The CEO works for the board. And the board really doesn't like when their company ends up on the front page of the WSJ for helping a Chinese intelligence agent traffic your company's own product in violation of US sanctions.
It’s pretty clear (if you aren’t a huge idiot) that Jensen is attempting to bury the lead here.
He knowingly helped advance China’s AI ambitions against the direction of congress. He got caught selling 7.5 Billion dollars of restricted chips to china.
Also he cheated on his wife with some Chinese woman, which is a totally separate and unrelated fuck up.
If you seriously think he got tricked by some random woman who batted her eyes, you are out of your mind. He founded the fucking company, he isn’t some clueless executive. He’s also not senile and he doesn’t have dementia. This is the only viable excuse for him to use, but it’s complete bullshit.
Think about it: He betrayed his longtime wife, who by all accounts supported him from the beginning. He betrayed his company and its shareholders. And he betrayed his country (BOTH of his countries?) who specifically forbid the chips to be sold to china. He’s fucked
He cheated on his wife with multiple women, it's coming out... I feel bad for her, everyone's saying she'll get billions and that's nice but she's been completely humiliated.
That’s a stretch. He’s the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. Hearing that he had an affair, or multiple affairs, shouldn’t come as a surprise. The only person here who’s humiliated himself is Jensen, for having an affair with a spy. He was too high and mighty to take the simple route and pay for high end escorts who make you feel good for a couple of hours, and then move on with your life. No, he decided he needed to have a whole relationship on the side.
I don't really feel that bad for her. She's 65 and will become a billionaire in her own right, meaning she can build whatever retirement for herself she can imagine. Their kids are in their 30s. Being cheated on is theoretically embarrassing, but 100% of people who have an opinion about it would be sympathetic to her (I mean, they'd see this as his failing and not her fault). Contrast that with how people will see Jensen ("stupid, reckless, betrayer of his family") and how people may see the women he cheated with (people may assume they were gold-diggers who knew exactly what they were doing).
I guess what I'm saying is, I'd be happy to be publicly cucked in exchange for at least a billion dollars.
I think that's taking it too lightly, it's not all about money. They had a life together, losing that stability at any age can be devastating, and lonely.
If this is correct, what was his motivation? I fail to see what he could have gained from it, other than a few extra billion in revenue, which they likely would have made otherwise anyway.
You don't become a billionaire by leaving money on the table. Achieving this kind of wealth is proof that you will never be satisfied, the reasonable people took their exit a while ago and are enjoying themselves peacefully. You most likely already took shortcuts and illegal actions to get there, so why not continue in that direction?
Trump has made a lot of money from NVIDIA stock, and he's very good friends with Jensen. Especially after he approved the Export Deals. Jensen will be fine after he's out of NVIDIA.
A billionaire being fired is not that much of a big deal. There’s nothing in the world that’ll make them worry about what will be their next business jet.
As for him being good friends with Trump, it doesn’t say much. Epstein was one of his besties and he’s still dead.
Trump famously banned Epstein from his golf course and worked with the FBI during his first arrest. They famously hated each other, and were not friends
> Trump famously banned Epstein from his golf course
(all sourced from [0])
Well, they had a spat in 2000 because Epstein was poaching Trump's staff but he remained a member until 2007 (or possibly longer, depending on who you believe.)
> They famously hated each other
In 2002, Trump said "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with." I don't know, it doesn't sound very "hatey" to me.
In 2003, he sent his birthday message of "A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret." Still not getting much "hate" from this relationship.
I'll give you, maybe, from 2007 onwards they fell out of friendship but even then it's not clear what actually went on.
Maybe once we get a fuller release of the Epstein Files we'll know more.
I think money’s not really the game for these guys, at least not for its own sake, it’s being able to bend the course of the world. People who don’t have enough usually seem to think it’s about consumption and wonder how they can be so greedy, but you can only consume so much, and that’s generally impossible to see in the rear view mirror for this group.
"A lede is the introductory section in journalism and thus to bury the lede refers to hiding the most important and relevant pieces of a story within other distracting information."
Burying the lead in the journalism would actually be burying the lead (like the metal) so they aren't even pronounced the same. Many people make the same mistake you do so this misconception proliferates.
I recently recalled Nvidia's rather strange reaction to the Gamers Nexus investigation into GPU smuggling [0]. Found it somewhat strange at the time how incredibly agitated the reaction seemed to have been, given Nvidia could sell the same GPUs for the same price essentially instantly without the Chinese market. Their reaction wasn't merely a denial, dismissal or even silence, but very irrationally sounding for a company of their size and standing.
Why not just sell to not-sanctioned entities, ensure compliance to the best of your abilities and otherwise keep your head down? Again, wasn't like they struggled to find buyers for their chips.
Considering Megaspeed, I now see this in a very different light. Him cheating is personal and I wish the affected members of any family of a cheater the best, but not relevant for us outsiders.
Being honey trapped very bad securities wise, but he'd be a victim (and evidence for why we shouldn't discount Mistral in the frontier lab race [1]). If sanctions avoidance went all the way to the top, that is hard to negate even for a board that is interested in keeping him.
Imagine you’re a woman and your boss proposition you. Or gets flirty. Now imagine the pressure this comes with because it might put your big job and future work in jeopardy.
Why was it wrong of Weinstein to proposition possible actresses working?
It’s not hard to see that if you’re on a position of power over someone you must keep it professional.
Sorry, you're not explaining anything here, at all.
If you can, I would be grateful if you could explain how it is necessarily unethical and immoral for the CEO of a company to ask an employee to have sex.
dating someone != asking a subordinate to fuck you
In most juridictions there are laws against abuse of authority which applies if it is the case. How well they are enforced is a different matter but unless there is a victim I don't think there is a problem from a legal and ethical point of view. It is just not very smart, especially if you are cheating someone and/or are a public person.
> If no law or illegal company policy has been broken[1], is dating another employee or cheating their wife a motive for firing someone?
Cheating on your wife cannot be a reason for a company to fire you, its your personal life. Dating an employee that works under you is also not a fireable offense if you disclose it to avoid any conflict of interest that affects other employees.
Having affairs with multiple employees that work under you + potential links to a chinese spy + not having any disclosure and showing a pattern of doing this = makes you look unhinged and untrustable. In that case, the board can move to remove you as they have enough cause.
It is a special case because of the people involved but it is par for course in terms of how corporate governance works. There is no ethical reason required as long as they follow the internal policies and the law.
And yes company policy doesn't supersede the law but it can be used to fire you if you break it. They just can't like jail you but they can decide who to fire or hire based on their policies.
If it's not due to a love affair (which is now public), and not just working for PRC out of ideological readons, it might be some kind of secret pressure, some kind of a secret hostage situation, so serious as to force a CEO of the world's top company to act so recklessly.
He made a strong case that the sanctions harmed his long term ecosystem lock in play.
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.
When you have a fixed supply (which GPU production basically is), the more demand the more you can charge and the more you can make. It’s not about finding buyers, it’s about creating even more demand so you can ask more than ever for the GPUs you’re making.
The U.S. blocking advanced chip sales to China has ensured China increased their efforts to someday no longer need them.
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.
China already makes GPUs that are good enough, even if they are slower and less efficient than the NVIDIA GPUs.
Their main problem is not the lower efficiency, but the limited capacity of production, caused by the fact that they cannot buy SOTA manufacturing equipment.
This will indeed slow them down for some time, but it is likely that sometime between 2030 and 2032 they will become able to use EUV lithography in mass production, eliminating the principal advantage of US companies like NVIDIA. After that, they will no longer be constrained by the capacity of production for GPUs and CPUs.
I consider rather doubtful that USA will possess advanced AGI before that.
Even with the smaller amount of GPUs that they can use, I do not see any sign that they will trail by much the AI research from USA.
Which METR report? The one about Anthropic's acceleration rate for improved benchmark results, that put the value at anywhere between 1.1 and 3x per year.
I don't know what your definition of "advanced AGI" is, but if it's the target for a final "win" to the AI race, I think you need to reassess what the current capabilities really are, we're still in the infancy or toddler stages of AGI at best. You should also take a look at how fast Chinese labs are closing the gap, with greater efficiency compared to US labs.
The US mindset of abundance and "scaling laws" is not going to have them win the race. It's not a sustainable strategy.
Covert actions in the interest and by the request of a foreign power is spy craft. If you do this openly, then it would not be called spying, it is done all the time; sometimes it is called diplomacy. If you hide the fact that you are working for a foreign power, you are a spy.
It is not a necessary condition, but it is sufficient.
China or any other country is not required to follow the U.S.'s laws. If they don't see U.S. rules to their advantage they may work around it.
We've seen the results of this just this year when its turned out China has enough oil reserves to buffer the reduced output from the Iran war. China had been bringing in Iran/Venezuela/Russia oil for years despite U.S./EU sanctions. That's not spy craft. That's China looking after itself and not bowing to western hegimony.
Folks here tend to forget US laws are just that - US laws. Mostly done to benefit US and nobody else. Its not like US respects any European laws, does it.
Nobody apart form US has issue with current China - if folks in US are getting the idea from US media that whole world is on some jihad against China thats laughable - nope its just US, yet another failed effort that will backfire way worse than doing nothing, ie like Iran. We don't want part in that. China is not expansionist unlike russia, it doesn't have that desperate need to promote their regime and way of doing things on whole world and murder anybody rejecting it. This fearmongering is simply not working outside US borders.
Now in the past there were many gentlemen agreements between nations plus the risk of aircraft carrier group coming your way or getting kicked out of SWIFT network, but that has been overused recently so nobody cares that much.
I’m not sure if you haven’t followed this story or if you’re constructing some kind of specious argument that the only evidence you’ll accept is a personally signed letter from Xi Jinping. I’ll assume the former.
* US intelligence agencies reportedly monitored Alice Huang for over a year and concluded she was passing information directly to Beijing.
* A memo overseen by Marco Rubio reportedly concluded that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited her to gather intelligence on Jensen Huang and potentially influence Nvidia's chip exports.
