I find the discussion here to be slightly myopic. It is obvious he did something wrong, it is also obvious that members of the government and other actors likely knew about all of this for several years. You aren't the CEO of a trillion dollar company without being under the eye of many people. The real question people should be asking is "why now?" why is the PR spectacle happening at this moment and who is benefitting from supplying the NYTimes with this compromising information.
Obviously we can only come up with conjecture, but it should at least be discussed that this is not happening out of thin air due solely to his reckless actions but represents some kind of hidden power struggle. It's quite clear to me folks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio very likely knew about these things taking place for quite some time.
The story was broken by the New York Times. New York Times journalists Tripp Mickle and Ana Swanson got a tip from from "a tech industry contact"[1] in August. They worked sources and investigated until they were ready to break the story in October.
Based on the photos that have been popping up, the tech industry contact could have been any one of the comparatively large number of people in position to observe what was going on.
Perhaps someone decided to leak it to the media now because it became clear that the US government was unwilling to take it seriously, despite the persistent warnings.
Or perhaps it's just the sheer accumulation of chance. The longer it's happening as an open secret that no one wants to talk about, the more likely that someone who thinks it's wrong will find out and speak out.
This could likely be the "transition of power" playing out in the US. Jensen presented possibly the easiest target due to his indiscretion and lack of deep connections with the powers to be.
Others like Altman, Ellison et al better fall in line with the new power brokers or some compelling reason for their departure will surface as well.
It looks to be a tough next year for the tech industry (AI in particular) and possibly for your stock options, stocks and 401Ks as well.
I wouldn't be totally shocked if the Chinese themselves gave him up in a long game to start a dialog with the incoming powers. They don't lose much if nVidia gets tangled up and flounders around, they get more time to catch up.
Might it be as simple as who made the most money now with shorting Nvidia stock before they step out of a position of power/access to this level of insider info for timing purposes with the change of power with recent election results? I.e. they see the tide is changing, so play this card now while they can still make money...
You lined statements up but didn't draw a conclusion. Why do you think it happened and what about Marco Rubio? Did he leak it? Is he compromised?
The thing is the spy scandal might not have done anything to Jensen. He submitted an apology and the board was looking into what happened. It wasn't until the second affair came out that the board met to discuss firing him and it was the board that decided it. Jensen resigned which means they fired him. So if the government coordinated leaks on his private life to oust him, they had this intel on him. That means they were watching him and to me that implies something worse than just a power struggle. I am inclined to believe a simpler theory that it came out through investigation and he's apparently scandal prone and if he hadn't had affairs with employees might still be the CEO.
The elephant in the room is very apparent and you can trace it all the way back to specific foreign agencies with their new interim CEO. I think it's pretty clear this was orchestrated on a timeline to put him out.
> The real question people should be asking is "why now?"
It would always be a "why now" situation. No matter when it was disclosed. You can always find how a release like this is correlated with something, eventhough they might just be coincidences.
there's motivation from CIA/state in making an example re: protecting america re:
"According to Director Wray, the level of the CCP criminality is so widespread and voluminous that “the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours and of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China.”"
It is incredibly likely that this scandal will expand to those people in government who knew about this and supported it either tacitly or actively. This is only the first domino.
Because it went public. The secret finally reached someone who cared enough to slip it to reporters who took a few months to research and validate the claims. That person could either be someone who's hoping to benefit or someone who just thought it was wrong that it was allowed to go on so long.
It may be a power play for the top spot of what's essentially going to be the most valuable company in the AI future
But equally it could be as simple as very elaborate market manipulation (intentional stock tanking) so they can all 'buy low' and make trillions when it goes back up
Certain groups may need that right now given some recent political events... you know to get some money for the next big political event that's due in a couple of years...
Who will benefit from people that are dumping Nvidia stock today ? Where these investors will allocate theirs capital next? Why Jensen was trying to prevent AI duopoly from forming even at risk skirting export laws.
Agreed, the focus on Jensen Huang's affairs, even with this Chinese "spy" are just a side show.
The more serious side of this is that NVidia, and specifically (but hardly only) Jensen have been knowingly supplying Megaspeed (and probably many more) Chinese proxy companies with GPUs, presumably well aware that the final customer was China in one form or another, which would be a felony if proved.
The US Commerce dept, and FBI, had been investigating Megaspeed until for unknown reasons (follow the money!) the Justice dept. told the Commerce dept. to stop the investigation. Trump appears friendly with Jensen, and effectively (but not legally) commands the DOJ, so it would not be surprising to find that he is the one who stopped this investigation. Trump had previously arranged for NVidia trade with China as long as the US government got a 15-25% cut, so to him this is all about money not AI or national security strategy.
The timing of this now coming out may be related to the midterms and change in balance of power, and an interesting question is who behind pushing this into the news? One possibility would seem to be the FBI, upset that this investigation had been shut down, and realizing that with the dems controlling the house and senate that Trump would have less ability to control the story. The juicy "having affair with Chinese spy" angle seems well designed to get media coverage. It's interesting who is behind resurfacing Jensen's multiple affairs with Nvidia staff - did the same party that pushed the Megaspeed/spy story do this, or is this from people inside NVidia perhaps happy to pile on? Jensen does seem to have run Nvidia as his own personal fiefdom, installing three family members there in high paid jobs, as well as his employee affairs, and presumably had his enemies there as a result. Jensen's rapid resignation perhaps reflects him realizing that his protection is gone and this is not just a media story that may blow over.
It seems that it's not only Jensen Huang that needs to be (and will be) investigated here, but also NVidia, and the Commerce department, and whoever ordered the investigation shut down.
One interesting practical aspect to this is does NVidia keep supplying GPUs to these Chinese proxy companies in Singapore and elsewhere, or does this now actually get shut down? It's crazy that there are US companies starving for NVidia GPUs while NVidia was preferentially selling them to companies like Megaspeed instead. If this changed, would it end the US GPU shortage?
On the "Why now", Dylan Patel from SemiAnalysis, the most prestige American Semiconductor industry research and analysis firm (who broke the Google DeepAI we have no moat neither does OpenAI in 2023) has the direct answer:
It’s Likely Worse Than We Thought
So, if we had to say “why now,” it’s likely to remove opposition to an extremely hawkish China export control bill:
after a large shift in Congress and heading into a lame duck session, it’s best to get your opposition out of the way to
get the bill passed. That is our best conspiracy theory take on the situation, and it lines up with the ripples from
Washington. So now let’s return to our original question.
100% on point for the bigger issue hiding in plain sight.
Nvidia employees actually like their boss regardless his personal life / (un)professional affairs, and petitioning the board to reconsider and generated 1000s of comments internally [1]. Like for two reasons,
- After all, Nvidia was one the BIGGEST if not the biggest millionaire minting factory for the computing era. And Jensen was the solo man behind this whole journey (he bragged about being the longest serving CEOs in Corporate America, too sad he jinxed himself now.) Now the millionare minting factory part is about to be superseded by Anthropic.
- His working style was well known. He's a huge supporter of Open Weight and invested the entire AI ecosystems.
My understanding of the conspiracy theory is that the fingers point towards Anthropic:
- Anthropic is strongly at odds with NVIDIA over their stance on open models, as Jensen is very pro-open-models [0]
- Anthropic could benefit from tanking the NVIDIA stock to have more free capital to invest in their own upcoming IPO
- the NYTimes reporters that broke this story are known to have previously published articles on Anthropic
- the timing after the midterm elections is such that the Republicans (especially Trump himself, who likes Jensen quite a lot) are sufficiently weakened that they cannot protect Jensen or NVIDIA
- Dario has previously had personal anger issues surrounding Jensen and NVIDIA [1]
- it seems plausible that AI (Claude) could have been used to do the extensive research and "dig up dirt" on NVIDIA
But again, this is merely a conspiracy theory. I don't have the evidence to conclusively accuse Anthropic of anything. All I can do is point out a series of coincidences.
> The real question people should be asking is "why now?" why is the PR spectacle happening at this moment and who is benefitting from supplying the NYTimes with this compromising information.
I would view this as a vague and fairly useless question. Yes, the admin knew about it an year ago, and still nothing happened, and there is no reason to think this would've been out in full force if the NYT article didn't come out. One could ask the same question "why now?" if NYT article came out in March instead of November. The answer might be fairly mundane -- once a 'newsworthy' front page article comes out, everyone wants to run with whatever headline that gets them the most clicks and 'mindshare'. A fancy version of Nightcrawler so to speak.
If past performance is an indication of any competence -- 9/11 prediction, catching Bin Laden, WTC bomber, or even catching the LBNL hacker -- it is quite clear many of these govt agencies are mediocre at best, but they are experts in hiding their incompetence behind the veil of importance such as national security, and furthermore, there are masses of flag-worshipers that cheer them on. In most elite corporate setups, they would be classified as professional bullshit artists by most employees and promoted quickly ;)
first comment on this hn -> says "obvious" 3 times for things that are obviously not obvious.
bonus: "it's quite clear" for something that is really not clear,"represents some kind of hidden power struggle" and "It's quite clear" for something clearly not clear.
Why now? Because Dems won the midterms, and some non-zero slowdown is likely in the US. Markets certainly think so, esp with all the moratorium headlines. It’s only prudent to ensure that China also slows down a bit, since the US lead is measured in months by most. RASA also fits with this narrative.
"but represents some kind of hidden power struggle."
I think it's likely not.
The thing that is getting him fired is the relations with his staff, not the spy stuff, for which there aren't really specific allegations.
The 'spy' story brought the scrutiny, the scandal is different than the story.
There is likely no 'spy' but just a woman trying to hustle GPUs. These things don't come with 'hard evidence'. So she had 'discussions' with the government? Ok, what was said? Was it even relevant? 'Enough to start a background investigation' is not damning either.
People here have a bad intuition for media whims and narratives. A story can sit in the wide open until there's enough momentum behind it. That draw scrutiny, and if there are more 'juicy things' (infidelity), that gives the story legs.
There are hugely relevant material things going on about 'Epstein' but we only hear about it when the narrative winds blow around it and break the issue through into a contemporary wave.
There are a lot of questions around this resignation, and they're hard to untangle. It'd be something just to figure out what exactly he's supposed to have done wrong. Did he really (on purpose or "inadvertently") pass banned chips to China? All this story's going to leave us with is suspicion and no certainty...
Marco Rubio has always had disdain for Trump, but appeased him to stay in office. He absolutely knew about this because word is coming out that on multiple occasions he and other representatives brought the suspicion about the GPU smuggling to Trump and Lutnick, but they did nothing.
