Nvidia is preparing to oust Jensen Huang (wsj.com)

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

It makes sense to me why they would benefit from chinese labs having more compute.

Those statements sound different today, but I think they are both commercially reasonable desires and follow naturally from his very successful playbook over the last twenty years: CUDA built that company. Or at least got it to its first trillion.

In effort for us to see clear eyed, it would be good to stop assuming someone is a spy without a shred of credible evidence. Avoiding trade restrictions by routing them through another country does not indicate spy craft.

I am not entirely sure I buy the Spy thesis. And Alice's husband knew this all along. Which makes the whole thing more doggy.

And Jensen's view isn't wrong. There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions. Not when they are the second-largest economy and still rapidly advancing. There are better ways to handle this, one huge ban isn't one.

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

Because a good exec plans long-term. Presidents and political parties in office are temporary. It takes much more to get a foothold in the market.

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

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

NVDA stock lost hundreds of billions of dollars. Erased ALL gains from the last year, and there are at least four or five materially significant investor information, that NVIDIA should have disclosed as risk to investors and did not.

For a company with 4 Trillion in stock market value, this is an absolute wet dream for the lawyers who specialize on this type of lawsuits.

And its telling that even Trump basically refused to back him, and said the FBI is investigating and "he hopes there is nothing there..." what is telling, so there is a lot. So he is gone. Its just taking time for the board to find a CEO.

So the affair is going on for 3 years...and it was her husband that made the introductions [1].

Trump, Rubio and the security community knew about this for at least one year, and knew NVIDIA was in all likelihood, engaging or tolerating criminal activity on violating export controls that come with a few years of prison.

Look at this [2] excellent work from Bloomberg. For Jensen Huang as a dual Taiwanese and United States citizen, to completely ignoring what is going in the South China Sea, the Chinese threats of invading Twain, and be so forthcoming on saying "China is not our enemy" like you see here: https://youtu.be/JW5s9Md4U2U?t=1058

While failing to disclose a relationship with CEO of the main company traffic forbidden NVIDIA GPUs to China, shows a recklessness that probably meant to side observers of the intelligence community, he had to justifiably be taken down.

And its telling this is a takedown from within the government and the intelligence community, because most is coming from the New York Times. They seem to be ahead of everybody else, and is well know it has always been a mouthpiece of the US intelligence community when they want to leak something convenient.

[1]-"A Mystery Businessman Introduced Jensen Huang to His Paramour. It Was Her Husband." - https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/a-mystery-businessman-introduced...

[2]-"The Rise and Reckoning of Jensen Huang" - https://youtu.be/JW5s9Md4U2U

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

As bad as cheating is morally, we don't really know how his wife feels or if they had some open relationship type arrangement, and it's not really material to his running the company because it's been doing very well during all of that. I don't think it makes much sense to fire someone over this, it's more like a power struggle with other parties vying for control.

As a large shareholder and world's 7th [now 12th] richest person he would certainly retain a lot of power, even with a new CEO. Time to start his own personal VC firm or something.

There is some nepotism at Nvidia, those people are likely going to be very annoyed with him since their positions may not now be tenable.

TSLA's board also needs to do its job.

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

This is a common fallacy. Often being incredibly smart in a few areas leaves you incredibly naive in others. If nothing else, your success in some domains will lead to overconfidence in others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To an extremely ignorant person on the matter like me, and genuinely asking, what has he achieved in terms of engineering and development, that makes you think he's smart? Or do you mean in the sense of knowing its way through business and politics? Idk I always find difficult to believe that people really think that CEOs are smart, when they commonly are not involved what so ever in any scientific leading or research, and just funnel money to a product that make them richer.

But I prefer to believe I'm wrong and would like to hear form the other side.

He probably didn't come clean about the second one because there's actually 5+ and if he came clean about everything he'd definitely be done

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

That's less than a slap on the wrist.

Oh no he will no longer be able to afford anything and everything he wants and only be able to afford anything and everything he wants.