* The FBI reportedly warned US lawmakers nearly a year ago that she might be supplying information to China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
In the spy world, this is about as close to irrefutable evidence as it gets. We know that any strategically important or large company in China requires Party members in positions of authority inside the company. The CCP exerts direct power over these companies in a multitude of ways. Megaspeed is a clear example of the kind of company they oversee. To assume anything other than Megaspeed being in clear cooperation with the CCP would be a rejection of everything we know about how companies operate in China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
I would not be surprised if Alice Huang and others were coordinating chip purchases through financing backed by the China government. But that's not spying. Thats just business.
I think you have a very strange definition of spying if you preclude the Chinese government using an operative to sexually compromise the world's most influential tech leader running the world's most influential tech business into breaking US laws to materially benefit China to an almost unprecedented degree.
I think you've made up your mind on this matter and you're not going to let reality get in the way.
This is not a courtroom. Jensen has been very open that he wants to be able to sell his chips to China. As of today it comes out that he has had other affairs.
Jenson may have knowing broken the law. Perhaps the law will have its way with him.
My point is simply what I said at the beginning of this thread: "In effort for us to see clear eyed."
I don't have a horse in this race, but from a US perspective it makes sense to ban chip sales. This is an arms race and any advantage however small makes a difference.
NVIDIA is the undisputed champion of AI hardware because of the advanced chip node access ban, ensuring no Chinese competition in this area for years. In return NVIDIA was banned from selling their chips to China so that the US holds the state of the art in AI models as well. Selling chips through back channels is a betrayal, spies or not.
I agree with you and I find it sad. I grew up during the last Cold War. Dario Amodei often writes in new Cold War rhetoric. Is this really the best we can do as humans?
Name a single technology where the US sold to China and China remained reliant on the US long term for it. Just a single one would do. That would make me believe this theory that keeps being repeated.
Your reply comes off a bit rude and not within the tone expected on HN.
First off, China is not my enemy. I am a humanist (at least try to be).
Yes, with or without approved transfer of tech to China, China will eventually catch up. Would you rather this eventual tech normalization happen through a process of growing animosity or respectful cooperation?
I don't have a dog in this fight on specifics regarding Nvidia chips. People on all sides will respond as they see fit.
> Yes, with or without approved transfer of tech to China, China will eventually catch up. Would you rather this eventual tech normalization happen through a process of growing animosity or respectful cooperation?
False dichotomy. We have plenty of examples of selling tech to China which eventually leads to the opposite of respectful cooperation. I'm not anti-china but it has nothing to do with any of this. What was the point of bringing it up, it doesn't make your argument any more compelling. It's not within the expected logical standard that is expected on HN.
Let's get back to the original point that you made, which is parroting the idea that selling leading technology somehow prevents China from accelerating their pursuit of it. Do you have any evidence of that working? Or are you just parroting what Jensen has been saying because he wants to sell his hardware in the Chinese market?
I doubt that you actually even believe what you are parroting. Would you say that giving china our stealth fighter technology would cause a longer term reliance on us and stop their pursuit of stealth tech?
This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market, when China has more active iPhone user than the whole US population.
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.
> There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions.
You can get like 200% margin on selling GPUs to PRC smugglers in Taiwan. It's a very busy industry with lots of players so the margin gets spread around. Recently a big ring of them was busted and sent to prison here so most people try to have as many middlemen between them and the guy that puts it on the boat as possible, because apparently the prison sentence is quite long.
I had someone offer me 10x whatever I bought for (not even MSRP just whatever I paid) for "as many GPUs as I could get my hands on." I asked hundreds? Yeah. Thousands? "Can you get us thousands???" It's fuckin nutty.
Exactly, it is the same thing in Hong Kong, Japan or South Korea or any other nation in the region. Just like how they used to smuggle iPhone into China. It is a hidden distribution network that has long established.
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.
I think there are a lot of people who want to bring him down. His competition - AMD, Broadcom, Google. OpenAI and Anthropic also have advocated for banning chip exports to China because of Chinese lab LLM competition. Then there are both Republican and Democrats who likely support the views of OpenAI/Anthropic.
Finally, because he's of Han Chinese origin, I bet they thought they could get the media to coordinate a narrative around him that will force him out. Of course, he sort of made it easy to pin something on him.
There are a lot of Game of Thrones going on in AI. Everyone is jockeying. Everyone has different incentives. Super high stakes game.
He seems to have broken the law. That should have consequences. That he cofounded the company should not matter. Neither should it matter that many rich people get away with breaking the law in other cases.
It’s not about that, it’s about the cloud compute loophole of export restricted chips. NVIDIA sold billions worth of chips to Megaspeed, a Chinese company spin out in Singapore founded right after the export ban. Neocloud Megaspeed rented most of their compute to Chinese companies like Alibaba circumventing the sanctions. The investigations didn’t find any wrongdoing per se even if it’s very obvious that the whole Megaspeed operation is Chinese state orchestration. Labelling Alice as a spy put an immediate hold to all of this.
The thing is that at this point, even if this was all a plot to take him down, it worked! Can't go back to the information not being public.
He's operating in a highly charged political environment in which his credibility is a key asset. He can't effectively advocate for NVIDIA's interests if his credibility is damaged.
And this goes directly to his credibility on the most politically charged issue of all: The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China, and NVIDIA's role in it.
I agree it's a tragedy for NVIDIA, he seems to have been exceptional as a CEO, it's just too late now.
He's a strong advocate for gaming. That's why he started Nvidia in the first place.
I think whoever is next will not always have the affinity for gaming. Any finance person who looks at the unit economics of gaming would conclude that they should allocate next to no chip supply to gaming GPUs.
They stopped manufacturing the 5090 even under Jensens control. And no the 5090 die is only 750mm squared big, a B200s die is 1628mm squared. That is more than twice the size of a 5090.
as nvidia goes into making purely big-business hardware, some other player will arrive to provide the chips to the masses. then, the researchers will use this mass-market hardware for research, supplanting nvidia itself.
nvidia got their strong position in AI now by providing CUDA to researchers who couldn't afford their own supercomputing cluster. and now the entirety of machine learning revolves around CUDA.
once you fixate on the business and lock out the masses, you instantly elect to become a fossil like IBM.
> Any finance person who looks at the unit economics of gaming would conclude that they should allocate next to no chip supply to gaming GPUs.
And that is the NVIDIA's secret sauce. Historically there were bunch of parallel processors comparable to NVIDIA GPU, none of them survived without presence in gaming and entertainment.
Did you know that NEC had a line of 2-slot GPUs with 48GB of HBM VRAM with 1TB/s bandwidth since 2017, that had gone absolutely nowhere? Probably not, because it was never sold as gamer toys. It was for lucrative serious customers only, and nobody bought it.
Only Huang played the game in the way it's meant to be played. Apparently nobody else can.
> WSJ reports that details of the affair were known to top officials, including SoS Rubio and CIA Ratcliffe, “going back to last year,” and were brought to President Trump; the administration took no action to blacklist Megaspeed.
Does this this sound like people who want to bring him down or people who wanted to protect him?
> This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market, when China has more active iPhone user than the whole US population.
Is it so unreasonable to expect American tech companies to 'ignore' the market of a country that is supplying materiel to the countries that America is currently engaged in a proxy war, and actual war with?
If not, exactly what would China have to do for this to be a reasonable expectation, and something that we would expect American companies to do under their own volition?
>There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions.
What the fuck are you talking about - it's obvious this guy broke the export bans - the affairs are just a media circus to distract from that fact - not only should he be ousted he should be going to jail if there's any sort of legal system in the US left...
The whole affair circus to distract from the export control circumvention is another example of "It's a big club and you ain't in it". In which you is all of us non billionaires.
As I understand it, he didn't though. The law had a loophole you could navigate a supertanker through, and there is no duty to adhere to the spirit of a poorly written law.
> This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market
There are a few major differences. Apple's devices aren't under export control so Apple takes no risk selling. Nvidia had to take legal risks to do this.
On the stock side, Apple devices are almost never supply constrained. Nvidia's never get to sit on the shelf. Nvidia can jack up the prices to the sky and still not keep up with demand.
Between these 2 things, the risk to sell to China looks like more than only profit motivated.
No need to author a grand conspiracy, it's likely exactly what it looks like. Jensen like to dip his pen in all sorts of ink and China used a honeypot to blackmail him.
China has all the incentive in the world to disrupt a major US AI firm to slow the US down.
> I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
Absolutely. Since the midterms, many politicians see going after Jensen as a way to appease the pitchfork mobs of anti-AI/data center voters (it doesn't matter if that position makes no sense).
Apparently the government was informed of his activities with this alleged spy about a year ago and at the time decided to ignore the issue. Why would they suddenly, after elections decide that they want to follow up on the allegations?
Surely this totally undermines his ability to negotiate in good faith about export restrictions and so on or advise on national security in any capacity. That's not good for the company, shows really poor judgement, I don't see how they can keep him after this. If it was just the affair sure whatever, but it obviously matters that she's an intelligence asset, whether that actually led to anything or not. You can say what you want about export restrictions but his relationship to the US government and the general perception of his judgement matters a great deal for the business.
Affairs suggest problems of candor and trust. A second affair with an executive-level subordinate confirm them. The fact that one was with a foreign agent calls his judgement into question as well.
It may be the case that his ouster helps certain people. That has nothing whatsoever to do with how the blame should be apportioned or what the sensible course of action is.
> 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.
There are many regulations, sanctions and restrictions I disagree with. That doesn’t mean I can or should try to bypass them on a large scale.
He may have been right, doesn’t mean he gets to break the law.
If he was actually a victim, it would be gross negligence on him and/or his board. CEO's at $100B market cap companies should be undergoing regular, advanced training on spearfishing as well a due diligence on such large chip deals.
I wrote this elsewhere, but right after they fire JH (he's lost all credibility on anything China going forward, and that makes it impossible for him to remain CEO), the board needs to cycle themselves off and get people who can handle the scope of a company like NVDA. The complete lack of real governance and what appears to be any succession plan is squarely on this board.
It's obvious that it was on purpose. He's been involved for years with the Megaspeed spy, he knew exactly what he was doing and where the GPUs were going.
I've been watching them for some time now and i must say they do pretty good coverage of the crazy tech world. They def don't shy away from deep coverage and chasing of the truth.
I just recently unsubscribed, when it became their "thing". Their LG video was terrible at dividing what TV it did on its own and what they used it for. And they have like 4 "AI Bubble" videos in row, each 40m+ long, where new one adds at best 5 minutes of new information, over the previous. The GPU smuggling investigation was nice but they quickly went downhill from there, and instead of being side projects, it is now the main hook that brings people to channel. People who care about hardware reviews have to go somewhere else.