Now that the midterms are over and Republicans don't have a majority, everyone is scrambling to spill the beans on everything to distance themselves from Trump in an attempt to save their careers in politics.
But how are we going to even discuss this, in the absence of verifiable information, without degenerating into wild speculation and conspiracy theories?
Maybe the Trump administration is cleaning house in preparation for the coming Congressional investigations, and trying to pin the blame for their treasonous dereliction regarding the chip export controls on Huang?
U.S. economy would be the worst affected if the AI bubble pops, yet still they decided to bring down Jensen for some reason. Considering absolutely nothing happened to the children-raping Billionaires, what did Jensen really do and why now seems to be the paramount question.
A guess is that china burned its own asset. Why would china burn its own asset? With her being known compromisined, usefulness expired, they burn her and potentially damage the NVIDIA relationship with TSMC. The thing to keep in mind about china is they make long plays, not short ones. If they do intend to make landfall on Taiwan in ~4 years, this seems on track, sow distrust now, reep it's rewards later. You might say, that's a crazy longshot for a long player to make. And you be right, but it's at the cost and risk of basically nothing. Perhaps this will be the first in a series of events that will sour or slow the relationship the US has with Taiwan.
>"why now?" why is the PR spectacle happening at this moment and who is benefitting from supplying the NYTimes with this compromising information.
Best theory I heard is fairly simple: Howard Lutnick acted as a shield towards this stuff to keep the money flowing. Midterms was a huge blow to republican power, and that shield will fall very quick as an entire cobweb of corruption will be discovered. I won't say "cleaned out", but we're going to have a lot f light shed on how deep this web goes.
As for why now: you can say some people want to get ahead of this before the new congress comes in. I think it was just pure happenstance. Someone who wasn't easily bribed was in the right (wrong?) place at the right/wrong time and the word spread like wildfire because this is pretty much every soap opera staple happening IRL. People love drama, so the spread is the least surprising part.
Whether you think the spark was coincidental or coordinated will only be revealed with history. but decades of crime scene investigations will reveal to you how utterly sloppy supposed masterminds can be in becoming discovered. Mere seconds of care away from getting away with it all.
He doesn't mention Jensen Huang by name, but he is definitely talking about him (only person who fits), and also basically admitting they used it as blackmail (comply or go to jail). Between his narcissism and his dementia Trump couldn't stop himself from talking about something he shouldn't have ever brought up in an interview.
The Trump administration was using this as leverage over Jensen for almost a year!
The important question is who then decided to eventually burn Jensen and lose that leverage, and why?
Seems pretty obvious: Whatever he did wrong was only recently discovered. “Exposing” his personal life that was never much of a secret to get him out of there is easy cover to avoid having to let the world know what he did wrong.
But while it is obvious he did something wrong, the question remains of what that is. Of course we’ll never find out. This will soon blow over and nobody will ever think of him again.
I think a lot of people here seem to underestimate how much of a CEO's job is perception.
"Oh who cares who he slept with, he's been great for Nvidia. Nothing has been proven."
He's one of the most visible CEO's in the most visible industry in the world, and the entire AI economy is dependent upon them. The perception of him as stable is incredibly important.
Merely the suggestion that he is having affairs with people with close ties to China's government, given export controls, is a huge PR problem. Adding in an additional affair with someone under him. And the likelihood that there may be even more out there.
I doubt the Board wants to get rid of Jensen Huang. He's done incredibly well for them. But right now, there's a huge PR shitstorm swirling around the company.
Maybe in six months it all dies down and he comes back, who knows. But right now, you really can't just ignore the problem and hope the media doesn't care about the whole "well she was only sort of a spy" situation.
People are primarily talking about the Chinese spy affair, but the impression I personally got on X was that the subsequently reported affair with a subordinate VP in Nvidia is what did him in.
Not just the optics, but the liabilities and class action lawsuits if they are not acting on it. After all, A board's fiduciary duty is the legal and ethical obligation of board members to act in the best interests of the organization and its stakeholders.
Make no mistake, a lot of this is also lobbying and highly political. He's one of the few who was extremely vocal about open weight modals. Think about it, you run one of the largest AI (hardware) companies in the world and you're out there promoting open source models, which your home country is losing moat to, so the timing of this is not merely "oops, it's just a co-incidence". Anthropic is going IPO at this exact time - and they're known very well to invest millions into lobbying already (just google it), Google just released a new closed source model, Open AI too is cooking up stuff, and all of these companies need the closed source business model to win. What better way than to kill the vocal leader against their business model?
Well, personally, I hope the open weight models win despite all this lobbying.
But there's also now going to be more scruitiny on Nvidia selling to grey market sanction busters and sensitivies in Taiwan where the chips are made.
Also, massive question marks over possible leaks to Chinese chip makers.
It's not just PR. It's also government relations, and relations with fabs, which maybe are more expensive to fix.
Imagine you run TSMC and the mainlab fabs are causing you existential fears. And you have Apple, AMD, Google, Intel, etc all asking about roadmaps, and begging for fab quotas. You gonna offer Nvidia a special deal for being a good customer?
There's an increasing agreement about how big of a deal AI is among a growing number of tech luminaries, that if misused it has potential to be very dangerous to humanity. This calls for careful and measured advancement... it also calls for some level of coordination with big players, including China.
Jensen echoes similar sentiments in Emily Chang's interview.
I rue that nuanced opinions are going to brushed aside amidst the nationalist fervor in current ongoing media cycle.
You already said "in six months maybe it dies down"
Thats the thing about perception, the internet is loud and irritated, but no one actuals cares, and if you just ignore it and keep moving forward your perception becomes your track record again and not the noise.
Your perception becomes the noise when you let it drown out the real signal.
Many leaders and engineers at Nvida are multi-millionaires many times over, they don't need to be there, they love the culture, vision and leadership. With Jensen gone, that could all change. I'm sure many employees are looking at the exit now.
Oh come on. Everyone knows these tech CEOs are distasteful humans, people just buy from them because they have little competition (from fellow evil tech CEOs).
The CEO's personality is irrelevant if they're selling something that's in high enough demand. Money matters more than anything.
This particular scandal is an issue for Nvidia because:
1. Actual espionage, national security, etc. is potentially in play - criminal charges cost money.
2. Liability from potential lawsuits around in-office affairs - civil suits cost money.
I think a lot of people who care deeply about optics overemphasize the importance of optics. Which is understandable.
To many people, optics matter less than other things. Shareholders want profit, employees want a certain trajectory, tech leaders want products or services. To most of these, they really couldn't care less who Jensen goes to bed with.
I might even go as far as saying that to most people who actually matter in this context, PR is probably not their top consideration.
No it isn't. This fabricated reality is all about control. And that's why we have these totally fucked up societies and psychopath politicians who do not give a flying f about the populace. Because who can adhere to these standards? Psychos.
I don't like NVDA and Huang, but this ridiculous double standard that certain people adhere to is akin to a cult's thought process. You are the CEO, you cannot have emotions, you have to hide your personal life, you have to show outside how great of a person you are blablabla.
If you have good optics to the outside, well, you are our man. Oh, there was a chap called Jimmy Saville. He was such a sweet person, and he raped kids by the dozens. DOESNT MATTER! He had good optics. There you go, wallow in the mud, crazy f'rs and offer your children to the rapist.
At the end of the day he is just another human being. The same human being like anybody else. End of story. Rest is hyperbole and powerless people trying to exert some influence on an individual.... because of corpo skullduggery. Bleh.
When the share price is at max max any slight crosswind is going to knock it hard too. And this is a big one because a trifecta of scandal, the spy thing and him being ousted and so that brain and leadership and image being lost. Wouldn't be so bad on a value share probably (I invest in another scandal ridden CEO stock so I know the drill!)
With the recent midterm / AI crash, I'll leave this stock well alone. Might buy at sub 100 if panic sets in.
Didn't Musk completely disprove this theory by doing Nazi salutes without consequences to his position? Turns out actually CEO perception doesn’t matter.
If it were a female CEO being ostracized for having an affair she would clamor that "men do it all the time" and how sexist "society" is obsessed with controlling women's bodies.
> I think a lot of people here seem to underestimate how much of a CEO's job is perception.
What a load of crap. Elon Musk is deranged and nobody bats an eye. Zuck is proven to steal and sell data illegally for political gains in authoritative countries with Cambridge analytica and nobody cares. This guy has 2 affairs and is out.
I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
>I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban
If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.
This is the timeline:
Nov 8 : Jensen issues apology. NVIDIA allows him to use nvidia.com for this
Nov 8 : The Board of Directors publicly backs him up with a "vote of confidence" by stating: *"no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that "The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team."* -- from https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/statement-from-nvidia-board-of-directors
Nov 11 : 2nd affair gets exposed in the news
Nov 11 evening : emergency meeting of Board of Directors is called to fire Jensen Huang
Before Nov 11, it looked like NVIDIA might try to ride out the storm and keep Jensen at the helm especially if they saw that the China accusations and evidence wasn't strong enough to be a problem. Again, it was totally unnecessary for the board to publicly back him up if they had plans to get rid of him because of China allegations. However, the Board of Directors emergency Nov 11 meeting is inconsistent with the Nov 8 statement affirming Jensen's leadership.
Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.
Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here. Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. The Nvidia corp still has to answer for that even when Jensen is out.
> the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.
As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?
Not the _only_ reason, sure. However, it's quite common when executives have an affair they will get fired. I think that's just the reality. If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
Let’s be real here. Everyone making money out of NVIDIA was more than happy enough to go around the restrictions and see the prices go up due to Chinese demand.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
The first affair was possibly survivable, although the cost of survival would be high for all involved.
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
>NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
That's not the reason either.
They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc.
And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.
Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?
As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?
They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.
I said this on the thread this morning/yesterday. It is impossible for JH to speak about China with any credibility going forward. That alone made it impossible for him to remain CEO. Add to that, everything he's said about China in the past will now be scrutinized and questioned if he was influenced in some way.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Why can't it be all of the above? I'm disturbed by the number of posts I'm seeing around social media downplaying the affairs as if this is normal behavior that should be encouraged or allowed. He slept with someone who worked directly under him, under what universe would he be allowed to stay at Nvidia? That's absurd.
It'll be a relative slap on the wrist. The US is not going to destroy one of the companies keeping it competitive on the AI landscape right now. Worst case, it is a heavy slap and some individuals go to jail, but the company will be fine.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
He committed what looks like some light treason. The fact that he had an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped the CCP bypass import restrictions is why he had to go.