Great punishment. /s

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

Very well, but backing CUDA is an old decision that has paid off and will continue to pay off because Nvidia has operationalized it. It can and will continue to run without Jensen Huang.

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

What sort of punishment is this to somebody who is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars?

You can say (rightly) that he has vastly contributed to NVidia's success. Well, he's been well compensated for that to the tune of almost $200 billion. Will the company fall apart without him now? No. No, it won't.

Also, if they fire him today, nothing will really change for a few years anyway. The short-to-medium plans are already locked in.

    > In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used Nvidia GPUs and CUDA to train AlexNet, whose breakthrough performance helped ignite the modern deep learning boom.

And anyway, whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.

That wouldn't really punish him. It makes no difference if you have 10 billion dollars or 90 billion dollars, your life is the same.

The idea was out there and Nvidia leaned into it first. GPU compute was going to happen regardless, but credit to Nvidia they actively developed it seeing its future uses.

They got a major upside due to two things that happened outside of NVIDIA: Crypto currency and AI, both of this found GPUs to be the best available technology to retrofit. Most of the initial work in retrofitting GPUs to these workloads happened outside of NVIDIA.

So, it's not Jensen but the Crypto and AI that propelled NVIDIA.

stopped reading

The facts are very scarce and yet this has been blown out of proportion.

Maybe I am wrong :-) time will tell.

Remember, Huang isn't an army officer, or someone in intelligence working at the Pentagon, or a CIA officer.

Surely he gets to do what he likes. You are not at war with China. Treason is not relevant here, nor are graphics cards some sort of ultra-secret domain. What NVIDIA does is easy, it's just that the package is not so easy to reproduce, what with it having many aspects, from software to chips and fast interconnect.

The latter is a question of how centralized modern AI-based computing is. And to me that is almost a fight between good and evil.

A marriage between an Anthropic/OpenAI duopoly and the national security establishment is a marriage made in hell.

NVIDIA is licensed by the United States government to sell GPUs to China, and they do so at a rate well under their licensed quantity.

Read up on 91 CFR 1684 which directly contradicts your claims.

Your most important argument is categorically false and completely unresearched.

Your subsequent claims also have no basis: you cite a bunch of cases in which people leaked sensitive information as equivalent to the Jensen case, where the affair was with the CEO of a customer they were legally selling product to, and where we have no evidence that any leaks occurred.

It appears almost certain now that he’s finished. The lack of any succession planning (which also is too looks like more poor judgment) appears to be the only thing now slowing down his removal by the board.

A lot of people with ulterior motives want to throw him under the bus, don't buy into those narratives so easily. Use some common sense first.

Non-American here. Isn’t it your goverment’s/CIA’s job to detect Chinese agents and conduct counter-intelligence. Individuals (CEO or not) can’t do that. I heard that they already knew for a long time (as they must have). Then this becomes a hit job with political/business motivations rather than a serious national security issue as promoted to the public. Why don’t you all talk that obvious angle instead? 50s Red Scare rhetorics or a 70s James Bond narrative is politically more appealing I guess.

But we live in 2020s. We live under constant surveillance today. All national secrets are in digital environment (not on a microfilm in a CEOs leather jacket). Also Chinese spies, who require a visa to enter US, can be easily tracked the moment they get in touch with any VIP.

And for the sexual/marriage life of individuals, suddenly everyone goes back to 50s standards. (Note: This is extra interesting because I heard there is a “sex cult” attracting high profile AI engineers in SV. And everyone seems ok with it. But that’s probably another honeypot operation.)

if you fire him, he can go work for China. Or he’ll go work for Elon. I just have this feeling you aren’t explicit with your implicit motive.

Why? If he's that important then our own intelligence community ought to be doing stuff to fight espionage - doing counterintelligence, generally just making sure he's ok and providing support to him, etc. This is not some random guy. Did we just forget to do that?

If we're not doing that, then are foreign countries just after all of our important people? Forget sexpionage - what about hacking their computers? Do we have zero ability to combat any of this, whereas other countries can do whatever they want?