> Their LG video was terrible at dividing what TV it did on its own and what they used it for.
I assume that "what they used it for" means "what they could do after they pwnt the computer in the TV". If that's what you meant, then _if_ there is at least one reasonably easy way to pwn the computer in that TV without really requiring interaction from the TV's user, then it's 110% fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the TV does out of the box and what it has the capability to do. Why? Because if it's easy to pwn, then it's likely to already be pwnt.
But. Even if there wasn't a reasonably easy way to pwn the TV, I'd say that it's still very fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the thing does now and what it can be made to do, because what it does tomorrow is up to the manufacturer... which has pretty clearly demonstrated that they give zero shits about the privacy of the purchasers of their consumer-grade TVs. Inevitably, the manufacturer will make the TV do everything it can do in order to continually squeeze as many pennies from that initial sale as is possible.
> People who care about hardware reviews have to go somewhere else.
You've probably missed the handful of videos where Burke is all like «We'd love to review hardware, but it's so damn expensive that no one can really buy it. Why spend time reviewing things that people can't really buy? So, we investigate this stuff because it's informative and important.»
But yeah, GN doesn't do many hardware reviews these days.
It also makes sense. I've pretty much stopped watching actual hardware reviews because I've essentially given up on upgrading my PC any time soon, at least until the AI bubble pops. Why watch people review stuff I'll never be able to buy? I may as well watch people review Ferraris and Gucci bags at that point.
Being a victim doesn't make him less guilty in the eyes of the law. Even if a judge finds him to be 100% misled and honey trapped, they will still hold him accountable. If it turns out he expressly avoided sanctions and probably worse leaked military secrets then he might be going to jail. And possibly a small Nvidia top heavy pyramid with him. Anyone who followed orders will go with him, it's going to be more painful than "just" losing the CEO.
It was so important the security services didn't even bother to warn him when they found out about the affair. You can say 'suspected' spy about anyone. Classic spin language.
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.
Dude, are you kidding me? You have such a corrupt government for the last two years that they openly did insider trading and all the other stuff. I'm sure somebody was in the known and I'm sure somebody did investigation, there was also an article how a higher ups in the government leaked to Nvidia that there was some investigations and internally there was pressure to do nothing about it.
Eh? The point I'm making is if there was a vaguely serious security risk the security services would have told the CEO ( which is separate from 'taking action' ).
Which suggests the formal assessment is it wasn't - they were investigating Megaspeed for sanction busting via chip smuggling, happened to notice the affair, and found nothing concrete.
Note sanction busting by buying lots of Nvidia chips and renting them to Chinese companies is perfectly legal ( and very lucrative ).
So that's the evidence about the security situation.
The real question is why leak the memo to the press now - and I don't pretend here to know the answer - but if you think it's about suppression of some serious espionage event I think you are wrong.
> The point I'm making is if there was a vaguely serious security risk the security services would have told the CEO
Where is the evidence that nobody in the security services did not know ?
There is already history where Security services are not independent, and stuff that will be investigated depends on the current gouverement, what the timing of the leak seems to suggest.
I am with you until here. Since cuda they have had a strangle hold on the market. It's like Pepsi vs R.C. Cola, their nearest competitor is miles behind.
Those are not the main issues. There only two core issues, the national security aspect, and the mother of all lawsuits by activist investors of NVIDIA, that the company, their current CEO and the Board is about to get hit by.
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 withing 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.
> Found it somewhat strange at the time how incredibly agitated the reaction seemed to have been, given Nvidia could sell the same GPUs for the same price essentially instantly without the Chinese market.
"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.
The China exports were a monopoly play, basically.
He wanted to make sure that all the open source AI tooling is as married to CUDA at the hip as it could possibly be. He didn't want the Chinese to come up with a working open source CUDA alternative which was just as good, and just as usable by the non-Chinese.
Nvidia's playbook was to make sure everybody was focused on competing against each other and not against Nvidia. This meant larger allocations to small players than would seem rational at first glance, investing into those players to make sure they survived and could compete against the hyperscalers and frontier labs, spending effort and human capital on optimizations which made open models run better on Nvidia hardware, making them more competitive with closed offerings, that sort of thing. This was a big part of Jensen's strategy.
It is not as simple as “selling” a chip. Jense Huang is not worry about selling gpu now. He is worried about let china develop a new ai processor architecture which will definitely destroy his business. This like ban Elon to sell and have factories in China.
Sounds like he helped China get GPUs in violation of export controls. This puts NVidia in a tough place as keeping him as CEO risks broader legal ramifications.
it seems like this is the legal equaivent of smoking dope behind the McDonald's ..basically no one cares that much. The govt. could prosecute or make an example.,but whatevah. It's implicitly understood nvdia is a huge success and central to the US tech boom.
I think /u/jazzyjackson was referring to the US Government, who, there are grounds for thinking, did know something about all of this and immediately swung into action .... or not, as the case may be.
Really I figured nvidia has a legal team that evaluates how exposed they are to risk of running afoul of the US government. I ask because, ok the CEO was complicit, but should the company wash their hands of it and pretend they had no way of knowing? That it was only the CEO that was responsible?
But I ask out of ignorance, I’ve never been inside a Big Corp.
This appears to be shortseller-initiated. We're going to make this illegal (in around the next 20 minutes) and if he is fired, we will launch a rigorous investigation and liquidate any company that contributed to this happening.
It is also subject to our laws. Regardless of what shareholders want, it is illegal to fire Jensen. If they don't like it, they can sell their stock and buy some other stock.
That $200 was a sort of formality; him buying his shares from the company as part of the incorporation paperwork. It has nothing to do with actual funding needed to run a business. Nvidia's first round of financing was 3 months later. $2M at a $6M valuation [1].
This is another way of saying all the other people designing the chips, and everything else that goes into the company, are meaningless. The cult of CEO is out of hand
who cares where he named it, stan'ng for the Oligarchy is becoming a social faux pas, fyi
How much did he donate to the ballroom? Did he get the investigation by the government shelved because of that payment? What's the real story behind the 15% revenue share deal he did with Trump?
This doesn't seem like a healthy move for the company's longevity. What else did Jensen do? It's a given that companies that size will be targets for espionage and leak information even without it. This one mistake is enough to end all the value he has-and likely continues to add to nvidia? Feels like we're missing information about the whole thing.
Uhm ... yes? Screwing around is not a crime. That is something Huang should settle with his family. His wife may divorce of forgive him, but a divorce is not something that the company should fire anyone over.
The fact that he slept with a suspected Chinese spy is not a crime either. Now, if he has enabled industrial espionage, helped circumvent sanctions or broke other laws it is a different matter. But marital infidelity seems insufficient as a cause to fire a CEO of a highly successful company.
I did not follow the story much, so might be missing some important information.
He also sold chips worth billions to her "mistress" and the chips probably went to China. So he did circumvent sanctions. Thats the only crime I recognise in this matter.
These are Trump political sanction. NVDA is a multinational company out to maximize profits for shareholder. Selling to China should not be on any sanctions list. China is not the enemy of anything in my book.
Screwing around is not a crime, but he also isn't under threat of prison time. He's under threat of losing his job, because he has shown that his judgement cannot be trusted (he had two illicit affairs, one of which was with a subordinate). It's perfectly reasonable to fire someone from a leadership position for having bad judgement.
So he had an affair with a woman. Who cares. He's human. He's not a spy. This whole charade to dethrone the founder of the biggest company in the world is a joke. I hope the NVDA board are not stupid or they should all resign.
Jensen's been lobbying hard for years to get the government to allow selling high-end GPUs to China. It's his position that this will discourage local competitors from getting big enough to meaningfully threaten nVidia's dominance.
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.
In such a time of the Epstein Files a better question is when did society become so immature to joke about such things like hoarding children in a thread regarding adultery?
I understand you're trying to discredit my post with hyperbole, but you could have tried with a bit more maturity.
At the time I didn't think it would happen because of impact on Nvidia's stock price, but at that point we didn't know about his second affair - with Kimberly Powell.
I'd suggest this latest revelation makes his position untenable, especially if the board found out about the second affair via a source other than Huang himself. He should have spilled the beans on that when the first affair came out, not that it would necessarily have saved him, but withholding the information - if that's what he did - should condemn him. It's another serious lapse in judgement and a failure of integrity that is not befitting of one of the most powerful corporate leaders on earth.
Goodness knows how his wife is feeling at this point. Certainly makes his apology from a couple of days back ring rather hollow.
Someone mentioned that the 2nd affair was known about by the board for a long time, and this is pretty common in boards. They don't really care, they just keep it in their pocket until they need the ammo to fire someone. It sounds right to me, affairs are very hard to keep secret for someone that public, and then this news dropped right after the first one.
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 bad as cheating is morally, we don't really know how his wife feels or if they had some open relationship type arrangement, [...]
If that's the case and she backs him up on this, then it's sordid but not cheating and _that_ part of the scandal can be overlooked, but espionage is a different matter.
Look around these threads. There's a great deal of suspicion of espionage, and then there's the actual spy that compromised him (so, espionage -- a CEO of that importance falling for a honeypot is a big deal in and of itself).
Suspicion of espionage based on what evidence? Also the "spy" isn't confirmed to be a spy, and there are other explanations that are more plausible in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
That matters I would think. A concern for a powerful person is whether knowledge of an affair could give someone else leverage. If you are keeping up appearances then that signals appearance (and secrets) have value.
Assuming the second affair claims are legit, he was also having an affair with a subordinate. That's a huge violation of many corporations' policies, for the average worker I'd expect its an immediate termination offense.
Yes, but at that level, and with less press attention, that sort of thing can be swept under a rug with enough $$$. Not defending it, just saying that it might not have been enough on its own. But cheating is definitely not very good since if you cheat on your spouse you might cheat on your employer.
Oh for sure, I assume these situations are swept under the rug until it becomes politically or financially useful for the board to leverage it.
I also fundamentally disagree with that being how rules are enforced though (I assume most people do). Rules either need to he enforced universally or not exist at all.