There does seem to be a sway in the reporting towards his relationship with an employee and not the whole trade ban and spy stuff. I'm not sure why that is
Why? Because the government want to maintain the American advantage in GPU chips and AI? This move tips the scales in favour of China. Right now there is tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs sitting on the dock in Hong Kong because China government blocked them. They think it's more important to support their new domestic GPU industry than to have the best models today trained on nvida.
The U.S. has imposed such harsh semiconductor industry sanctions on China, tightly locking away scientific and technological achievements that will most likely shape the future of all humanity for the next hundred years through political means that change with every few-year election cycle.
It's hard to imagine that in a community that constantly claims to champion freedom and progress, so many people would think from the perspective of the U.S. government and believe in baseless spy allegations, because anyone who knows NVIDIA’s history and Jensen Huang’s background should be able to see that this is a charge forcibly fabricated.
“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.
To me the fact that it was known for a year that the affair was happening, and nothing changed implies that this is more a publicity move rather than anything else. They had to make a change, improve their brand image. Probably nothing will change in how they sell their product, the rules they skirt.
I'll plug our Pretrained episode from Monday here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N97DW8gfCnI - this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.
The fact that Nvidia was skirting the export ban was an open secret. So many outlets like NYT itself, Reuters, WSJ, etc have published reports about it starting over a year ago.
I hope you understand the affair with the spy does not strictly matter, but he is in fact being fired because of the affair with a subordinate.
Like everyone, they have a COC/sexual harassment policy, and that is basically always a firing offense in practice.
They cannot place him above it, or else they would be in for infinite liability.
This is why literally nothing mentioned firing until that was discovered, and then it instantly became about firing him.
He was also favoring local open weight models in a world where frontier AI companies are lobbying the government for control. Could be one of the reasons why he was ousted.
If it were just about the export ban, then why leak the affairs? US intelligence (which serves US corporate power only) has decided to put this guy out to pasture by any means necessary. That's the reason for this faux moral outrage. They want to make sure there's no chance he makes it out the other side.
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
This comment yesterday [1] indicated that Megaspeed was not on the blocked entity list, but that NVidia voluntarily hasn't sold to them since June 2025.
NVIDIA also does tons of military and intelligence work, very sensitive stuff. The idea that the CEO had a significant espionage problem raises significant _criminal_ liabilities.
History will look back at this and see Jensen was right to do this.
Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.
> Nvidia has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration
I want to add some nuance to this statement. There is a difference between:
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
I think thats correct, I was at GTC in berlin a couple of weeks ago, a number of Chinese firms that are on the export control list were present and had booths… so perhaps this was all rather blatant.
dark ops [well, maybe these are really very bright out in the open ops...!!!] may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race
China doesn't even want Nvidia chips. They're holding up hundreds of thousands of smuggled cards at Hong Kong customs. Many Chinese companies want to take the easy shortcut of using Nvidia, but the Chinese govt wants Chinese companies to go through the pain of helping the domestic chip industry develop.
Plus the fact that there's absolutely no evidence that the lady is a spy. All media report anonymous sources but treat the allegations as fact. Singapore said their investigation of the lady is not due to spying, but no western media picked up that story. The lady traveled to Taiwan with her Hong Kong passport, and the Taiwanese govt also said they have no evidence she's a spy. The Chinese spy agency just started investigating her due to all the commotion (likely for smuggling chips, which China also doesn't want, see above), and also has no idea who she is. Despite all this, the public still treats the spy allegations as a fact.
Jenssen Huang is a victim. Those who wanted to get rid of him and set this up, have succeeded. But everyone is under the mistaken belief that this hurts China somehow. China doesn't give a damn. In the mean time, all Chinese Americans lose. Jenssen is not the first such victim, and won't be the last.
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
I’d also note that being complicit and not entirely aware of sanctions evasion -but being in a qualified position that should have been able to discern it- is sufficient for criminal charges and conspiracy. I spent a long time in trading and money movement, and this was the scared straight things our former federal prosecutor internal counsel would lecture us on. The bar for prosecutors in national security, sanctions, conspiracy, etc are very very low and this sort of relationship is a perfect foil. It exposes Nvidia to extreme risk, and Jenson even more so. And being cutoff from Nvidia now makes him prey without the support a major employer and driver of the economy could provide him.
Being compromised kinda does seem like a reason to be fired. It seemed well known he was doing it since there are plenty of photos over a few years? So it’s more she was a honeypot.
I think the affair with the Chinese CEO is a considerable factor. Jensen cannot possibly maintain any plausible deniability over Megaspeed's alleged diversion of chips to China and his role therein.
The second affair with an employee likely just dealt a death blow (if it hadn't already been dealt) to Jensen in terms of his ability to ride the crisis out.
It is legal for Chinese companies to buy US neocloud time. These toothless restrictions were poorly constructed and unenforceable law. The extent to which nvda was supposed to self police is unclear. I find it hard to believe any binding evidence of direct sales will be found.
If they really did, I hope they at least go to prison for a while. I say at least because they actually should be court martiall-ed and spend their next 30 years in a military cell.
Eric Swalwell was not punished and committed something worse than Jensen Huang, because he was a government official. He even ran for Governor and the only reason he as forced to resign was because of a different sexual abuse case.
If our own government officials can't face justice, why should the CEO of a company?
I am not sure I can agree. Perhaps this was the underlying reason. Perhaps others wanted to frame him and launched a media campaign. But from what I can see, at the
least on the surface, to me it looks as if he was fired for liking too many women at the same time, at the least one of which might be a possible spy. This may all be fake-reasons on top to cover underlying real causes, but to me right now it looks as if the girls cost him the job here.
Jensen is Taiwanese. Nvidia's chips are made in Taiwan, as are all the most advanced chips in the world -- including the chips in Apple and AMD products -- by TSMC. China wants to re-absorb Taiwan into itself, partially because they cannot match TSMC's geometries and they desperately need those geometries.
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
As though the Board had no idea of this, and are suddenly acting oh gosh this is the first we've heard of the phantom SG revenue! Time for Jensen to go. Nah, not buying it. Many of the board have been w JH since the early 1990s. This is because his reckless disregard for the company and his years-long relationship with a Chinese spy.
With a strict ban of chips to China, Chinese companies will not have enough compute. Without enough compute, they are not going to be able to release new open weight models.
That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".
Him taking the stance of "we should be allowed to sell all the GPUs to China" was bad enough in itself.
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
> From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.
I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?
> ”it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.”
Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got redirected or forwarded on to China.
It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.
I dont think its more soo about the ban as China itself has 'officially' blocked the chips that were being licensed as exportable. I think its more of the asks that were being made by the NATSec and Amodie aligned actors (see the pod he had with Dwarkesh ), to ho tighter and more aggressive. Basically Jensen was sort of the brake on the impulsive ideas getting thrown around on how to 'win' AI and create a moat against all latecomers.
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
Did your TV tell you that? I hope you realize that there is absolutely no proof of the import ban having been skirted. The FBI has been investigating Alice Huang and Megaspeed since 2024 and all they have is a few GPUs still being unboxed at their Malaysian data center.
Well the only thing super weird is the timeline - USA bans exports, China (very soon after) bans IMPORTS! And then there's a company which keeps doing trade under the nose of the potentially two most powerful nation-states and their secret service sources. This is super fishy, really I don't buy nobody knew nothing, only for a "lucky" journalist to figure out the whole thing...
Very much agreed, the second this became clear his position was untenable. He will surely have launched his unicorn by the end of December regardless, I’d be surprised if this had any tangible repercussions outside the divorce court.
Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.
Is this remotely believable, that one CEO can surreptitiously work around both the government and his own company to sell restricted goods at volume? If this were real you'd have to lobotomize the entire management structure, because there are a lot of people that would know and know better and that they'd face jail time. And maybe merge it with some other company quickly so it doesn't completely collapse because of the immediate mass firings to try and sway prosecutions toward individuals and not the destroy the entire entity.
I'd be more inclined to believe the spy thriller narrative if he sent the RTL of their top designs to China. Selling goods is not a one chief op.
I would be so, so surprised if the US government / CIA / etc wouldn't know at all that NVDA was selling to China and skirting the export ban in a meaningful way.
In 50 years from now, some declassified documents will maybe shed light on this specific incident.
I would imagine it being a form of "So, China, we'll let our Jensen guy sell you X in chips, and in return, you do Y in relation to Russia, and Z in relation to Taiwan. Oh, and we need to use one of your spies, in case someone f*cks up".
Biggest valuation ever will turn into biggest investor lawsuit ever. The music on the AI circular deals is about to be broken by a feminine spell. This has Lord of the Rings all over it...
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
China is a gigantic market. A company that profit hungry will find it supremely difficult to resist doing business with China. It is almost guaranteed, that they did in some indirect ways sell to China. It's also not like people like Jensen care one bit about the USA. What they care about is pure profit of their own kingdom. Uhm, I mean company, of course.
The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.
Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.
Oh, it's not the repeated violations of sexual conduct with an employee, and a spy, and likely more? A CEO who is that dumb to risk his and the company trust isn't worth it. Look, a trillion already wiped out. When employees say "how dumb could he be", you know the board and major investors are saying that too.
NVIDIA's latest chips were also on an export ban for several Middle Eastern countries ("security" theater). That's about the time the UAE's sovereign fund invested a large sum in Cerebras. They were still able to get the chips by way of Kuwait, which is a friendly Middle Eastern state.
Of course, not a year went by before the UAE and Saudi invested heavily in the Trump crypto fund and, very coincidentally, the ban was lifted.
Fear not, Cerebras managed to get another investment from OpenAI!
Yeah, this has to be related to the export ban. It's too much of a coincidence that the woman happens to run a shell company that funnels NVIDIA chips to China.
It's just unlikely that an affair would nuke his CEO's position.
The strange situation, however, is that the current administration, specifically Trump, loves Jensen for he thinks that they're kindred spirits: both incredibly successful businessmen at the top of the world and at the top of their game (this is from Trump's perspective).
It's an odd situation where, yes, they're breaching national security mandates, but they're also being protected by the man at the top of the organization that makes those national security mandates.
We're living in a comedy film, where the outcome of said comedy film has an effect on the world economy, so we're actually living in a tragedy film.
That's how corruption skews the reality that the powerless are forced to live within.
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
The timing is politically important though; shifts headlines from
"Trump/GOP lost their ass in midterms!" and "Dems intend to investigate GOP/Trump!"
Also provides news channel attacks on Dems; Congress should be looking into national security issues over here in CEO land! Not dividing Congress with partisan hackery!
Important to call out the social engineering going on among all the tribal groups.