I'm not an Elon fan at all, but ... while he sure sleeps around, I have not heard he slept with subordinates, or Chinese spies.

kinda weird China would want him out, considering he's been begging to sell chips to them

That ship has sailed.

Huang has a problem now because his ability to advocate for NVIDIA in a politically charged environment is damaged.

He can't be an effective CEO for NVIDIA if there's a plausible (even if unproven) suspicion that he's on a geopolitical adversary's side.

He was very strongly advocating for selling to China before this. At that point, it could be understood simply as him looking out for NVIDIA's business interests. Now, there's doubt sowed in everyone's mind about whether it really was just that.

Maybe you don't care, because you think selling to China is the right thing to do - fine, there can be different views on this.

But, a lot of influential people very much do not hold that view, and he needs to be able to effectively communicate to them also.

First

The board. Elon and his brother are the board, and some sycophants. They are also heavily weighted shareholders.

Jensen doesn’t have that.

Second

The wife, who also is entitled to significant shareholdings. Musk avoided that, and major shareholders are already in trusts, his private foundation, his donor advised fund, and just outside of any future marriage to begin with. The market doesn’t care what a disagreement with his partners mean

Third

The state, and the product. Elon sells cars and it isnt the backbone of economies. The rockets and starlink do pursue waivers or avoid sanctioned countries. Indiscretions were already paid for in the campaign.

So “canceling or not” masquerades as a societal view or tacit consent, when it is solely a matter of who your masters are and if they will stand by you or have any capability of a choice.

What’s really hurting Jensen here are the accusations of sanctions violations. That can impact Nvidia. It’s already hurting the stock price. That hurts the investors. A 20% drop while the rest of the market is fine is probably enough to oust him.

Cui bono? China. Incredibly low cost op. She doesn't even have to be a spy, just the rumour is sufficient for the puritanical US media, china hawks, and anti-AI lobby to do the rest.

standing on its' head your statement reads as :

"If the US doesn't allow government intervention into the business dealing of important private entities during times of scandal, to protect lies and initiate cover-ups, then China will win."

do I interpret that correctly?

Do we even know thats the end of this? This is only whats public at this point... It doesn't feel like the end of it but more like beginning to middle.

I'm trying to figure out who pushed this story through or if this is just bubbling up naturally.

Midterms over, major loss of power for faction Huang seems linked to

Distillation getting harder

Anthropic IPO

Most companies have policies that strongly discourage this, or forbid it, and for good reason.

It's a big enough deal that former CEOs of Nestle, Norfolk Southern, McDonald's and Intel were either terminated or resigned after similar relationships were uncovered.

I'm glad others agree that his infidelity is a complete nothing burger. Moralising about this is wrong and is a purity spiral.

The Chinese spy thing and illegal dealing with China are far worse but they should be investigated properly.

He shouldn't be ousted from the company he built to be the biggest company in the world because he cheated on his wife.

I'll admit I haven't really been following this story, but I ASSUME he didn't know she was a spy? (Given a good portion of a spy's job is making sure you don't know they are a spy) So why is this an issue either?

On one hand I firmly believe that if a rule is stupid you have no moral obligation to obey it. There might still be consequences though, however unjust.

On the other hand so many rules can be in place for years because people just don't obey them so their stupidity is mitigated to the point of invisibility.

I wouldn’t call this particularly nuanced, certainly if they were sold to intermediaries not subject to the export controls (Singapore)

Whether he would be the most profitable CEO is absolutely irrelevant. The guy is literally facing prison time if he can be directly tied to the violation of those sanctions. If the board takes more than about 30 seconds to come to a conclusion they should probably all be replaced as well.

https://fortune.com/2026/03/19/supermicro-arrested-founder-s...

She's alleged to have been an 'intelligence asset', which is not the same thing as a spy (assets are not agents). Assets are often just good sources of insight and analysis, whereas agents are tasked with active deception and exfiltration of information. Jensen Huang is arguably an intelligence asset; I'm sure he's given informative briefings to spooks on the state of the world, albeit not necessarily knowingly.