Human beings do as human beings are. You'll not get perfection. Which is not to justify anything here, but there was a Star Trek episode I remember where ensign Crusher stepped on some flowers on a planet where all rules violations begat the death penalty, no exceptions, so if your rule is "[r]ules either need to he enforced universally or not exist at all" then beware that you might end up with "rules do not exist at all", which is probably not really what you want. We will have some sweeping of things under the rug, and it's often unfair and unjust, but the alternative is not necessarily easy to stomach either when taken to absurdum.
In that example its just absurd to have a rule that stepping on flowers is illegal.
In the case of Jensen, my point is that many companies have rules against office romance, and the idea of sleeping with your subordinate is an obvious case that would be covered.
Some random middle manager would be fired on the spot if it became known they were sleeping with a subordinate. Such an open and shut case, based on my experience with various tech HR departments, should be enforced regardless of level in the company or the rule shouldn't exist at all.
Its the same problem we see today with insider trading. Its worth giving Martha Stewart house arrest for but not worth investigating members of Congress when they or their spouses seem to consistently best the market by trading before big news breaks.
Yeah I mean they don't seem to care about the moral implications or view it as poor judgement like some people here say, or else they would act when they find out. They just see ammunition..
By the way that is an interesting insider trading question.
You didn’t get a tip or give anyone a tip. You are not the only one whose decision affects the outcome. However you choose to divest yourself of shares by selling them, and then bring it up.
I am not a securities lawyer or an expert on case law. But would the board member be able to file a Form 4 and sell shares, before their actions that may affect the company?
Even knowing that the board is considering to fire him should fall under insider trading. Its one thing to speculate on board actions, its another to be on the board and know what you or other members may be planning to do.
The issue isn’t a moral one from a a company perspective, it’s a conflict of interests issue.
Dating a customer and subordinate potentially undermines objectivity in customer pricing, customer chip access, promotions, performance, etc. That’s why it’s explicitly forbidden in Nvidia (and most companies) code of conduct
this is like a theory and practice situation. in theory this is conflict of interest issue possibly undermines objectivity and so on. in practice Nvidia thrives and the man is a substantial reason of this. removing him will be plain stupid from the point of view of the company's performance.
But keeping him potentially exposes them legally. If she ever accused him of using his authority to coerce her into said relationship (purely hypothetical), the board is now complicit in covering up legit criminal behavior. This is why conflict of interest policy exists.
fair point but is it solvable by other means? like the board "to conduct investigation", discuss with this woman if she has been coerced and if she claims she is not — avoid firing him?
Why should we assume corporate codes are morally just though? I do not. In fact I would argue this is evidence that company codes are in a general sense draconian and/or disconnected from social reality under capitalism, etc.
Many (most?) companies have specific policies against romantic relationships in the office, especially with subordinates.
It isn't necessarily about morality if there are rules in place that all employees, c-suite or otherwise, are expected to follow.
I don't know Nvidia internal policy, but assuming their HR policies include such a stipulation it shouldn't be treated as a "rules for thee, not me for" situation.
> if they had some open relationship type arrangement
His public statement about hurting his family suggests they did not.
If I was in his position and I did, my statement would be something like "We're not monogamous, and we're both content with that arrangement. That was meant to stay private, and I'm sorry it came to public attention".
I think some people who are in open relationships of various sorts would handle it the way he did. Some amount of women are at least willing to tolerate a one-sided open relationship so long as it does not result in public humiliation. Most people in an open relationship, either partially or fully open, do not publicly advertise it as it's non-conventional.
I thought I covered the privacy angle well enough; once it's exposed, admitting it's cheating seems far worse to me than admitting it's an open relationship.
Cheating may be more conventional, but it's almost universally considered immoral.
Yeah, he should leave. Next earnings call is Nov 17, he needs to be out by then so that he is not a distraction (CFO could do the call).
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.
> who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy
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 remember the exact points, but several times during the conversation he dismissed analogies or ideas out of hand without rebuking any of their substance. The biggest one I remember is Dwarkesh likening GPUs to uranium or something. Jensen just shut it down like it was absurd without addressing the core premise of the comparison: that AI makes hardware dangerous in the same way that tech makes fissile material dangerous.
I can think of good counter arguments for most of the things Dwarkesh pushed on, the uranium bit included, but that makes it all the more frustrating. Jensen almost refused to respond with substance at times, choosing instead to just dismiss or argue an adjacent point.
But not with his employees or staff at companies he sells to, he’s the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, being paid billions, it’s not a big ask.
Random low level managers in a supermarket have been fired for sleeping with their staff.
Come on, there is a difference between a company having some Nvidia, and sleeping with a salesperson at a company with a massive conflict who wants to buy lots of your hardware and import it in China, possibly in breach of laws.
Do you really think this is the same as sleeping with a random person at a company which happens to use some Nvidia products?
People are using the argument that Larry Ellison, Brin, Bill Gates, and other tech moguls also did this and really didnt face major consequences.
When former Intel CEO Brian Kraznich did it he was on the chopping block and they used as an excuse to fire him.
But Nvidia's board has a history of being favorable to Jensen-- he hasn't done much wrong and typically they will reward performance. First responsibility is share-holders but there is a lot of self-interest at play. If they don't fire him they could face action by government or get sued by shareholders, if they do fire him they deflate the value of the share holdings further.
Now that Nvidia has blown up so much they think they can do fine without him -- but it can easily turn into the next Intel. It most likely won't 100x in two years but it can certainly crash if there are poor decisions made. If the CFO is rumored to replace him, changing leader from a founder engineer to a finance person isn't likely to go well.
He shouldn’t be shagging subordinates or senior employees of customers, basically. In a way, the alleged spy thing is just icing on the cake; well-run companies won’t tolerate the conflict of interest even without a spy being involved.
That banging customers and execs is a huge conflict of interest and security risk. There is a good reason if C-suites typically bang escorts instead of their colleagues.
> The fact that someone like Jensen Huang - who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy as opposed to a nitwit - can somehow completely implode his life in almost the most ridiculous way imaginable...
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...
> who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy
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.
Not really, there were other GPU manufacturers who aren't around any more and didn't get propped by those waves. There's no denying that the company was doing more things right than their competitors.
P.S. As a linux user I ascribe to the "FU nvidia" Linus' school of thought (because drivers) and I am happily running a Framework desktop instead of an nvidia rig. But credit where credit's due.
Not really, they were casting about for these kind of opportunities since day 1 in the early 00s, and pushing it with GPGPU talks at universities in the 2010s. And eventually it bore fruit.
Jensen has absolutely made his own luck here. They were in the right place waiting for the right time for decades before it hit.
Being smart and having full cognitive control over the animal part of your brain are completely orthogonal to each other - loads of intellectuals were also massive uncontrollable sexual deviants in one way or another.
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
I am not sure why several top comments here express sadness for the wife and affected loved ones. Do you actually feel bad? Why is it necessary to bring this pseudo sympathy to this topic? The topics are: what are the impacts to the stock market as a whole as there's a precarious arrangement at the moment with circular financing and Nvidia being a disproportionate piece of the stock market, national security and many other problems that affect hundreds of millions of people. But let us weep for the billionaire families of this soap drama. Get over yourselves.
> can somehow completely implode his life in almost the most ridiculous way imaginable
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..
EDIT: The fact that someone like Jensen Huang - who I'd previously considered to be an incredibly smart guy as opposed to a nitwit - can somehow completely implode his life in almost the most ridiculous way imaginable does give me some hope that at least some of the troublemaker ne'er do wells that have wielded so much power over us all over the past decade or so might also experience some just desserts in the not too distant future.
Jensen, like the rest of us are vulnerable to sin, temptation and suffering. No one leaves unscathed in this life
It's really interesting to me how unaggressive Jensen has been vs. his peers about tighting up control over his company (even during the recent years when he had huge leverage):
- His board setup is ... odd. He isn't Chairman of the Board (a role over 50% of Fortune 100 CEOs apparently hold). He seems to be responsible for Nvidia having a wierdly more egalitarian structure (all directors including him, are equal, with a designated lead independent director)
- His compensation (~$35M, primarily stock) is ... not up there with other tech CEOs
- He doesn't seem to have ever pushed for super-voting rights (he only has like ~3.5% of the company), but I guess that's hard to change once you IPO
I kinda wonder if this ends with him taking a month off, spending 12-18 months transitioning to a successor and ending as the chairman of the board or some such. He really does seem vital to the company (and thus the stock price).
I wonder how much of this is to do with how recent and explosive (relative to the history of the company) nvidia’s growth was. Like before the back to back booms of cryptocurrency and AI, the company was mainly selling products to gamers (iirc, their datacenter business was like 10% in 2019). It wasn’t that long ago that nvidia’s comparable companies were like… super micro and western digital, rather than Apple and Google.
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.
> super micro and western digital, rather than Apple and Google.
Well, bigger than that, but yeah. The early 2020 market cap for NVDA was ~150B, vs. ~1.3T for AAPL. They were the dominant semiconductor design house in an important but still fairly niche area of the PC marketplace.
Seems like much more sane governance for a publicly-traded company.
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.
Agreed. This is almost certainly a key to Nvidia's success. A lot of tech companies end up shooting themselves by putting too much power into the CEO, so that when the MBA takes over it turns into a corporate pillaging operation. Cut back on staff, ramp up on prices, maximize shareholder value at the cost of sane long term business practices.
> A lot of tech companies end up shooting themselves by putting too much power into the CEO, so that when the MBA takes over it turns into a corporate pillaging operation.
You're describing the opposite scenario. Generally it's the founders who get a special class of shares which allows them to retain control over the company even when they own <5% of the stock. Without that the company becomes controlled by Wall St. who appoint the MBA to loot and pillage.
Wall Street rarely appoints CEOs, that's the job of the board. And those members generally get there via investment into the company (usually before it goes public).
The MBAs get there often because it's who the board picks when the founder retires.
The board is chosen by the shareholders in the absence of some arrangement to the contrary (e.g. the special class of shares), and for a large publicly traded company, the major shareholders are generally going to be large investment funds, i.e. Wall St.
The main thing the special class of shares does is make it hard for them to oust the founder when the founder doesn't want to retire. Once they choose to, they either use their special votes to choose a worthy successor, or they stop caring and you get the default MBA you'd have had regardless.
> Honestly this arrangement (total comp aside) is how it should be for all these companies.