Well, you say that, but the perception is he hasn't got sacked for circular financing, nor for the providing of sanctioned components (supposedly they went to third countries, not China, so legal). But he got sacked for two affairs.
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
Can you imagine if it were a female CEO fired for the same thing? Oh how the accusations of sexism and double standards and how she doesn't have to report to the board what she does with her body. The argument writes itself.
A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.
We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.
Fuck no. Jensen did no such thing. He actually hasn’t been charged with a single crime. You’re outright hallucinating here.
The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.
If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.
The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.
Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.
Elon Musk has an AI bot generating explicit images without consent, regardless of age, yet nobody's firing him.
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
And yet from the reporting Trump okayed the sale so Nvidia argues they had a license to export from the President. Lutnick was okay with it too apparently and State didn't get a vote. If the reporting is accurate, then I think Nvidia gets zero blowback from the sale.
There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this. NVidia is too big and Huang is too wealthy. This administration in particular would never prosecute that. And, even if they did, a pardon is only $1-3 million anyway.
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
Let's cut the crap, it's a coup because he is in favor of the open-weight ecosystem and doesn't want to restrict models at the firmware level. Anthropic is in large part behind this.
Everybody should be against the export ban. It's laughable to claim that it is for "national security", it's blatant protectionism to cover US AI companies for the fact that they operate at monumental losses. Any country in the world should be allowed to buy the hardware they need to run AI, if they need it, and if the roles were reversed the US should also be allowed to buy tech from other countries. Graphic cards aren't nuclear bombs, and AI is a multi-use core technology every nation on earth should have access to. So far, China has made a far better impression in that respect than the US. At least they have published open weight models.
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.
His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.
I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.
I don’t know if I’m just getting tired of tech and AI in general, but man – this story and the media frenzy around it are like the perfect combination of off putting things to me: arrogant AI company CEOs, sordid obsessions with the personal lives of said CEOs, nationalist politics, on and on.
Seeing this as the top story everywhere makes me want to throw away my phone and become a monk.
Not really sure why I’ve written this comment, other than as some reassurance to anyone else that feels the same way.
"Jensen Huang summoned his top finance executives to his office this summer. The AI economy, backstopped by Nvidia’s NVDA -4.34%decrease; down pointing triangle increasingly outrageous bets, was teetering, and Huang wanted to make sure they were getting it right.
Over the course of the meeting, he proceeded to tear into the woman who is now taking over for him as Nvidia CEO.
Colette Kress was “a deer in the headlights,” he said, interrupting her presentation, according to a person familiar with the comments.
He had summoned Kress and his senior finance team to diagnose a ballooning problem: Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that couldn’t afford its chips. That included deals led by Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who had been offering upstart cloud providers and data-center developers financing in the hopes of turning them into long-term customers.
Huang had launched a dealmaking spree and was now starting to question whether it had gone too far, according to people familiar with the matter.
Kress was a “reporting CFO,” not someone who could help him define a strategy or make decisions, Huang said during the August meeting.
Then he went on to describe the situation the company was in. Major cloud providers were running away from Nvidia, making plans to use alternative chips and lessen their reliance on the firm. Even worse, Huang said, the vast supply of chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buying were coming at him like an “avalanche.” (...) Amid the rollout of the program, Kress raised questions including how to decide which deals to pursue, how to value the guarantees, and how to calculate the return on investment, a person familiar with the matter said. Behind the scenes, she tried to rein in Huang’s son-in-law, who had been promoted to a vice president in January, people who worked with her said. "
It's bizarre to me how many people here seem to seriously believe this is actually about cheating on his wife. It seems pretty clear that this is related to the glaringly obvious, continued export of GPUs to China, expressly violating an export ban. Combine that with having an affair with a woman who just so happens to be integral to the smuggling operation. It just looks too bad. Opens Nvidia up to a world of hurt once the dems take over in January, and Huang himself to serious criminal charges. And that's just the stuff that's public information. We have to assume the board knows more than us.
This stuff has probably been going on behind the scenes for a while. The leak about the affair is just the catalyst that accelerated it all.
I hope this won't change NVIDIA's refusal to block inference for unsigned and registered open-models in the firmware of modern GPUs. Anthropic and others are pushing hard on this. First the hardware export ban, eventually the software one via hardware-enforced execution controls like IETF hinted at
"Jensen and Nvidia were planning to go hard at producing frontier class open models. They wanted to verticalize their AI presence, and not depend on OAI or ANT to drive the industry forward. OAI, ANT, and GOOG are simultaneously competing with NVDA by designing AI chips."
"At the same time, Jensen had all but gone to war with NatSec hawks in DC over Nvidia sales in China. As I've noted over the last two years, NVDA sold huge numbers of GPUs (~20% of total sales?) to SE Asian buyers and I always thought many of those chips ended up physically in China, or available for remote use by Chinese companies."
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.
Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.
I think this just confirms that he had knowledge of gpus going to China and the board wants to minimize the damage now. His infidelity does not help but I doubt the board would have ousted him for that
Jensen, even after decades, remained deeply involved in many operational decisions with 40+ direct reports. He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy. Jensen gets to retire with $100B+ and not deal with the crap.
I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support. This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
I lost all respect for Jensen when he started gushing about data centers in space which is a stupid idea and obviously self-serving for Elon (sells launches) and Jensen (sells chips). Anyone who says data centers in space should explain why Microsoft determined data centers under the ocean are too expensive (for now). A submerged data center is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper than a space data center.
Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably
Can't help that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the China hawk fraction of the US government and associated entities (i.e. Anthropic) obviously brought the hammer down on Jensen here, even if he arguably brought about his own downfall with the affair.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
He wanted to have the cake and to eat it at the same time. I've seen CEO's who handled this in a much more orderly way, such as: getting a divorce, then announcing internally to the company that he is getting a divorce, then announcing he has found new love with a certain person at the company and in the same sentence announcing that the certain person effectively no longer answers to him, but to the board or something like that.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
Interesting that 18% of Nvidia's revenue comes from their 2020 Mellanox buyout. Might rank among YouTube as one of the most profitable corporate buyouts ever.
About their new interim CEO Colette Kress:
>'She starts her day talking with Israeli execs because Nvidia's major Israel operations (post-Mellanox acquisition, ~6k staff, ~18% of revenue via networking chips) are business-critical'
Jensen bought Mellanox for $7B in 2020. In Q2 2026 it generated $17.5B in revenue or ~18% of Nvidia's total revenue.
This is a net loss for everyone, but especially the gaming community. As a founder, he cared about nvidia's history and where it all began.
As someone who had those AGP cards and an nForce motherboard (which were amazing), can't help but feel sad. Whoever his replacement is will not feel the same about what's a much smaller market.
It is baffling to read comments that this is excusable or he should be retained 'in interest of the shareholders'. Setting aside the obviously poor judgement, the appearance of impropriety has serious ammunition behind a situation that already looked weird. More practically, he's compromised now. Whether it's further scandal or the impending criminal investigations, there might be further hooks people have on him.
The quote about succession planning is also a little out of context, he phrased it more that there should be continual information and responsibility sharing such that succession planning is effectively redundant or unnecessary.
I always wondered why investors were ok with not having any control due to dual structure shares and board composition. A "Great Men" theory of the world is a convenient and satisfying narrative, but it's usually not the best at explaining things. As the saying goes, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men".
Just a sad state of affairs. Jensen was by far the biggest voice pushing for open weights and keeping the Anthropic / OpenAI doom narrative from getting out of control.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
I'm actually surprised at this. I figured everyone would justify keeping him because he made Nvidia (and investors) so much money. Money > anything else
The apologists in this thread are absolutely shocking. Jensen is a ruthless CEO who clearly lacks moral fiber. Why do we idolize and "feel" for people like this?
Lot of comments here stating with absolute certainty that China wanted Nvidia chips (they've previously ordered Chinese companies to not buy Nvidia chips https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...) and that Alice Huang is a CCP spy (zero public evidence of this).
My understanding is that NVidia's organisation is very flat and Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type. Moreover there was no succession plan. I get that having an affair with a spy is not great but isn't it risky to replace him now?
For all his faults, I do feel for Jensen. He built this thing from an absolute scratch. He had a lot of luck on the way, from crypto to CUDA. And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago.
Googling around gave me a stat of about 20% of married men have affairs, and you can maybe double that for relationships in general rather than marriages. And I’d expect that to be underreported.
People are fallible and life and relationships are complex. I’ve not personally had an affair (I’m married) but some of my family have. I don’t condemn them for it. You learn the details and you can see why and how these things happen. You also see that it’s impossible to judge from the outside - you never really know what’s going on inside any relationship.
It also makes me very uncomfortable when people want to judge others. Maybe us HN folk are by nature very black and white.
He didn't resign because of two affairs. He resigned because there were a LOT more than two affairs. I'm sure they wouldn't stop coming after enemies and the press smelled blood in the water.
How illegal is it for a CEO to sell goods (potentially a core component used in military weapons) to a foreign government after your government said not to?
Bummer. He stood in the way of regulatory capture and AI monopolists had him removed. I foresee the open model / open weights ecosystem eventually getting locked down, especially the most competitive Chinese models.
I didn't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
One thing which isn't adding up to me. Everyone is breathlessly reporting that in the past three years (or whatever) megaspeed obtained $7.5B in nvidia chips. Nvidia's revenue is about $6B per week. If the fear is that China's AI research is catching up due to those chips, which seems like a percent of nvidia's production, does that mean China's researchers are so efficient they only need that 1%, or does it mean they are getting a lot more AI compute through other channels?
This smells like a hit job on Jensen Huang. Years from now, it'll probably come out that Alice Huang wasn't a spy for China and the whole Kimberly affair was a setup. Of course, by then, no one will care about the truth.
It seems to me there is a significant difference between "spying" and smuggling or evading an export ban. Is there any evidence Alice Huang had access to Nvidia trade secrets vs access to buy a product? Jensen was rightly opposed to America's stupid export ban to China. People who are opposed to ICE policy break the law or enable breaking the law all the time. This guy wanted to sell computer chips to china. Who's the victim (Sam and Dario? TSMC no because they make more chips). Further more there is no evidence Jensen broke the law vs merely being close to someone who may have (Alice Huang). There is no evidence of industrial espionage. So where is the spying here?
This is going to be very unpopular here, but this domino triggered by the China hawks in the current admin (and the handful of dem lobbyists in the pocket of openai/ant) is going to go down in history as a massive geopolitical and technological blunder.
Huawei just announced a fully domestic computer, Deepseek is rumored to be training v5 right now on entirely domestic Ascend chips.
