was going to eventually come crashing down? Is this that? Is this the AI bubble popping? Is this an implosion that a lot of people have been expecting? You said, you don't give a flat answer, but you say that you will be quote looking for four things in the weeks to come. You said, are there signs of investor capitulation outside of tech stocks? You said, are there any signs of emerging macroeconomic weakness that could reinforce the troubles in the equity market? Does the confidence of the leading companies in AI crack, despite persistent inflation and sound macroeconomic data, do bond yields take another major leg down from here, foreshadowing a slowdown? Let's talk more about what you're looking for in terms of determining whether this sell is the big one or a few? it's something a little more minor. - Okay, one thing that's really good, and I think that really saved our bacon was that strong employment report on Friday morning. And it was a very strong report where clearly in an employment recovery in the country, and it's pretty broad, we're not just an economy that's being held up by AI. That matters, right? And so, I wish the wage growth numbers, the real wage growth numbers were better, but we are close to full employment. And while the macroeconomic picture is as solid as it is, I feel like the equity market can keep going. Of course, the equity market can sink the macroeconomic picture, the direction of causality runs in both directions. That said, we have that as long, if we start to see cracks in the macro backdrop, the stock market looks a lot more tenuous. So that's point number one, two. If it's still gonna be pretty rough, if one of the hyperscalers comes out one of these days and says, you know what, maybe we're gonna spend a little less on these data centers. Maybe it wasn't as good ideas we thought. That is gonna be an awful moment, and that could be the thing that pops the bubble. And I'm sure, by the way, those companies are acutely aware of that, so they'll be watching their words very carefully. But expressions of loss and confidence in their own capital expenditure plans would be very dangerous. And the bond market, as always, is the big scary animal we all have to worry about. It's been coming down as investors have been coming, there's been some flight to safety. And the idea, the stock market being a little wobbly, actually tightens financial conditions, means maybe the Fed won't have to do it. So some of that is being reflected in bonds coming down. But if bonds rare up again, we're in scarier territory. If all that stuff keeps happening, solid macro, the key companies keep expressing confidence and backing that up with dollars, the bond market behaves itself. I feel like this is not the big one. But those are the three I would emphasize right off the top of my head. - Final question. Does Jensen Huang stay or go? What do you think happens? If we have a lot of information left to discover, it's the classic who knew what when. And it could easily go either way. If you force me to take a bet, I guess I would bet this isn't possible to come back for him. But maybe there's some elegant solution where they make him chair and bring in a CEO. So like his wherewithal and knowledge and expertise stays within the company, but they bring some outsider in. - Because he has betrayed our trust so greatly. - He can't be left as the solo pilot of this plane. I just feel like given what we know now, that's probably the outcome. But again, I want to give a lot of provisos to that. There's a lot of information still to come out. There could be important exonerating or damning facts to come out. But right now, this is a very difficult situation for Nvidia and for him remaining as the CEO. - Robert Armstrong is US financial commentator for the Financial Times and author of the Unhaged Newsletter. Rob, always appreciate your time. - Thanks for having me. This was great. - Okay, as we end this episode, a quick word on data centers, or more specifically the backlash we have been seeing against data centers. As we discussed on yesterday's episode, the midterms turned out to be something of a referendum on data centers. More than 40 data center proposals were voted on across the country, and only one of them passed. Meanwhile, 56% of voters said that AI and data centers were a crucial or major factor in their decision in this election, and many of the candidates who put data centers front and center in their campaigns won those campaigns by significant margins. In other words, Americans didn't just say no to Trump at the midterms, they also said no to data centers. And not only that, it was an unequivocal and resounding no. Now, this is of course why AI stocks tanked last week, names like AMD, Micron, Nvidia, SpaceX, essentially any company whose business model depends on building data centers, all of them got crushed. And the reason is that investors believe that data center construction is about to come to a screeching halt, the fewer data centers that get built, the fewer chips that get sold, the less compute it's consumed, and so on and so forth. The political problem appears to be the straw that broke the AI buildouts back. Unsurprisingly, this has prompted some very fierce debate. Some say that the backlash is warranted. After all, data centers have thus far increased electric prices in local communities, as well as utility bills. And that's certainly not good. But others say that the backlash is ridiculous, because at the same time, we also know that data centers create jobs, not in huge numbers. I know, but still, they do create jobs. And more importantly, they generate enormous amounts of tax revenue. Data centers in Loudon County, Virginia, for example, fund nearly 40% of the local government budget. That is a big deal. And it's a decent argument for why data centers might actually be good for a local community. But I also think that this whole debate is actually besides the point. Because the truth about data centers is that this is the first time in American history that regular people have held leverage over Silicon Valley. And that is very important, because over the past several decades, the American people have been completely an utterly powerless to big tech. They've been powerless to them in optimization, powerless to regulatory capture, powerless to privacy abuses, powerless to addictive algorithms and to their influence over our children, powerless to their unprecedented level of societal control. And most importantly, they have also been powerless to big tech's abuse of that power. Despite the many harms that big tech has been responsible for, no one in America has ever been able to do anything about it. They bought our politics. They bribed our leaders. They skirted around the law. And not once have the American people been given a say in all of this. Not once have they been afforded the opportunity to tell Silicon Valley, no. That is until now. Because now big tech's mission happens to converge with an unusually stringent legal procedure known as land use regulation. And the reality is, if they want to do what they want to do, they now have to ask Americans for permission. And last week, the American people's answer was plain and simple. The answer was no. This is a dramatic shift in societal power. This is a dynamic that Silicon Valley has actually never experienced before. They got too comfortable in the wild west of digital services where regulation was scant and where permission didn't really exist. But now they're operating in the physical world where laws have stood the test of time and where democratic consensus actually happens to matter. And now big tech is learning an age old lesson, commonly known as karma. And that is if you piss enough people off, eventually, they will get round to returning the favor. That is what is happening today. You can call it petty. You can call it misguided. You can call it whatever you want. But the reality is that this is how humans work. And big tech is about to find out why. OK, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Chalon, Kristina Donahue, and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to PropG Markets from PropG Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Adelson. I will see you tomorrow.