It's difficult to say based on the actual data in the past 10 years. The companies with dual shares seem to do well if we look at the companies of the same sizes.
> Google did the super control way before Zuck did.
Fair, I just remember the backlash to the FB arrangement more I guess. At least in the case of the Google Class B shares control was split between the two, but still, in my opinion, wildly inappropriate for the purpose of public markets.
I may have an antiquated view of how the capital market should work given how long I’ve worked in the space, but I’m strongly of the opinion that going public should be synonymous with surrendering private/individual control of the company. The company is effectively spreading the risk of failure, and I think the average investor doesn’t appreciate or understand the voting vs non-voting differentiation.
Then again there is a monstrous amount retail participants in the market don’t understand and frankly the SEC has done (in permitting these sorts of listings) a poor job of executing on its mandate.
> I’m strongly of the opinion that going public should be synonymous with surrendering private/individual control of the company. The company is effectively spreading the risk of failure
There's certainly a hypothetical principal-agent risk if someone holds voting power / control without holding any financial risk. In practice, holders of preferred voting power shares usually also have financial interests at stake, and thus are aligned with long-term financial interests.
Proposals that forbid holding control shares without parallel financial interests are more compelling than proposals to outlaw multiple share classes in public companies in general, but again, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find cases where having the law would force de-facto changes, and then the question becomes whether the law is worth its compliance costs.
Only if you think the definition of doing well is shareholder returns. I think it’s time for a different way of evaluating corporations, like their overall benefit to humanity. In that lens Meta is not doing well.
If you're not a shareholder you don't get to vote. If you are, vote! If you can't, but you chose to be a shareholder, well I'm not sure what the complaint is.
That's the idealized version. In practice, there are millions of people who never "chose" to invest but because of index funds have a significant portion of their retirement savings in companies lacking any real governance or oversight from the board that ostensibly represents their interests.
When you buy a fund, you’re choosing its management strategy (including about votes). If you don’t feel a fund represents your interests well, don’t buy it.
Sometimes your employer gives you a list of a couple dozen funds run by the same manager, and if you want your employer to contribute to your retirement savings, those are the options.
The parent comment isn't about dual-class companies, it's about the fact that many shareholders effectively don't get a choice in how the votes for their shares are cost.
I'm not against forbidding index/401K funds from investing in those companies since many people (including you) deem those companies as "bad". With this, shareholders would have choices as people intend.
I might even vote for it. I'm actively managing my money anyway and would've reaped benefits from these super-voting-share companies.
It's the counterfactual that is interesting. How well could this company have done in the other timeline where the founder didn't retain all that control?
The scenario in which dual-share structures can be a problem is if things don't go well. Specifically they greatly limit the shareholder's ability to protect their investment by removing the CEO. That's why it's considered poor governance.
The counter argument is that active external governance can be bad for the long term prospects of the company. Optimizing for quarterly results, activists investors threatening and getting sweetheart deals that are good for them and bad for the rest of the company.
In the end it comes down to leverage, Zuck famously didn’t sell early so people were pounding down the door to invest when they finally got the opportunity.
I'm imagining a world where you don't get to fuck up as bad as FB did spending multiple years chasing the Metaverse while letting their platform rot, relying purely on plateauing ad revenue.
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...)
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There are two actual taquerias less than 100 feet from where I am writing this comment that make food in a completely different league from Taco Bell (which is neither authentically Mexican nor gourmet). It is, however, a shining beacon of multicultural deliciousness and a bona fide American institution. I will not stand for Taco Bell slander and strongly encourage you to reconsider your stance.
A flat structure means nobody is a clear competitor with Huang for the top job. If Huang was able to get his way as was, adopting a more traditional structure would have just made somebody else a significantly more powerful #2. A lack of a clear successor might make the transfer of power rougher unfortunately.
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.
He's well compensated because he owns a lot of the company, much at much cheaper valuations, right?
For all the complaints about him you can't argue he hasn't delivered a lot of value. Lots of corp CEOs make more with falling company performance and valuation, because they aren't really paid for performance.
Jensen cooperated with china well before the affair. I'm pretty sure her being a chinese spy did not change anything in his decisions. His position on China did not change for years. And he is right. As long as we export chips to china it's really hard for them to invest into developing their own chips from scratch. It's just too expensive. If that door closes they will be incentivised to go for it that much harder. As it is right now they are one step behind us but in the future this won't be the case anymore and since we don't have hardware manufactuing experts in US it's just a matter of time we'll get surpassed. Sure we can bet on AI to overcome that but it's way easier for china to get a software stack going then for us to get hardware manufacturing back.
China doesn't need nvidia's chips, they have plenty of in-house chip designers and there is not much they can gain from nVidia.
What China really needs is semiconductor equipment like ASML EUV and more precisely the Zeiss mirrors.
so all noise about Huang affair is just pretext to steal control over the multi-trillion $ company built by a Chinese immigrant and hand it over to a white American with ties to Intelligence and deep state (aka Larry Ellison or some other person like that).
A warning story to all immigrants who think they will ever be accepted as proper Americans, despite not having a white skin
I agree. Basically NVIDIA is being wrestle to be controlled by westerners. Smell a lot like CIA operation. Anyway, China already got their NVIDIA gpus and the AI gap now close in to less than 6mths. Deepseek 1017 incredible fast and near parity with last year greatest frontier model. And all these is still on 7nm Huawei gpus. When they transition to 3nm end of this year, Deepseek 5 likely on parity especially when they have more gpus to do 10 trillion parameter models. I think is blessing for Jensen. He will exit with his money, maybe do something like Steve Jobs. And whoever taken over will be in unlucky phase of AI burst. Is like that Chinese idion where breaking a leg saved the sob from death military camp.
Jensen effectively is Nvidia, and is likely the only person that truly knows the company - this is what ties him to his place and of that doesn't ensure it I don't think anything else would. Almost all significant successes Nvidia had were results from direct action from him, and he truly knows the tech
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.
As another comment thread brought up, his children are both working pretty nice sinecures, which would have been huge negative press during any kind of corporate governance struggle. I don’t think it was even widely known, I was a Jensen fanboy and I just now learned about it.
Here's why Jensen is critical to Nvidia as well as the industry:
Without Jensen Huang's vision, Nvidia might have remained primarily a graphics chip maker, and the deep learning revolution would not have arrived when it did. Long before deep neural networks took off, Huang backed the use of Nvidia GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computing, including the development of CUDA. In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used Nvidia GPUs and CUDA to train AlexNet, whose breakthrough performance helped ignite the modern deep learning boom. Nvidia's investment in programmable GPUs helped make that breakthrough possible.
The critical vision was that GPUs could become a platform for computing beyond graphics—and that Nvidia should invest in making them programmable before a large market for that use existed.
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.
You are definitely overselling him. If you are a hardware maker, you naturally want to sell to as many markets as possible. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith.
the only things the "AI industry" has done is price normal people out of computing, give justification for companies to lay people off, fill the internet with slop, contribute to centralizing capital, and add a transaction cost to everything people do with their computers.
i couldn't care less about the "industry" that focuses on profits or the "nation" that is more committed to overseas wars than providing basic infrastructure.
AI is strategic, so the government pays for it behind the curtain. Everything the government buys is taken out the hands of the poorest people. The rest pays more for what is left.
This simply shows how the real tax is government spending, not how it gets the money. It can "tax the rich", print money, or take debt, but when it spends, it takes your computer, your fuel, your house, your car, your furniture, and your food.
> Huang backed the use of Nvidia GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computing, including the development of CUDA
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?
Nobody is irreplaceable. And this includes Jensen Huang.
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.
didn't the very early deep learning frameworks use opengl and shader constructs? I recall reading something to that effect.
If my memory right, it was around time when opengl allowed programmable shaders to render to texture. It was limited to floating point numbers and very short programs.
Nope. These are inexplicable things that point to Jensen allegedly collaborating with a foreign actor and nation. The board should punish Huang and save our industry and the nation. Plain and simple.
Viewing people like this is unhealthy. Nvidia could have failed instead of 3dfx, and that it didn't involved some luck, not just the magical clairvoyance of one individual.
And anyway, whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.
The design of cuda is basically just brookGPU from stanford (supported by IBM, Sony, ATI, NVIDIA and DARPA), CUDA isn't so important beyond the fact that a hardware company can use it as a moat if they want to be anti-competitive. Google bought PeakStream, intel bought RapidMind.
The situation only exists because regulators in the 80s-20s believe that hardware should be a sanctioned monopoly. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, and Microsoft were all involved. If it's not Jensen it'd be someone else, there is a good reason NVIDIA is called NVIDIA and not JENSEN.
There's a nearly 20 year lead up to the current CUDA dominance including working with developers, but on the gaming side there's also a parallel with the dominance of nvidia's gaming tech versus how much ATi/AMD were able to get their tech to stick. Nv invested not just in capable hardware then throw it over the fence to leave developers to figure out, but software solutions easily integrated by others and engineer support to show off their hardware in the best light.
More directly on topic, I can't help thinking this is also a question of "what have you done for me lately" versus "what are you going to do for me tomorrow". It's hard to doubt he and the company as a whole have executed a vision and reaped the rewards, but have they been planning and doing the groundwork for another act.
> planning and doing the groundwork for another act.
A nontrivial part of which is pumping up an infrastructure bubble with NVIDIA money. It wouldn't shock me if that very aggressive and increasingly questioned strategy plays a role in whatever happens to Jensen.
Back in 2002-2003 there were folks attempting to get GPUs to do non graphics tasks because of the amount of potential compute available. I recall running a sorting algorithm on a Radeon at the time. It wasn't quick but it worked.
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.
Nvidia made that idea possible by making GeForce 3 in 2001, we all experimented with GPGPU because Nvidia already created the opportunity. And at the time, using a tiny fraction of huge GPUs (of all things) for general-purpose computation was an absolutely ridiculous idea never taken seriously by most people, even us who experimented with it.
He's an extremely skilled shovel seller, but let's not pretend he foresaw the reason for every hole being dug. Most universities taught CUDA classes way back. Did they also see deep learning and cryptocurrencies coming? Supercomputers did exist and where all about FLOPS and that was a legit market. Intel released their Xeon Phi cards around the same time. Ironically, while deep learning started with consumer graphics cards, it could have started on super computers and right now it's back to super computers anyway.