I know eventually there will come out all the justifications for how this was to protect AGI, etc. But this move has also now tipped the scale beyond just the hardware bifurcation, but also the open vs. closed and commons vs. sovereign models. This isn't just chopping off your nose, this is America purposely gouging out it's eyes and removing it's ability to see down the road. Jensen Huang was the world's best shot and trying to keep a global AI world together, but one side has made their voice on that extremely loud and clear.
Jensen's the most pro-open weight guy and calmest on China public figure at that level.
Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.
It's good that the mighty can fall, especially over issues of trust. There are probably other candidates. If you're a shareholder I can't offer comfort but the rest of us need a world in which power cannot be locked in.
I think a lesson might be how strong 10x and 20x voting power class B shares are.
So for Nvidia, it only has class A share, where every share has the same voting power.
Huang has ~3.5% of the share, remaining 96% is publicly traded, hence Huang has 3.5% of the voting power when electing board.
However, if what Huang has is 20x class B share, then he will have 70 units of voting power, with everyone else having 97 units, hence he will have 41.9% of voting power, effectively deciding every director's election w/ little outside help.
Even if the board could vote him out this year, he could vote the board out next year and come back as CEO in that scenario.
From all the readings so far, it does not look like he knew he was under the spell of a honeypot, nor nvidia knowingly sold the chips in question, directly to china. The truth will come out one day, and it is might be an uphill battle to prove a criminal intent from Jensen.
On a more mundane level, since he can neither go to office, nor to the house, any guesses what his routine will be over next couple weeks? Not a perfect example, but for some reason, this reminds me of the last scene in Fargo where WH Macy gets holed up in a motel buying time.
The smuggling and romance details that have been exposed so far are either well known or immaterial to the business. So why the crazy urgency now?
Perhaps some influential folks want to support Anthropic's IPO by showing that the open source models will soon be blunted/outlawed, but IPO-ing into a crash seems like a high price for that moat.
Or do similarly influential folks want to tank AI as a whole but couldn't politically afford a crash before mid-terms?
Huang is the classic example of an entrepreneur who grew up and came of age at the end of the Cold War, at the height of globalization and the Pax Americana: focused mainly on business, with no obligation to take sides for any national interest. Unfortunately, those days are over, and, reluctant to fully adapt, he has paid the price.
I only wish he got ousted for being a liar about where the money was coming from during the crypto boom, or the super anti consumer policies like prohibiting OEMs from having a top of the line series with anything other than nvidia, refusing for years to support standard vrr and pushing for g-sync, artificially nerfing silicon capabilities in consumer grade dies and helping this bubble get bigger and bigger with bad accounting practices.
The dude is out at the absolute top of the company because he fucked too many women he shouldn't have and in a year people will be missing him when the AI reckoning for hardware manufacturers comes.
Edit: and hairworks! That fucking shit that tanked performance but was "a game changer" due to PR. Just like the fake frames and slop filter they're pushing now.
The big question for NVIDIA investors is how much of their sales came from skirting export sanctions because you can bet there is an investigation coming.
There is a lot of discussions on Export Ban. Does selling to a Singapore Company with Chinese Stakeholders considered illegal under those ban? Does Nvidia have to track every single GPU sold or even resold?
I was under the impression he sold it to a Singapore company, or even any other companies. What those companies do with those GPU is not his fault.
From Game of Thrones:
- Men without cocks. You wouldn't find me fighting in an army if I had no cock. What's left to fight for?
- Gold?
- I spent my life around soldiers. What do you think they spend that gold on?
- Family.
- Not without a cock, you don't.
- Maybe it really is all cocks in the end.
I live far away from all this and reading what has been shared all over social media, I find it hard to believe that there isn't a plot.
Jensen has done horrible things with regards to the affairs. But it is clear that people around him knew this for quite a while. So why this sudden and swift action? Does Jensen support a future that is against people who want to make massive profits from AI?
If anyone reads the biography of Warren Buffett (by Roger Lowenstein), you'll come to see the family lives of some of these couples are very non-traditional. Buffett effectively had a public facing wife and a private wife, chosen by his public wife.
It wouldn't surprise if Jensen and Lori had an arrangement wherein they are both able to live a happy fulfilled life. She's worth billions too.
I'm probably failing to see enough nuance here, but isn't Nvidia taking a hit a good thing when they are basically a monopoly? It seems to me like unintentional self-inflicted anti-trust regulation. Nvidia's failure is another chip maker's opportunity. And it's not like Nvidia is going to instantly implode and take the stock market down with it. It would take the form of slowly losing market share as their products become less appealing for whatever reason, assuming the decline would happen under new leadership at all. Then we get real competition in the GPU market.
I feel this could be a chess move by OAI/Anthropic/AWS etc to get Chinese companies stop open source models and get hands on all Nvidia Chips. This real estate race is getting dirty.
None of them are able to put two and two together that this was a deliberate coup
And it seems like nobody is paying attention to what Jensen Huang was fighting for. He was against regulation of open source local models. He was against regulation shifting liability of local model developers as well as frontier models.
All in all without Jensen, it isn't just about NVIDIA, there's no one to champion for open source models and running them locally is going to get a lot harder and expensive. It's actually going to accelerate the monopolization of closed models and they will have to pass on the costs to consumers.
It's an L across the board and I'm noting the degraded quality of discourse on HN and that nobody is seeing through the veil here.
Any guesses if that correlates with earnings? Are they bad, so they can they, look we already have new CEO, now everything is going to be better. Or are they that good, that they can say, look we will manage without Jensen.
The specific truths about anything hardly matter when a story becomes this big. The hubbub is too much of a distraction and Jensen was going to get hauled in front of Congress by reps trying to score points with anti-AI constituents.
If he had affairs with normal staffers and NOT involved with a chinese spy, he'd probably would have survived. The fact that he's out means he definitely supplied the chinese with chips.
The board is considering both internal and external candidates. Who has experience in hardware, has led a trillion-dollar company, has deep connections in Asia, and might be available?
It's possible Tim Cook's phone is ringing right now.
It would be interesting if the story unfolded with Jensen going to TSMC [1] and Tim Cook taking over NVIDIA.
I feel this is a hasty and suicidal move for the company, and for the American AI chip industry as a whole, esp. when they haven't figured out a transition plan.
The problem i see is that I dont see anyone who is suitable to be a ceo of Nvidia. It’s a special blend of hardware and software chops that no other CEO has imo.
Very very few HW CEOs have even the slightest ability to appreciate the key strength of Nvidia which is ability to build hardware and then drive it with outstanding software.
Look at AMD. Great hardware but hamstrung by their software for 20 years.
Despite his personal affairs, he brought significant growth and stability to NVIDIA thanks to which we all have access to excellent products so his dismissal does not seem like a wise decision. I wonder if his successor will be able to measure up to him. And what would be the cost for nvidia?
It all seems political and every politician has an affair to hide...
The board, made of 10 members, only has 3.94% of Nvidia share in total, out of which 3.58% is owned by Huang.
Meaning that the 9 people pushing him out add up to own 0.36% of Nvidia share, only 0.36%
This is betray of shareholder interest. The board doesn't own Nvidia, this is not their business, yet only they can vote. they just want to finish as soon as possible, and you get a mad result.
This might be due to violations or breach of his duties as the CEO, especially given the nature of who the other party has loyalties too, but nonetheless, its a lesson for us all. Because even if he didn't directly provide any IP, would that party have reasonable access to any IP during the events. Guess only time will tell
I don't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
This could turn out to be the best thing for AI. I hope Jensen starts a new startup and challenges NVDIA. This will enable more options of GPU for end users and break NVIDIA monopoly.
I've seen some people speculate whether or not he'll be a prosecuted/arrested. It's difficult to believe, but surely would be the biggest imprisonment that I can remember from recent memory.
For intents and purposes, consider NVIDIA compromised for some foreseeable future. For operations and future purchases/CAPEX, more than a passing due dilligence is warranted if considering NVIDIA.
Huang has shown catastrophically bad judgement and lied publicly [0]. Many commenters here harbor lots of sympathy for him, I assume out of respect for the technology and company he's built, but that doesn't exonerate him.
He was sleeping with one of his customers—a huge conflict of interest. That alone is good grounds to get a CEO fired, but it only gets worse! Alice Huang, a Chinese national, was previously working for a CCP propaganda channel network with an impeccable acronym: CCTV. Her company was accused publicly and investigated by the government for suspected smuggling of sanctioned NVIDIA hardware into China. Now we learned he also had an affair with one of his direct reports — another diabolical conflict of interest, which alone could be good reason to oust the CEO and possibly the VP as well.
It's yet to be determined whether he disclosed secrets to the Chinese spy, or whether he at least privately admitted to the second affair (if not, that's even worse!)
It's not a single, horrendous mistake anymore but a pattern of disastrously poor judgement. Building an extraordinary company and technology shouldn't mean lack of accountability, and thankfully we found out today that even at the highest level it doesn't.
This is insane. This is the best case scenario for China, much better than just getting the chips. They just crippled their biggest competitor. The stock might not crater immediately because of ongoing AI demand, but it will at some point.
He's the hero we needed but didn't deserve. If this thing didn't happen my guess is open models wouldn't exist and we would be deeper and darker into the whole AI boom
Regardless of the implications, even just as a change for NVIDIA this will be one of the moments we look back on. Keep hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times!
Now I'm in danger of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I think there are several layers to this current drama. Most of the reporting is very "surface level". I also don't pretend to have the full picture myself, but there are many players and many agendas at play, and those agendas can change over time.
[edited for typo]
About the stock market, I think its as good as opportunity as any to buy tbh, people complain for not buying when stocks are low but then this opportunity is good.
Huh, between the Anthropic IPO, the big shift in political environment, and the change in outlook for tech stocks, this comes at a pretty pivotal moment to see if AI train keeps accelerating at the same pace or if we start to see the end of the bubble.
I don't want to sound like a Jensen apologist, obviously huge missteps on his part, but he was quite a figure in shaping the last few years broad economic narrative. Good or bad, he was a force in shaping one of the largest investments ever. Does that shift without him? Does it shift really quick?
I would have preferred a slow fade into the sunset as a opposed to a dramatic exit. Yes, there would have always been a correction, but the bubble bursting explosively vs a more measured, slower correction will have different broader impacts and I just hope this doesn't push more towards the outcome that hurts a lot more.