A related question to this is whether Jensen Huang even has a US government security clearance.It's not obvious to me that he's privy to any government secrets, even if the US regards Nvidia as a strategic asset. To pick up on your point 4, he might have been knowingly violating the law, a problem for any CEO. But if he's not definitely violating sanctions and is instead just chasing profits, that's considered the norm.

To be frank I think this is a storm in teapot because there have been rumors about his affair floating around since last May, and if the US government has known for at least that long and hasn't intervened or arrested him it's probably not that big of a deal. I can't help wondering if it's a case of the current US administration trying to look tough after the President suffered a humiliating election defeat.

1. Cheating on his wife when that will likely significantly change the ownership of the company is a big deal;

2. Here's where I disagree most. A married billionaire CEO sleeping with an also-married subordinate is a huge deal and that alone warrants an ouster. It creates huge legal exposure for the company;

3. The biggest issue with the Chinese spy is he's wealthy enough that this shouldn't happen. I'm sorry but you can afford corporate security who can vet the people you're involved with and do so discreetly;

Huang hired Heller (a crisis PR firm) a year ago. It seems like he knew something was coming and possibly failed to inform the board. Ok, that's more grounds for termination.

I too am 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

I very much doubt it stops here.

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

Either he's easily manipulated. Or he's a predator. Either way... not someone you want as CEO.

There's no scenario in 2026 where sleeping with a boss or subordinate is acceptable behavior for corporate leadership.

And... look, I get it, and maybe you can write it off as just something that happens in the real world.

But the fact that he would do it, also screams, "This is someone who thinks the rules don't apply to him."

Which again puts him squarely in the "not someone you want as a leader" category.

The tl;dr is she slept with Jensen in return for large benefits for her Husband's company.

Her actual role in this doesn't have a real good direct translation to English.

1) This is a huge matter of character. If you cannot be faithful to your wife, what makes you a faithful leader of a company? There is also the issue of respect: when a leader is morally compromised, the people he is leading lose confidence and respect in him.

2) Isn’t there something of a power dynamic issue here too? He has a greater responsibility to use his authority and power as a superior to not abuse that authority, and committing adultery with an inferior is a huge problem.

3) On what basis is this a huge deal and the previous two are not? Where’s the nuance? It’s just arbitrary.

4) Well yeah, it looks like he was complicit in breaking sanctions. It’s no longer an arms-length deal.

5) Again, why are the first two worth shrugging shoulders and this one is not? It’s no big deal, people cheat and break the law all the time.

6) That sure undersells it. It underlines the stupidity of sin, and the sinfulness of man.

7) I can’t argue with that.

Since US counterintelligence has known about the relationship since late 2024, they would be completely incompetent if they had not:

1) taken measures to ensure that she did not get US secrets,

2) collected information on Chinese priorities and methods for acquiring AI hardware, and/or

3) fed misinformation to the Chinese.

While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long time ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.

While I appreciate the spirit of this comment, I think that this ship sailed long ago when United States elected a convicted felon twice, who then proceeded to virtually break all the laws with no repercussion.

I agree with you on the first and second point. Perhaps you can argue it's in bad taste to have an affair but the private matters of adult lives should be of no interest to outsiders.

Him being married is relevant: he opened himself to extortion/blackmail, assuming his wife was not aware of his affairs. Anyone who knew that was happening would have had enormous leverage over him.

Even if no one actually did so it still demonstrates a massive risk.

I'm 50/50 on whether or not Alice Huang is actually a spy for the Chinese government, or rather just a social climber and opportunist. She certainly didn't hide her perceived closeness to Jensen Huang, and in fact actively flaunted it on her social media.

Furthermore, I think it possible if not likely that Jensen has had more than just 2 extramarital liaisons, and if more were to come out, then IMO that would actually shift the likelihood towards Jensen simply being a lustful old man taking sexual advantage of his power and status, rather than being honeypotted by some Chinese intelligence operation.