NVIDIA went nowhere for much of its history. Just look at its stock chart for most of its history.
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.
I feel like you're overstating NVidia's influence. OpenCL with AMD GPUs was also just fine around that time, we were all figuring out how much you could port and get a crazy speed up for not much effort. NVidia's ecosystem was particularly annoying to deal with on Linux. Maybe we'd have gotten AlexNet a year later without Cuda.
My problem isn't the affairs, but more so the potential complicity in violating the embargoes against some of his products going to China. I don't necessarily agree that the embargo is a good idea, but as long as its the law, we need to have a level playing field and not let companies benefit from breaking the law.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Luckily I am divorced and self-employed so I can play with Chinese models all I want.
but tbh I doubt it.
He knowingly helped advance China’s AI ambitions against the direction of congress. He got caught selling 7.5 Billion dollars of restricted chips to china.
Also he cheated on his wife with some Chinese woman, which is a totally separate and unrelated fuck up.
If you seriously think he got tricked by some random woman who batted her eyes, you are out of your mind. He founded the fucking company, he isn’t some clueless executive. He’s also not senile and he doesn’t have dementia. This is the only viable excuse for him to use, but it’s complete bullshit.
Think about it: He betrayed his longtime wife, who by all accounts supported him from the beginning. He betrayed his company and its shareholders. And he betrayed his country (BOTH of his countries?) who specifically forbid the chips to be sold to china. He’s fucked
That’s a stretch. He’s the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. Hearing that he had an affair, or multiple affairs, shouldn’t come as a surprise. The only person here who’s humiliated himself is Jensen, for having an affair with a spy. He was too high and mighty to take the simple route and pay for high end escorts who make you feel good for a couple of hours, and then move on with your life. No, he decided he needed to have a whole relationship on the side.
Nobody would have cared if he simply had a harem of mistresses.
I guess what I'm saying is, I'd be happy to be publicly cucked in exchange for at least a billion dollars.
Its best to not assume anything in regards to their relationship.
A billionaire being fired is not that much of a big deal. There’s nothing in the world that’ll make them worry about what will be their next business jet.
As for him being good friends with Trump, it doesn’t say much. Epstein was one of his besties and he’s still dead.
(all sourced from [0])
Well, they had a spat in 2000 because Epstein was poaching Trump's staff but he remained a member until 2007 (or possibly longer, depending on who you believe.)
> They famously hated each other
In 2002, Trump said "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with." I don't know, it doesn't sound very "hatey" to me.
In 2003, he sent his birthday message of "A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret." Still not getting much "hate" from this relationship.
I'll give you, maybe, from 2007 onwards they fell out of friendship but even then it's not clear what actually went on.
Maybe once we get a fuller release of the Epstein Files we'll know more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Donald_Trump_a...
Before that they seem very much to have been friends.
That's a great metaphor.
"A lede is the introductory section in journalism and thus to bury the lede refers to hiding the most important and relevant pieces of a story within other distracting information."
Burying the lead in the journalism would actually be burying the lead (like the metal) so they aren't even pronounced the same. Many people make the same mistake you do so this misconception proliferates.
It's often the Board of Directors that goes and the CEO retains control in the end.
Why not just sell to not-sanctioned entities, ensure compliance to the best of your abilities and otherwise keep your head down? Again, wasn't like they struggled to find buyers for their chips.
Considering Megaspeed, I now see this in a very different light. Him cheating is personal and I wish the affected members of any family of a cheater the best, but not relevant for us outsiders.
Being honey trapped very bad securities wise, but he'd be a victim (and evidence for why we shouldn't discount Mistral in the frontier lab race [1]). If sanctions avoidance went all the way to the top, that is hard to negate even for a board that is interested in keeping him.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
[1] https://time.com/archive/7146565/hollandes-popularity-goes-u...
The only person that should be able to fire him is their spouse and only of their mariage/relationship.
Why was it wrong of Weinstein to proposition possible actresses working?
It’s not hard to see that if you’re on a position of power over someone you must keep it professional.
In the case of Weinstein, they identified as victims.
Brining the conversation back to context, no such case has been proven for Jensen.
If you can, I would be grateful if you could explain how it is necessarily unethical and immoral for the CEO of a company to ask an employee to have sex.
In most juridictions there are laws against abuse of authority which applies if it is the case. How well they are enforced is a different matter but unless there is a victim I don't think there is a problem from a legal and ethical point of view. It is just not very smart, especially if you are cheating someone and/or are a public person.
It is usually frowned upon in companies because of the complications that arise when people are dating.
For example it risks confidential information leaking or projects being delayed due to relationship dynamics.
Cheating on your wife cannot be a reason for a company to fire you, its your personal life. Dating an employee that works under you is also not a fireable offense if you disclose it to avoid any conflict of interest that affects other employees.
Having affairs with multiple employees that work under you + potential links to a chinese spy + not having any disclosure and showing a pattern of doing this = makes you look unhinged and untrustable. In that case, the board can move to remove you as they have enough cause.
It is a special case because of the people involved but it is par for course in terms of how corporate governance works. There is no ethical reason required as long as they follow the internal policies and the law.
And yes company policy doesn't supersede the law but it can be used to fire you if you break it. They just can't like jail you but they can decide who to fire or hire based on their policies.
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.
Their main problem is not the lower efficiency, but the limited capacity of production, caused by the fact that they cannot buy SOTA manufacturing equipment.
This will indeed slow them down for some time, but it is likely that sometime between 2030 and 2032 they will become able to use EUV lithography in mass production, eliminating the principal advantage of US companies like NVIDIA. After that, they will no longer be constrained by the capacity of production for GPUs and CPUs.
I consider rather doubtful that USA will possess advanced AGI before that.
Even with the smaller amount of GPUs that they can use, I do not see any sign that they will trail by much the AI research from USA.
They will build this capacity anyways, delaying them to 2030 would be a massive win.
I don't know what your definition of "advanced AGI" is, but if it's the target for a final "win" to the AI race, I think you need to reassess what the current capabilities really are, we're still in the infancy or toddler stages of AGI at best. You should also take a look at how fast Chinese labs are closing the gap, with greater efficiency compared to US labs.
The US mindset of abundance and "scaling laws" is not going to have them win the race. It's not a sustainable strategy.
We've seen the results of this just this year when its turned out China has enough oil reserves to buffer the reduced output from the Iran war. China had been bringing in Iran/Venezuela/Russia oil for years despite U.S./EU sanctions. That's not spy craft. That's China looking after itself and not bowing to western hegimony.
Nobody apart form US has issue with current China - if folks in US are getting the idea from US media that whole world is on some jihad against China thats laughable - nope its just US, yet another failed effort that will backfire way worse than doing nothing, ie like Iran. We don't want part in that. China is not expansionist unlike russia, it doesn't have that desperate need to promote their regime and way of doing things on whole world and murder anybody rejecting it. This fearmongering is simply not working outside US borders.
Now in the past there were many gentlemen agreements between nations plus the risk of aircraft carrier group coming your way or getting kicked out of SWIFT network, but that has been overused recently so nobody cares that much.
* US intelligence agencies reportedly monitored Alice Huang for over a year and concluded she was passing information directly to Beijing.
* A memo overseen by Marco Rubio reportedly concluded that China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited her to gather intelligence on Jensen Huang and potentially influence Nvidia's chip exports.
* The FBI reportedly warned US lawmakers nearly a year ago that she might be supplying information to China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
In the spy world, this is about as close to irrefutable evidence as it gets. We know that any strategically important or large company in China requires Party members in positions of authority inside the company. The CCP exerts direct power over these companies in a multitude of ways. Megaspeed is a clear example of the kind of company they oversee. To assume anything other than Megaspeed being in clear cooperation with the CCP would be a rejection of everything we know about how companies operate in China.
* She was a director and controlling shareholder of Megaspeed, which US authorities investigated over suspected diversion of restricted Nvidia chips to China.
I would not be surprised if Alice Huang and others were coordinating chip purchases through financing backed by the China government. But that's not spying. Thats just business.
I think you've made up your mind on this matter and you're not going to let reality get in the way.
My point is simply what I said at the beginning of this thread: "In effort for us to see clear eyed."
NVIDIA is the undisputed champion of AI hardware because of the advanced chip node access ban, ensuring no Chinese competition in this area for years. In return NVIDIA was banned from selling their chips to China so that the US holds the state of the art in AI models as well. Selling chips through back channels is a betrayal, spies or not.
Yes, with or without approved transfer of tech to China, China will eventually catch up. Would you rather this eventual tech normalization happen through a process of growing animosity or respectful cooperation?
I don't have a dog in this fight on specifics regarding Nvidia chips. People on all sides will respond as they see fit.
False dichotomy. We have plenty of examples of selling tech to China which eventually leads to the opposite of respectful cooperation. I'm not anti-china but it has nothing to do with any of this. What was the point of bringing it up, it doesn't make your argument any more compelling. It's not within the expected logical standard that is expected on HN.
Let's get back to the original point that you made, which is parroting the idea that selling leading technology somehow prevents China from accelerating their pursuit of it. Do you have any evidence of that working? Or are you just parroting what Jensen has been saying because he wants to sell his hardware in the Chinese market?
I doubt that you actually even believe what you are parroting. Would you say that giving china our stealth fighter technology would cause a longer term reliance on us and stop their pursuit of stealth tech?
Sure - jet engines. China still can't replicate the material for turbine blade and has to buy them from other countries.
They've had decades from the first aircraft sales to do the R&D to make their own blades. They've failed so far.
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.
You can get like 200% margin on selling GPUs to PRC smugglers in Taiwan. It's a very busy industry with lots of players so the margin gets spread around. Recently a big ring of them was busted and sent to prison here so most people try to have as many middlemen between them and the guy that puts it on the boat as possible, because apparently the prison sentence is quite long.
I had someone offer me 10x whatever I bought for (not even MSRP just whatever I paid) for "as many GPUs as I could get my hands on." I asked hundreds? Yeah. Thousands? "Can you get us thousands???" It's fuckin nutty.
Finally, because he's of Han Chinese origin, I bet they thought they could get the media to coordinate a narrative around him that will force him out. Of course, he sort of made it easy to pin something on him.