My conspiracy theory is that its American spies who let this go public to pressure him out because Jensen was fighting their agenda of stopping China getting advanced chips. The flow will probably slow for a while, domestic Chinese companies will be forced to adapt, and as a bonus the USA wont even be competitive because they took their best horse out behind the woodshed and shot it to stop someone else from getting a ride. 12 months from now Jensen is gonna be VP of AI hardware at Huaweii or similar, calling it now. Another A+ geopolitical move from an administration that has been in a class of its own right from the beginning. Im a nobody who knows nothing but if I had to bet it would be on this.
What I think is hard to argue: Jensen did a remarkable job leading his company, especially during the development of CUDA, which required an enormous investment in the 2000s but eventually created an ecosystem that outside developers and companies now help sustain and expand. CUDA is a major reason Nvidia has such a dominant market position and should continue to achieve far into the future, regardless of who is CEO. Nvidia's massive risk and its extraordinary payoff will likely be studied for a long time.
AI pushed Jensen into the spotlight very quickly and he didn't respond well, but he should go down in history as an extraordinary leader.
I cant help but see a difference in the moral standard to which Jensen is being held compared to the moral standard that someone like Elon is being held. Why can one get away with shocking moral behaviour, but the other has to step down for a mild affair. If Jensen didnt have the affair, or it never came to light, would all of this still have taken place?
When Cambridge Analytica happened, no one kicked Mark out of Facebook/Meta.
Not making excuses for Jensen, at his status and power level, this stuff goes with the territory. But I cant help but see a double standard here.
And now nothing is stopping him from defecting over to China and Deepseek. Lost his family, lost his job, and China has plenty of money mountains and a very dedicated workforce. The idea must have crossed his mind.
Jensen, even after decades, remained deeply involved in many operational decisions with 40+ direct reports. He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy.
So, I understand this is getting priced in to some degree, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA.
Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
is today the best day in over a year to buy NVDA? From a long-term perspective, how much was he the one driving innovation, and can they be something like an Apple who overcame founder's reliance?
Personally I am not a fan of companies being moral arbiters, or company's reputation and such be the organizing axis around which we decide whether a person has the right to a livelihood, companies after all are not people. Though Jensen is insulated from economic security concerns, for any other "normal" person, the coercive power of a corporate with it's army of lawyers can effectively ruin a person's life.
Whether one deserves such ruination is a moral matter, and everyone is entitled to their own judgement, but it seems wrong to concentrate such power in a private for-profit entity. The entire basis of anti-fascist doctrine is infringement of individual liberties and modern societies, while mostly conditioned to be against government coercion are remarkably comfortable with corporate coercion, dressed up in the pretty language of compliance and organizational reputation. A company is an economic entity, not a moral entity. It is fine with being a moral entity when it comes to matters of its own reputation and operations, but conveniently becomes an economic entity when it is time for layoffs. Ultimately, it comes down to who has a bigger stick
The thing is an organization is not just a place where you work; it is a provider of economic security, livelihood, and dignity. This concentrates extraordinary power in your place of employment; you are to clock in 5 days a week for at least 8 hours a week; and then work in a highly locked down corporate machine, which you are not allowed to customize even though this is where you will spend the majority of your week in, and one has to ask the question to what extent a company owns your life.
I think that we must also identify the cultural contradiction here; where Hollywood and the like in a sense glorify promiscuity and depict wealth as flaunted with assets and women, as a cultural ideal, and then turn around and hound creatures who are products of such a culture.
Of course, in this case it is far more likely that Jensen was involved with some national security incident.
It speaks to Huang's actual work performance. His seemingly sole value proposition was talking; his customers originally identified a gpu's utility in AI.
- His replacement, Colette Kress
- Nvidia's competitors, AMD, Intel, Broadcom, Huawei
- His political enemies, ie chip protectionists on both sides of the aisle
- Perhaps AI Doomers like Amodei and Altman?
I am in shock, Jensen is one of the pioneers in our industry and we will always remember his accomplishments. But I do fear Nvidia will now only make safe bets and not be able to innovate in an ongoing industrial revolution because they lack their biggest, boldest visionary to set the direction. This man has created an insane wealth for over 50% of his employees. An extraordinary leader, engineer, salesman and team builder. I still believe in the excellent talent at Nvidia, but I do not believe in a board that fires their best person and we have seen several examples of a board/leadership ruining a company because they lack the founders vision, fighting spirit and ownership. Jensen deserved another punishment, not getting fired.
Am I the only one who feels this is a smear piece to oust Jenson to retain optics?
Outside of the continued selling to China/skirting the export ban I’m of the belief that he was offered a better deal in China, took it, then signaled he was departing, the timing on this seems…suspect.
Recalling the May POTUS and CEO field trip to china, the lot returned together with Jenson extending his stay nearly two weeks afterwards.
IMO this ongoing theatre provides cover to oust Jenson and vilify him before he appears somewhere in China —- imagine how the share price would fair if it came to light that he was leaving as CEO to take a position in Huawei…
"We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said get ready to go to jail."
Wish the interviewer would have let him talk more instead of changing the subject.
It's a shame as he built Nvidia and sheparded it to what it is that. Without Jensen Huang, I can't envision Nvidia surviving. Companies like that need visionaries. We can talk about tech oligarchy and with AI some regulation is needed, but without people like him, tech doesn't move forward as it has.
The irony isn't lost on me that Jensen Huang suffered consequences for his involvement with mature, consenting adults and a whole bunch of other tech billionaires didn't for their island antics.
I think the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. That opens up NVidia to a lot of legal exposure.
The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Skirting export bans is an unknown. I honestly don't believe this administration would let anything bad happen there. Jensen Huang is simply too rich and NVidia too big.
So, I understand this is getting priced in to some degree, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA.
Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
Cheaters are the worst, lying and betraying a woman who trusts you. Western people should treat cheating more seriously and not turn a bling eye to it. I wish they found a way to take back some of his pay too.
>Huang, Nvidia's fourth-largest shareholder with a stake of about 3.61%
This was the founder? Damn!
I get that hardware requires much more capital and investment than a pure software company, but he had crossed the board-being-able-to-fire-you rubicon looong ago
There's huge risk in firing a very successful CEO without anyone ready to replace him.
No one really cares about the affairs, so I think the only thing that could push the board do this would be the threat of more damaging stuff coming out, like nVidia skirting the China ban, or a legal threat to Jensen that envelops the company. Or back-channel pressure from the US Gov.
This seems like a wild over reaction to the stock. Does anyone actually think Jensen being CEO of Nvidia is with $1 trillion in market cap?! The reason Nvidia is dominant is because of their ecosystem and them having the best chips, not because of some guy that leads the company.
Jack Clark Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic / head of the Anthropic Institute is the nyt and @AnaSwanson "source" he is the one coordinating a coup against Jensen.
It just sucks because Jensen was basically the last big tech CEO that seemed like a human being, and knew what the hell he was talking about. I guess a little too human in the end. But this has pretty much destroyed my last bit of faith in any of them.
> NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) Board of Directors announced today that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.
Jensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
"Some officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including those close to director Jay Clayton, have framed the characterization of Alice Huang as a Chinese spy as not entirely accurate and over-torqued, sources said. And officials at the CIA also are not yet convinced that the intelligence collection on Huang to date, including intercepted communications, proves she was knowingly funneling information back to Beijing, a source told CNN.
Still, some Trump officials told CNN that it strains credulity to believe that she was not acting as an agent of the Chinese government — simply by virtue of the fact that she is a successful Chinese businesswoman working with one of America’s most powerful companies."
i hate this moral outrage. what's wrong if he was sleeping around? let him just print gpu. his ability to print gpus has nothing to do what he does in his bedroom. i can sympathaize with the wife and infidelity is a sin. but he was supplying everybody with gpu. so that makes him a great guy too.
I was hoping we wouldn't return to woke witch hunts
If this was about national security or evading the law, it would have happened when it was discovered.
The board didn't have the determination either to fire him or to protect him, and he realized they wouldn't be able to make a decision, so he did it for them.
Now we'll see yet another jewel taken over by bean counters because the board was so dependent.
Let's hope other founders have boards who can actially handle their responsibilities.
Lots of HNers chiming in that consent is all that matters, so the affair with a subordinate is totally fine.
Perhaps this may help explain why it's unethical to date a direct report to those HNers:
- It's unfair to the coworkers of the subordinate, because the affair can give the impression of influencing promotion, personnel and monetary decisions you make in favour of the subordinate.
- It places your direct report in a compromising position. Such a relationship is potentially coercive, because the direct report may fear reprisal, rendering any consent invalid. Many have commented that imputing coercion to any power imbalance leads to the absurd conclusion a rich person shouldn't date at all - however, this use of "slippery slope" doesn't offset your ethical duty as a leader. As the boss, you have to protect your employees, and placing them in this situation in the first place violates that commitment.
tl;dr you violate your duty of care, plain and simple, to everyone underneath you by doing this.
A pragmatic, ethical workplace policy is to instead date people not in your reporting chain. If that means you shouldn't date your employees as CEO, then that's responsible behaviour, not a chafing limitation.
---
Others have commented that Jensen's affair is plausibly fine because "we don't know his private affairs". Jensen has made an unambiguous statement about hurting his wife and family - if they were non-monogamous, Jensen has had the opportunity to disclose it. Absent that, you have to assume this was an illicit affair. Moreover, none of this changes the fact that having an affair with a direct report was entirely unethical.
Still others have attempted a whataboutism by asking why "other CEOs" haven't had this level of blowback for having an affair with a subordinate. Unfortunately, not every tragedy gets the same level of public reaction, for no other reason than timing, luck, or lack if engagement. We should be equally upset about all the other cases as a general rule, rather than relying on normalized apathy to lull us into complacence.
This is a really terrible decision, especially putting the CFO in charge afterwards. It really doesn't matter what terrible crap he's done in his private life as long as he continues to run the business well.
I have seen several references to Huang's stance on Open Models, and there is apparently nothing below board with exports. Is there a chance (within reason, I don't mean conspiracy theory) his ouster was orchestrated? Let's call the affair a "convenient excuse" because from what I've seen in my time on earth, a CEO's private indiscretions aren't always enough to result in a termination.
tl;dr - how much of this might be motivated about internal politics and board views vs. CEO views ?
I remember Jensen saying he doesn’t have a contract with TSMC. The whole supply is based on a trusted relationship and handshake deals between the two CEOs. I wonder if that relationship is transferable to his successor.
And is it going to get cheaper to build data centers?
Nvidia was/is such a fundamental cog in the american ai economy/ machine, what spies, what cheating are people obsessed about? Nvidia created the capital for its own success; read about it, think about it, be against it, be for it. The capital did not exist, they created it by neoclouds buying hardware which they wouldnt need for two years ahead by lender and vendor-backed financing; hardware, which would be replaced in another 2-4 years.