That is absolutely a huge deal, I have no idea why you don't think it is. That is the kind of behavior which anyone in an American workplace knows is not tolerated in the slightest and would lead to firing. The fact that he did it anyway shows he has shockingly poor judgement.

Is it true?

Or is the evidence right over there next to the evidence of WMD?

I know some people believe anonymous govt officials but I kinda don't so if there's actual evidence, let's see it, or note the the doubt legitimately exists.

It seems a very odd thing to be briefing newspapers about rather than the very many other, seemingly more useful ways of using that information if it is true. How does everyone feel about the CIA briefing the New York Times in general to seemingly get a CEO removed? Who takes responsibility for making that decision?

Not to mention that Nvidia has a huge stake in the ai space being a backstop to a bunch of players in all its circular financing deals.

Judge not, for in the measure of your judgment, it will be measured to you.

Desire is the enemy of happiness. To abandon sorrow, abjure want.

We are all in wanting. Our want is lesser than the needs of our partners, our friends, and our world.

They were married years before he founded the company, and lived in California, a community property state. And they got married right out of college. Unless he somehow knew that he would start a company and got a prenup that says "if I start a company it's all mine", a prenup wouldn't matter anyway (and would probably but null and void anyhow).

Or just... not cheating on your wife

> sleeping with a spy rather than just hiring an escort

I really don't like Jensen but I think this actually shows decent character! Sleeping with a femme fatale is rather romantic.

Humans need someone to be accountable to, even if it’s just some guy walking behind you saying “memento mori” twice a day.

That figure raises to about half if you include all officers/directors.

[1] https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Lowry%20-%20Buck...

One of the greatest failures of Nvidia's Board was in failing to push for a successor. (Musks' companies face a similar risk.)

It’s not like Jensen predicted it

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

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

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

He could've gave us seamless private cloud GPUs (basically let you run anything on any device, rent out your GPU to earn money, let you play GTA-6 on your phone...)

Could've had the true AI App Store

Could've bought OpenRouter (instead Stripe bought them):

Have not just cloud gaming but the true cloud App Store where Claude and ChatGPT are just apps

This way no terrorist can smuggle Jensen's physical shovels aka GPUs in a potato bag ;-)

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

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

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

______________

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

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

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

Recent trend is quite the opposite. What's Tesla without Musk selling pipe dreams ? Pretty sure there is 0 plan for replacement.

Huang expected to run the company well into his 80s, with no clear successor.

The coup of Jensen Huang was precisely organized by the same large institutional investors.

They want NVIDIA to lock-up firmware and prevent any open-weight models from being run. Everyone (at least in US/NATO/US-aligned world) will be forced to use Anthriopic/OpenAI or some other US based closed source model.

Open models will be banned at the GPU level.

This is done to cement the multi-trillion dollar valuation of the AI labs and prevent AI bubble from popping due to customers using free open-weight, instead of pay-per-token closed models

This premise is most likely incorrect: https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-state-of-the-ai-economy

If anything this should impact the IPO only to the extent it affects the production of new compute capacity, because it is clear that is the #1 thing they need to scale revenues.

There needs to be an else?

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

He risked his future, the value of his company and shareholders to commit adultery.

What else is he doing? How can his word be trusted? Who else is influencing him? Do people have blackmail from such encounters?

All fair questions to ask now.

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

ETA: It's nice to see all the incels downvoting this lol.

Not that long ago, it was accepted that sex - f*cking - was at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - basic physiological needs.

This is, of course, true for men.

But it is incredibly inconvenient for feminists.

So what did we do? Well, we just got rid of it of course.

And now here we are.

you answered your own question.

That's a pretty big "aside" for a very big company like NVIDIA.

> Haven’t other successful leaders continued to lead after having their affairs exposed?

https://andybyron.wiki/ is one half of the erstwhile internet-meme "Coldplay Cam Couple".

next move is navigating polycules.

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

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