There are a lot of Game of Thrones going on in AI. Everyone is jockeying. Everyone has different incentives. Super high stakes game.
That’s what I think it’s going on… the “allegations” are ridiculous at best. He is the most “normal” of the bunch by a long short.
He's operating in a highly charged political environment in which his credibility is a key asset. He can't effectively advocate for NVIDIA's interests if his credibility is damaged.
And this goes directly to his credibility on the most politically charged issue of all: The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China, and NVIDIA's role in it.
I agree it's a tragedy for NVIDIA, he seems to have been exceptional as a CEO, it's just too late now.
I think whoever is next will not always have the affinity for gaming. Any finance person who looks at the unit economics of gaming would conclude that they should allocate next to no chip supply to gaming GPUs.
An RTX 5090 is the same die size as a server GPU.
An RTX 5090 is a reticle sized chip.
nvidia got their strong position in AI now by providing CUDA to researchers who couldn't afford their own supercomputing cluster. and now the entirety of machine learning revolves around CUDA.
once you fixate on the business and lock out the masses, you instantly elect to become a fossil like IBM.
And that is the NVIDIA's secret sauce. Historically there were bunch of parallel processors comparable to NVIDIA GPU, none of them survived without presence in gaming and entertainment.
Did you know that NEC had a line of 2-slot GPUs with 48GB of HBM VRAM with 1TB/s bandwidth since 2017, that had gone absolutely nowhere? Probably not, because it was never sold as gamer toys. It was for lucrative serious customers only, and nobody bought it.
Only Huang played the game in the way it's meant to be played. Apparently nobody else can.
> WSJ reports that details of the affair were known to top officials, including SoS Rubio and CIA Ratcliffe, “going back to last year,” and were brought to President Trump; the administration took no action to blacklist Megaspeed.
Does this this sound like people who want to bring him down or people who wanted to protect him?
Is it so unreasonable to expect American tech companies to 'ignore' the market of a country that is supplying materiel to the countries that America is currently engaged in a proxy war, and actual war with?
If not, exactly what would China have to do for this to be a reasonable expectation, and something that we would expect American companies to do under their own volition?
What the fuck are you talking about - it's obvious this guy broke the export bans - the affairs are just a media circus to distract from that fact - not only should he be ousted he should be going to jail if there's any sort of legal system in the US left...
This isn’t about right or wrong. If he knowingly broke the law he should be punished.
There are a few major differences. Apple's devices aren't under export control so Apple takes no risk selling. Nvidia had to take legal risks to do this.
On the stock side, Apple devices are almost never supply constrained. Nvidia's never get to sit on the shelf. Nvidia can jack up the prices to the sky and still not keep up with demand.
Between these 2 things, the risk to sell to China looks like more than only profit motivated.
China has all the incentive in the world to disrupt a major US AI firm to slow the US down.
Pretending there was no China revenue books?? That's an insanely huge financial lie
Absolutely. Since the midterms, many politicians see going after Jensen as a way to appease the pitchfork mobs of anti-AI/data center voters (it doesn't matter if that position makes no sense).
So was Huang playing along as part of some other US-Chinese plot?
Was he a pawn, or go-between, in US-Chinese relations.
Maybe the cheating was a cover, or pawn with benefits?
It may be the case that his ouster helps certain people. That has nothing whatsoever to do with how the blame should be apportioned or what the sensible course of action is.
That she is a "foreign agent" is not an established fact whatsoever. Sure does make for a good headline though, especially if you want to oust Jensen.
- he lied about one affair
- That affair was with a major customer
- the other one was with a direct subordinate
BK fafo’d at Intel with a report and that was that.
Jensen seemingly took that as a challenge and doubled down.
If this level of ego is what’s necessary for this system to thrive, let it all burn to the ground.
There are many regulations, sanctions and restrictions I disagree with. That doesn’t mean I can or should try to bypass them on a large scale.
He may have been right, doesn’t mean he gets to break the law.
And then news came out that he was having an affair with a direct-report. Unfavorable and pretty unforgivable even before the spy story.
Why not CEOs at $73B market cap companies? And increase it with inflation?
I assume that "what they used it for" means "what they could do after they pwnt the computer in the TV". If that's what you meant, then _if_ there is at least one reasonably easy way to pwn the computer in that TV without really requiring interaction from the TV's user, then it's 110% fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the TV does out of the box and what it has the capability to do. Why? Because if it's easy to pwn, then it's likely to already be pwnt.
But. Even if there wasn't a reasonably easy way to pwn the TV, I'd say that it's still very fair to not extremely clearly distinguish between what the thing does now and what it can be made to do, because what it does tomorrow is up to the manufacturer... which has pretty clearly demonstrated that they give zero shits about the privacy of the purchasers of their consumer-grade TVs. Inevitably, the manufacturer will make the TV do everything it can do in order to continually squeeze as many pennies from that initial sale as is possible.
> People who care about hardware reviews have to go somewhere else.
You've probably missed the handful of videos where Burke is all like «We'd love to review hardware, but it's so damn expensive that no one can really buy it. Why spend time reviewing things that people can't really buy? So, we investigate this stuff because it's informative and important.»
But yeah, GN doesn't do many hardware reviews these days.
I also pray* that said reality has not breached an event horizon; blotted from the known universe, never to be seen again.
*figuratively
- https://www.youtube.com/@GamersNexus/posts 1 day ago.
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.
Which suggests the formal assessment is it wasn't - they were investigating Megaspeed for sanction busting via chip smuggling, happened to notice the affair, and found nothing concrete.
Note sanction busting by buying lots of Nvidia chips and renting them to Chinese companies is perfectly legal ( and very lucrative ).
So that's the evidence about the security situation.
The real question is why leak the memo to the press now - and I don't pretend here to know the answer - but if you think it's about suppression of some serious espionage event I think you are wrong.
Has it crippled their AI charge? No. Hindered perhaps - but things like the rental loophole show how stupid it was.
What is has done is supercharge the internal chinese chip market ( which has endangered NVidia's global dominance ).
For example:
https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2026/9/hc-lingqu-agent-ai
Where is the evidence that nobody in the security services did not know ? There is already history where Security services are not independent, and stuff that will be investigated depends on the current gouverement, what the timing of the leak seems to suggest.
I am with you until here. Since cuda they have had a strangle hold on the market. It's like Pepsi vs R.C. Cola, their nearest competitor is miles behind.
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 withing 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.
He wanted to make sure that all the open source AI tooling is as married to CUDA at the hip as it could possibly be. He didn't want the Chinese to come up with a working open source CUDA alternative which was just as good, and just as usable by the non-Chinese.
Nvidia's playbook was to make sure everybody was focused on competing against each other and not against Nvidia. This meant larger allocations to small players than would seem rational at first glance, investing into those players to make sure they survived and could compete against the hyperscalers and frontier labs, spending effort and human capital on optimizations which made open models run better on Nvidia hardware, making them more competitive with closed offerings, that sort of thing. This was a big part of Jensen's strategy.
We were already into personal liability for board members territory (and possibly GC) BEFORE the latest allegations.
LLMs are seen by politicians as a national security issue.
Better models = better cyber offense/defense, etc.
But I ask out of ignorance, I’ve never been inside a Big Corp.
NVidia is Jensen's company.
> The State of Utopia is an AI-governed nation with goals that include acting in the best interests of all our citizens.
2, China isolating Taiwan with an ongoing military drill https://www.reuters.com/world/china/taiwan-says-china-is-con... https://maritime-executive.com/article/analysis-china-s-nava...
3, Trump meeting Xi next week on the 18th https://www.euronews.com/2026/11/09/donald-trump-plans-to-me...
well, they do this like 6 times a year, it just usually doesn't make the news
He's had the job since before GTA 1 started development.
We could certainly do with more competition in the space!
[1] https://principus.si/2024/12/28/tae-kim-the-nvidia-way-jense...
This is another way of saying all the other people designing the chips, and everything else that goes into the company, are meaningless. The cult of CEO is out of hand
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo
How much did he donate to the ballroom? Did he get the investigation by the government shelved because of that payment? What's the real story behind the 15% revenue share deal he did with Trump?
How corrupt has Jensen actually been?
next move is navigating polycules.
There needs to be an else?
The fact that he slept with a suspected Chinese spy is not a crime either. Now, if he has enabled industrial espionage, helped circumvent sanctions or broke other laws it is a different matter. But marital infidelity seems insufficient as a cause to fire a CEO of a highly successful company.
I did not follow the story much, so might be missing some important information.
He's not being prosecuted; the legality or not of his actions is meaningless.
> His wife may divorce
Which could be awkward for NVDA if there is no prenup as I've seen reported.
> But marital infidelity seems insufficient as a cause to fire a CEO
If that infidelity opens you up to blackmail, it definitely gets up there as a fireable reason.
where are those epstein files, by the way ?
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.
Does he have a secret bunker full of preschoolers?
Is he working for the lizard people?
Do nvidia GPUs exist?
With what we know, these are all fair questions to ask now.
I understand you're trying to discredit my post with hyperbole, but you could have tried with a bit more maturity.
Who cares? Consequences have actions, and hopefully that's not just based on which choice is gonna make someone the most money.
At the time I didn't think it would happen because of impact on Nvidia's stock price, but at that point we didn't know about his second affair - with Kimberly Powell.
I'd suggest this latest revelation makes his position untenable, especially if the board found out about the second affair via a source other than Huang himself. He should have spilled the beans on that when the first affair came out, not that it would necessarily have saved him, but withholding the information - if that's what he did - should condemn him. It's another serious lapse in judgement and a failure of integrity that is not befitting of one of the most powerful corporate leaders on earth.
Goodness knows how his wife is feeling at this point. Certainly makes his apology from a couple of days back ring rather hollow.
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.
If that's the case and she backs him up on this, then it's sordid but not cheating and _that_ part of the scandal can be overlooked, but espionage is a different matter.
What evidence have you seen that espionage has taken place? I've seen people speculating about espionage, but very little evidence to back this up.
I also fundamentally disagree with that being how rules are enforced though (I assume most people do). Rules either need to he enforced universally or not exist at all.
In the case of Jensen, my point is that many companies have rules against office romance, and the idea of sleeping with your subordinate is an obvious case that would be covered.