Will nVidia continue to provide the same backing to neo-clouds? Without nVidia backing are lenders willing to give more or less?
Forget about chinese openweight models, antropic or oai, I see this development as a huge spanner in the us ai economy, maybe the biggest blunder of the year, the biggest own goal if it came from within the us administration under or without guidance.
And finally: Jensen selling to the chinese iron. Okay, was he the only one, god amongst mortals, in the fricking room. Who the heck comes up with these shallow plots...
> Jensen Huang was fighting hard to hang onto his role with the company he founded, according to several people briefed on the discussions. But an interim plan for the chief financial officer, Colette Kress, to take over Nvidia was well underway yesterday.
From the NYT live updates.
Ah well, I'm somewhat seeing parallels to the 2023 OpenAI drama, not sure if this is gonna be how things end quite yet.
Good lord, 3k upvotes?? HN needs to take a dose of that nothing-ever-happens meme. One guy is out, this is not the death knell everyone seems to think it is.
It's wild how so many of us think a CEO's behaviour over an affair (or whatever) is more "interesting" than the behaviour of the gangsters who rule the "free" world.
I suppose this is just how "true" propaganda works. The real goal is for people to just accept it as the norm.
What is the thinking in posting the 3,321st comment in this thread? If you're thinking of replying about the irony of this being self-referential consider that done.
I guess everyone looks at infidelity and goes oh the horror. Thing is these are puritanical views and has no bearing on the companys wider performance. Not to mention the fact we dont really know what was going on with these people's personal lives. Now going around sanctions otoh is a whole different problem. Although tbf, given the clown that is the US president right now, I am not sure the US has the moral high ground to suggest selling to China is a problem or anything. I dont see the point of these sanctions, so I understand if Nvidia found a way of going around the sanctioned pathways.
wow! things moved fast. It was only yesterday we were debating what could/should happen.
If he did what he did as an employee, he would be fired too. As a CEO it was much worse.
Also, this did not happen in a day, it was cooking for some time and the mid-term shift of power may have something to do with it as well.
All the folks arguing "oh China does not need the chips, this ban is bad". That is a separate issue. Fact is there is a ban and this reeks of at least turning a blind eye in pursuit of profit, if not downright complicity. Second major character flaw for a leader after he demonstrated tendency to cheat.
A CEO is the public face of the company. If he was in China, he would already be in a remote prison for "re-education".
Folks may have their own opinion, but I do think China desperately wants access to the latest nVidia chips. Their own efforts are lagging behind (maybe at 80% and the last 20% is the hardest). So in the meantime, they don't want their software part to fall behind. So they need the latest/greatest for their AI models.
Eventually they may get to hardware parity and likely even get ahead (they have enough smart people and consistent leadership focus). But not today.
For them this was a win-win. If it worked, they would have the chips they need and if it blew up, they would have slowed down the leading US company (and it will affect nVidia).
Mr. Huang who already was quite successful eventually could not manage the stratospheric growth that he lucked into on the back of AI. Maybe on a product level he did, but on a policy level, he seems to have come up short.
Now that leaves another big hardware company, also helmed by a Taiwanese - I hope they can keep their heads (women are generally better at that since they only have to manage one head).
The affairs are horrible behavior. Going around export restrictions.
But talk about ruining a legacy before it really took off. I don't really have sympathy. But this guy should have carried around a piece of paper with some short aphorisms to look at everyday to anchor him back to reality.
This is the reason no other ceo projects an image of being good guy. One affair and everything you build just collapses. And on the other side rich people can be doing anything and nothing moves markets for their deeds lol
I was telling yall I knew something was off with nvidia when they had those remote controlled “lets pretend they are ai” Disney robots on stage - I was like that’s not cricket.
"The state of the world economy and the future of open models would be in turmoil due to the affairs of a person who's not even a politician" was not on my 2026 bingo card.
Financially, this is probably the best thing that could’ve happened to him…even with the almost assured impending divorce. Wonder if he’s gonna start a new chip company.
As a coworker very succinctly put into words yesterday:
"All that money and only one side chick? He should be fired for not thinking big enough!"
Seriously speaking, not making any moral judgement on the guy: this is clearly big enough to think who would benefit for Nvidia slowly losing his firm de-facto monopoly on AI and GPUs, then pick whatever conspiracy theory suits you; it'll probably be 50% right at least.
So... Peoples are buying 3090 from China an just days ago we learned they have PRO chip inside... Maybe China was using that until they got 50 series, possibly with unlock trick ? After all just few months ago China wasn't interested in H or G something Trump generously offered...
we'll see whether it was about the affairs if Nvidia keeps promoting open weight models or just becomes a supplier for openai and anthropic's closed ecosystems for 'national security' reasons.
Great! Imagine of other CEOs would follow the same suit after their affairs went public. Or maybe once they have 14 kids with different women from their companies.
But I guess as a society we pick and choose who gets a pass for cheating and lack of morals, and who doesn't.
I wonder how many of you in this comment section are just butthurt about your over inflated nvidia stocks tanking. We all know the Nvidia stock deserves to be around 2020 levels.
Could this be it? Are these fuckers worried about their incentives being misaligned where Anthropic would love to stop open weight models in the US and NVIDIA has incentives to beat Apple at the local AI game.
Firing one the world's smartest men that built one of the most valuable companies just because he had consensual sex with a woman he wasn't married with.
Law and adultery are so obviously irrelevant here, besides being used as kompromat. That's a pretty transparent and well timed punishment for disloyalty and a corporate+state coup of one group against another, there's zero doubt about that. I wonder if anyone who commented "oh it's just China doing Chinese things" on Jack Ma back in the day will ever notice (ironic) parallels with Huang. Detestable.
So apparently (allegedly) entire segments "just evaporated" from NVDA's books (ie. Singapore). How is it then that of all people NVDA's Chief financial officer is considered as a new CEO?!
It's so weird, we have CEO that did Nazi salute live, to millions of people, and suffer no consequence. Then there is CEO who, AFAIK, sleeping with suspected Chinese Spy, and get fired.
He was at the top of the world just last week and now his career is over.
Slept with a direct subordinate - who btw rose quickly through the ranks - also slept with a Chinese spy and allegedly sold one of the most precious commodities in modern times illegally to an economic adversary. Hit job or not, he really fucked up.
Eh, i think he's acting as a heatshield for Nvidia, his affairs are irrelevant, but the Chinese sales could put both Nvidia as a company and him as CEO in jail... this allows them both to pretends it's a 'personal issue' and get away with it.
That bit with Dwarkesh was very prophetic in hindsight.
Jensen Huang getting caught with his pants down was not on my bingo card for how AI ponzi schemes will crash. This is the same guy and the same board that has been loaning peter to rent compute from paul who buys from them. ie circular financing juicing forward revenue.
Banging Chinese Spies presents a conflict of interest the Board cannot overlook.
Banging 1000 women while married is Chinese "Boss" behavior.
The cause and effect is that any and all future CEOs caught in a honeypot will be easier to compromise. Xi loves the news. Nerds with one billion dollars hoping to attain unlimited groupies will need proper Hollywood Handlers. HR for whore intake if you will. Until the sex robots arrive.
Since this company has abandoned gamers for AI. Plus allegedly giving away a few million plus chips (gamers get fucked) to China. I am fully on his wife's side. She was there at the beginning.
Luckily we know that American courts are one sided. Making the upcoming divorce more costly then the Bill Gate's Foundation implosion. What's the over/under divorce cost trending on Polymarket right now? Seems undervalued.
It's amazing to see the people cheering on Jensen's resignation as if it's not the death knell for open models..especially on a forum that prides itself on open source, what a slap in the face and a compromise of the forums values.
Huang/Nvidia = House Atreides
Lisa Su/AMD = House Harkonnen
GPUs = Sandworms
US Govt = The Emperor/House Corrino
Smugging GPUs to China = Smuggling Sandworms off planet to try and break the spice monopoly
This event = some stuff that happens in book 2/ movie part 3
Stuff
Let this be a learning experience for everyone here: if you ever get the CEO if a US tech giant, then never f** a Chinese spy! (and never circumvent export bans while you are at it)
Someone of incredible wealth and influence suffering negative outcomes for something wrong that they did?
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
Goes to show how little faith people have in institutions. Almost nobody is taking this situation at face value. It's conspiracy this, conspiracy that. The only thing people can agree on is that we, the public, are being ratfucked.
Elon(and others) got it right by making perfidity a feature of there character right up front by bieng VERY public about whatever they get up to.
Jensen just so happens to be a convienient scapegoat to buy a news cycle away from the very difficult political and economic situation that would otherwise be the lead story, and I bet that having him fold his hand quite so easily is actualy not what they were hoping for, and good on him for doing it.
Jensen is basically Nvidia, he has ruled it for over 30 years single handedly, he took the risks and had the vision to take it to where it is today under his leadership. Without him, they are just some chip company, and will be revalued as such. The innovation will stop.
I have to say, this seems like a ridiculous over-reaction on the part of the board.
I think if you could know the truth, 75% of CEOs in the US probably cheat on their wives. They are not hired to be faithful to their wives, they are hired to increase the stock prices of their companies.
Like sure, if you're a good Christian, it's not good behavior, but ultimately, it's just having sex with someone. I want the guy to make me money and build a great company, I don't care who he has sex with.
Not sure about the people thinking he didn't do much wrong.
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
ok heres a conspiracy theory: they got rid of him now because he advocates for open models and minimal govt interference. who wants more govt interference and closed models? the other ai labs for one and the govt for two. maybe getting one of their more compliant buddies in charge of the hardware manufacturer would also be not such a bad idea.
In its day, Britain imprisoned Oscar Wilde and castrated the brilliant Alan Turing for homosexuality, driving him to his death. Now we look back on this in horror as an example of collective madness.
So how will we look back a couple of decades from now on the atmosphere of the 21st-century woke party committee, which, on the word of a spurned woman, fired the brilliant biologist David Sabatini and destroyed the visionary founder of a company over extramarital affairs?
I really hope the NVIDIA GeForce Now service sticks around and doesn't get enshittified.
It's actually an excellent high quality service and with all the shortages should hopefully continue to get more and more successful. Cloud gaming will continue to become a more important part of gaming.
Now that Microsoft recently enshittified Xbox Cloud Gaming, we have a situation where GeForce Now is pretty much the only good option left.