Some random middle manager would be fired on the spot if it became known they were sleeping with a subordinate. Such an open and shut case, based on my experience with various tech HR departments, should be enforced regardless of level in the company or the rule shouldn't exist at all.
Its the same problem we see today with insider trading. Its worth giving Martha Stewart house arrest for but not worth investigating members of Congress when they or their spouses seem to consistently best the market by trading before big news breaks.
You didn’t get a tip or give anyone a tip. You are not the only one whose decision affects the outcome. However you choose to divest yourself of shares by selling them, and then bring it up.
I am not a securities lawyer or an expert on case law. But would the board member be able to file a Form 4 and sell shares, before their actions that may affect the company?
Polymarket prices in a 32% chance of divorce by end of March which is about a third of his chances of getting fired over the same timespan, so...
https://polymarket.com/event/jensen-huang-divorce-in-2026
WHO CARES. sorry, I don't meant to be mad at you. But we need to stop using the wisdom of the crowd when such crowd is... that crowd.
Dating a customer and subordinate potentially undermines objectivity in customer pricing, customer chip access, promotions, performance, etc. That’s why it’s explicitly forbidden in Nvidia (and most companies) code of conduct
It isn't necessarily about morality if there are rules in place that all employees, c-suite or otherwise, are expected to follow.
I don't know Nvidia internal policy, but assuming their HR policies include such a stipulation it shouldn't be treated as a "rules for thee, not me for" situation.
His public statement about hurting his family suggests they did not.
If I was in his position and I did, my statement would be something like "We're not monogamous, and we're both content with that arrangement. That was meant to stay private, and I'm sorry it came to public attention".
Then I'm just eccentric instead of an asshole.
Cheating may be more conventional, but it's almost universally considered immoral.
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 can think of good counter arguments for most of the things Dwarkesh pushed on, the uranium bit included, but that makes it all the more frustrating. Jensen almost refused to respond with substance at times, choosing instead to just dismiss or argue an adjacent point.
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.
But not with his employees or staff at companies he sells to, he’s the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, being paid billions, it’s not a big ask.
Random low level managers in a supermarket have been fired for sleeping with their staff.
Do you really think this is the same as sleeping with a random person at a company which happens to use some Nvidia products?
When former Intel CEO Brian Kraznich did it he was on the chopping block and they used as an excuse to fire him.
But Nvidia's board has a history of being favorable to Jensen-- he hasn't done much wrong and typically they will reward performance. First responsibility is share-holders but there is a lot of self-interest at play. If they don't fire him they could face action by government or get sued by shareholders, if they do fire him they deflate the value of the share holdings further.
Now that Nvidia has blown up so much they think they can do fine without him -- but it can easily turn into the next Intel. It most likely won't 100x in two years but it can certainly crash if there are poor decisions made. If the CFO is rumored to replace him, changing leader from a founder engineer to a finance person isn't likely to go well.
That banging customers and execs is a huge conflict of interest and security risk. There is a good reason if C-suites typically bang escorts instead of their colleagues.
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.
NVidia was at the right place at the right time, nothing else.
P.S. As a linux user I ascribe to the "FU nvidia" Linus' school of thought (because drivers) and I am happily running a Framework desktop instead of an nvidia rig. But credit where credit's due.
Jensen has absolutely made his own luck here. They were in the right place waiting for the right time for decades before it hit.
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..
Jensen, like the rest of us are vulnerable to sin, temptation and suffering. No one leaves unscathed in this life
What is it about a Jensen.
Was anything stolen?
Is he like a Steve Jobs?
- His board setup is ... odd. He isn't Chairman of the Board (a role over 50% of Fortune 100 CEOs apparently hold). He seems to be responsible for Nvidia having a wierdly more egalitarian structure (all directors including him, are equal, with a designated lead independent director)
- His compensation (~$35M, primarily stock) is ... not up there with other tech CEOs
- He doesn't seem to have ever pushed for super-voting rights (he only has like ~3.5% of the company), but I guess that's hard to change once you IPO
I kinda wonder if this ends with him taking a month off, spending 12-18 months transitioning to a successor and ending as the chairman of the board or some such. He really does seem vital to the company (and thus the stock price).
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.
Well, bigger than that, but yeah. The early 2020 market cap for NVDA was ~150B, vs. ~1.3T for AAPL. They were the dominant semiconductor design house in an important but still fairly niche area of the PC marketplace.
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.
You're describing the opposite scenario. Generally it's the founders who get a special class of shares which allows them to retain control over the company even when they own <5% of the stock. Without that the company becomes controlled by Wall St. who appoint the MBA to loot and pillage.
The MBAs get there often because it's who the board picks when the founder retires.
The main thing the special class of shares does is make it hard for them to oust the founder when the founder doesn't want to retire. Once they choose to, they either use their special votes to choose a worthy successor, or they stop caring and you get the default MBA you'd have had regardless.
> Honestly this arrangement (total comp aside) is how it should be for all these companies.
It's difficult to say based on the actual data in the past 10 years. The companies with dual shares seem to do well if we look at the companies of the same sizes.
Fair, I just remember the backlash to the FB arrangement more I guess. At least in the case of the Google Class B shares control was split between the two, but still, in my opinion, wildly inappropriate for the purpose of public markets.
I may have an antiquated view of how the capital market should work given how long I’ve worked in the space, but I’m strongly of the opinion that going public should be synonymous with surrendering private/individual control of the company. The company is effectively spreading the risk of failure, and I think the average investor doesn’t appreciate or understand the voting vs non-voting differentiation.
Then again there is a monstrous amount retail participants in the market don’t understand and frankly the SEC has done (in permitting these sorts of listings) a poor job of executing on its mandate.
There's certainly a hypothetical principal-agent risk if someone holds voting power / control without holding any financial risk. In practice, holders of preferred voting power shares usually also have financial interests at stake, and thus are aligned with long-term financial interests.
Proposals that forbid holding control shares without parallel financial interests are more compelling than proposals to outlaw multiple share classes in public companies in general, but again, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find cases where having the law would force de-facto changes, and then the question becomes whether the law is worth its compliance costs.
When you buy a fund, you’re choosing its management strategy (including about votes). If you don’t feel a fund represents your interests well, don’t buy it.
Sometimes your employer gives you a list of a couple dozen funds run by the same manager, and if you want your employer to contribute to your retirement savings, those are the options.
Banning these super-voting companies from 401(k) and index funds would have deprived many low- and middle-income people of those superb returns.
But hey less competition for the houses and stuff, right? We don't want more average people to enter the upper middle class.
I'm not against forbidding index/401K funds from investing in those companies since many people (including you) deem those companies as "bad". With this, shareholders would have choices as people intend.
I might even vote for it. I'm actively managing my money anyway and would've reaped benefits from these super-voting-share companies.
It's not really surprising that companies that print huge amounts of money with fairly little need for funding do well.
The scenario in which dual-share structures can be a problem is if things don't go well. Specifically they greatly limit the shareholder's ability to protect their investment by removing the CEO. That's why it's considered poor governance.
In the end it comes down to leverage, Zuck famously didn’t sell early so people were pounding down the door to invest when they finally got the opportunity.
I understand Zuck made many failed bets but he had a few big bets paid off. And those big bets paid off so well that FB is a $1.4 trillion company.
It's like people here are still stuck in school where you have to score A+ on every subject.
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.
I won't trust anything you say. I have seen what I needed to.
There are two actual taquerias less than 100 feet from where I am writing this comment that make food in a completely different league from Taco Bell (which is neither authentically Mexican nor gourmet). It is, however, a shining beacon of multicultural deliciousness and a bona fide American institution. I will not stand for Taco Bell slander and strongly encourage you to reconsider your stance.
Think outside the bun.
But I disagree with "They deserved to win the franchise wars on the strength of the Chalupa alone".
The Doritos taco is one of the best inventions
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-...
For all the complaints about him you can't argue he hasn't delivered a lot of value. Lots of corp CEOs make more with falling company performance and valuation, because they aren't really paid for performance.
Lies are one thing, but murder?
What China really needs is semiconductor equipment like ASML EUV and more precisely the Zeiss mirrors.
so all noise about Huang affair is just pretext to steal control over the multi-trillion $ company built by a Chinese immigrant and hand it over to a white American with ties to Intelligence and deep state (aka Larry Ellison or some other person like that).
A warning story to all immigrants who think they will ever be accepted as proper Americans, despite not having a white skin
Another theory is that Nvidia doesn’t want their ceo to sleep with business partners and subordinates?
Which one do you think sounds more likely?
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.
Without Jensen Huang's vision, Nvidia might have remained primarily a graphics chip maker, and the deep learning revolution would not have arrived when it did. Long before deep neural networks took off, Huang backed the use of Nvidia GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computing, including the development of CUDA. In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used Nvidia GPUs and CUDA to train AlexNet, whose breakthrough performance helped ignite the modern deep learning boom. Nvidia's investment in programmable GPUs helped make that breakthrough possible.
The critical vision was that GPUs could become a platform for computing beyond graphics—and that Nvidia should invest in making them programmable before a large market for that use existed.
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.
Why did NVDA fare differently than AMD or Intel?
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
This simply shows how the real tax is government spending, not how it gets the money. It can "tax the rich", print money, or take debt, but when it spends, it takes your computer, your fuel, your house, your car, your furniture, and your food.
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.
And anyway, whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.
Why? There were the reason why NVIDIA GPUs became so successful at the first place.
Who knows whether Jensen's current leadership isn't generating today's CUDA for NVIDIA?
The situation only exists because regulators in the 80s-20s believe that hardware should be a sanctioned monopoly. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, and Microsoft were all involved. If it's not Jensen it'd be someone else, there is a good reason NVIDIA is called NVIDIA and not JENSEN.
More directly on topic, I can't help thinking this is also a question of "what have you done for me lately" versus "what are you going to do for me tomorrow". It's hard to doubt he and the company as a whole have executed a vision and reaped the rewards, but have they been planning and doing the groundwork for another act.
A nontrivial part of which is pumping up an infrastructure bubble with NVIDIA money. It wouldn't shock me if that very aggressive and increasingly questioned strategy plays a role in whatever happens to Jensen.
This well researched video I endorse. Sure Nvidia was touch and go a the very start but beyond that, they were just locked in.
How Nvidia Won Graphics Cards - Asianometry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZqE6H-dww
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.
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