One Blue Tsunami, and now all the oligarchs are suddenly turning progressive and transitioning! Trump was right all along. This is exactly what he was trying to warn us about.
Think of all the mistresses who will now have to accept and adapt to their oligarch lover's new gender -- Jensen has at least two that we know of, but when you see two ants in the kitchen, you know there are a lot more. I can't wait to see the wig Bezos picks out.
The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me. This is a man who could be fired just for OFFERING to have sex with a subordinate. The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind. But we live in an age where the only truth people believe is the one that makes them feel a certain way, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
What is, however had, more interesting is that many of
his statements did not age well. Now, mind you - I still
think it is his private life at the end of the day; one
can reason about foreign spies, but then the same question
can be asked about Trump and his strange addiction to
Putin. As well as how Jen-Hsun was so obedient to a
mainland-China female, when the other Taiwanese are
scared of being possibly invaded and subsequently killed
by dictator Xi, just as dictator Putin commits to his
own personal genocide against Ukrainians right now.
But, with regards to statements, I distinctly remember
Jen-Hsun berating the british as incompetent economists.
I watched that on a shorts on youtube; can not find it
right now (google search AND youtube search sucks to
no ends now). Well - he may be right that the UK suffers
huge economic problems, but boy, this has not aged well.
People will poke fun at his love of women potentially
being spies while berating the british as being too
incompetent in economics. Perhaps he was too incompetent
in his own love life?
The reason this is all going so quickly now is because they realised how deep the shit is Jensen put the company in.
There will be an endless walk of shame for Jensen that would constantly drag the price of the company down, because this is the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to fly out of the gate in January and put the fear of god into the other billionaire oligarchs again. Punish one with extreme measures the others will fall in line, because at the end of the day they are all pussys.
Remember Elon wanted to do cagefighting with Zuckerberg. Those two losers had every excuse ready not to fight in the end. They didn’t even touch gloves for a single sparring. Manly men. All they can do is tough talk.
Plus the voters will see at least one party is doing something against blatant billionaire corruption, with corruption being the third most important topic in the elections.
There needs to be made an example of what happens to you if you start selling weapons-grade technology to the enemies of the United States for personal profit, and then think you are above the law.
This is not over for Jensen. And also not over for Nvidia, so the only sane thing to do is get as much distance between the "rogue" CEO and the company. Same for the White House, let’s see how often we see Jensen and Trump still together.
They are going to throw him under the bus and say he had the opportunity and the access and the power to do this without anyone else noticing, especially as he was sexually manipulating managers that directly report to him on important corporate issues.
They will make it look as though it’s all Jensen’s fault because otherwise they stop being a trillion-dollar company.
It’s a fitting end for Jensen Huang.
He gets taken down by the holy trifecta of power, money and politics he valued above his own marriage or what this whole mess would do to his kids.
He even lied in his public apology because he still was confident the other affair with his married manager would never surface because he truly believes he is smarter than anyone else.
What a loser. 140B deep pockets and still a loser.
Money is only paper. All that counts is family.
Threw away his life’s work, his marriage and every last drop of respect for him as a man, father and husband his kids could ever have for pocket change and some ass.
I still got no idea why an affair is such a big deal, why everybody immediately assumed his wife was not ok with it, or why this had any effect on his ability to continue running a business he's been very successful at running for three decades.
The amount of crass intrusion in someone's irrelevant private life is amazing, especially when it mostly comes from a country with some of the highest infidelity rates. Most of the people eager to insult him and make assumptions about his wife's feelings probably are cheaters.
There was absolutely no reason for him to resign or even publicly apologize until the pending investigation about his girlfriend being a spy or not completed.
Stuff like this is why AI automation is going to come faster than people think.
Invariably it will be recognized that the weakest link in any part of any organizations are the humans. Humans once had a monopoly on long-term strategic thinking so capital had to confer them authority and compensation, but once AI supersedes humans in these respects, then the human element will be aggressively excised from any company where human flaws put the strength and compettive advantage of that company at risk.
A robot employee never has affairs, never sleeps, never needs worker's compensation for injury, never sues the company. When trillions of dollars are on the line, eliminating risks like this is a trivial decision.
This is insane. Firing someone for their personal life choices instead of their professional life choices is absurd. The reporter that went after the second affair story was a proper misandrist too (as per reels) who had a history misandry in the past.
Because he cheated on his wife?? Or what am I missing? If that's the official reason, I don't buy it. I don't think those who can influence this decision give two shits about this type of morality. It's silly on its face. Obviously it's cover for some other agenda. I'm just surprised people buy this silly excuse instead of getting to the bottom of what is really happening.
What are the implications if up to 15% of revenue was "fake"? The investors have been pricing Nvidia based on demand and revenue from (most places except for China). Since it turns out that it was actually (most places including China), doesn't that imply the market is actually smaller than they thought? Can buyers sue because they paid increased prices for their products due to sanction breaking by Nvidia?
The only reason Jensen is out is because he doesn't pretend AI is an existential threat like Anthropic and OpenAI do to boost their own valuation/moats and to boost the anti-China sentiment for the administration.
If shareholders want to save the company fu-g board of directors should be replaced completely and Jensen back.
Colette Kress has brain of Marisa Mayer who destroyed Yahoo. A woke clown to lead technology company? No vision, no skills, no understanding of technology.
Apologies, but I don't really get why these issues are being exposed all over so awfully about the person life of the poor person who is getting ashamed, reputation getting damaged, and what's more important, his wonderful personal, private life is getting exposed and preserved in the history...
These lovely cases must still be approached with pure respect for private life of everyone, and understanding, because we all are human who have feelings, and this is absolutely normal to make mistakes in love sometimes trying...
Relationships, affairs, love... this is personal and must be respected. These are some of the most complex subjects, if not the most... and infinitely magnificent feelings... where sometimes the heart and hope wins over rational actions...
Yet, this is true for every single human, isn't it? This is true about me, I believe, too. This is true about people I know in overly serious and responsible positions at critical decisions for business and lives of other people... and they know that, and stay careful.
And these cases, vulnerabilities, or operational risks... are also covered on military classes, as leadership and security awareness courses, to stay responsible for actions and consider the future - to remind that you must always evaluate the long term consequences, to the point to decide quickly in full action.
This is matter of the heart... human emotions... infinitely powerful aspects of human nature... the dear love...
There's nothing to be ashamed of.
Yes, you must stay truthful to your half... the ring bound promise, which is a miracle if from love...
But it is fundamentally... absolutely normal, awesome to try searching for your soulmate if you don't have peace at heart, making mistakes, trying hard...
// ---
Such public cases are either designed for public (e.g., to derail attention from something more important), or those that get out of control, which is relatively rare, I believe.
It is rare to get exposed on public since these relationships are known to limited number of people, aren't they? So samizdat is rarely responsible for it, and mass publishers are normally supervised by governments, which is expected for them to stay responsible for control of events.
Even if circumstances and consequences may be monumentally tragic or overly serious, this is love which is no less serious, and miraculously lovely awesome...
// ---
> I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry...
>
> To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust...
>
> My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.
>
> ~ Jensen
>
> Source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
// ---
And I just heartfelt sorry for the person to receive so much shame, hatred, mockering, hostility, ridiculing from public... for just his attempts to find love, his peace at heart...
There is no shame in that, I believe, absolutely. This is his business to be not exposed so disgracefully on public.
This is a miracle to proud of, to understand, and respect always.
Sincere heartwarming hug, dear Jensen... I am... sorry... for the people to ridicule on it you nor anyone deserves...
Jensen Huang called Israel a "second home" while it was committing genocide against Palestinians. This is just a continuation of a pattern of corruption. I think he resented his own success because these are not honest mistakes. Jensen Huang is the AI Great Gatsby.
I find the discussion here to be slightly myopic. It is obvious he did something wrong, it is also obvious that members of the government and other actors likely knew about all of this for several years. You aren't the CEO of a trillion dollar company without being under the eye of many people. The real question people should be asking is "why now?" why is the PR spectacle happening at this moment and who is benefitting from supplying the NYTimes with this compromising information.
Obviously we can only come up with conjecture, but it should at least be discussed that this is not happening out of thin air due solely to his reckless actions but represents some kind of hidden power struggle. It's quite clear to me folks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio very likely knew about these things taking place for quite some time.
The story was broken by the New York Times. New York Times journalists Tripp Mickle and Ana Swanson got a tip from from "a tech industry contact"[1] in August. They worked sources and investigated until they were ready to break the story in October.
Based on the photos that have been popping up, the tech industry contact could have been any one of the comparatively large number of people in position to observe what was going on.
Perhaps someone decided to leak it to the media now because it became clear that the US government was unwilling to take it seriously, despite the persistent warnings.
Or perhaps it's just the sheer accumulation of chance. The longer it's happening as an open secret that no one wants to talk about, the more likely that someone who thinks it's wrong will find out and speak out.
This could likely be the "transition of power" playing out in the US. Jensen presented possibly the easiest target due to his indiscretion and lack of deep connections with the powers to be.
Others like Altman, Ellison et al better fall in line with the new power brokers or some compelling reason for their departure will surface as well.
It looks to be a tough next year for the tech industry (AI in particular) and possibly for your stock options, stocks and 401Ks as well.
I wouldn't be totally shocked if the Chinese themselves gave him up in a long game to start a dialog with the incoming powers. They don't lose much if nVidia gets tangled up and flounders around, they get more time to catch up.
Might it be as simple as who made the most money now with shorting Nvidia stock before they step out of a position of power/access to this level of insider info for timing purposes with the change of power with recent election results? I.e. they see the tide is changing, so play this card now while they can still make money...
You lined statements up but didn't draw a conclusion. Why do you think it happened and what about Marco Rubio? Did he leak it? Is he compromised?
The thing is the spy scandal might not have done anything to Jensen. He submitted an apology and the board was looking into what happened. It wasn't until the second affair came out that the board met to discuss firing him and it was the board that decided it. Jensen resigned which means they fired him. So if the government coordinated leaks on his private life to oust him, they had this intel on him. That means they were watching him and to me that implies something worse than just a power struggle. I am inclined to believe a simpler theory that it came out through investigation and he's apparently scandal prone and if he hadn't had affairs with employees might still be the CEO.
Moreover, the report by Culper Research apparently discussed these issues back in May.
I know it takes time for stories to pick up steam, but it's 6 months. Why did no one care until now?
The elephant in the room is very apparent and you can trace it all the way back to specific foreign agencies with their new interim CEO. I think it's pretty clear this was orchestrated on a timeline to put him out.
> The real question people should be asking is "why now?"
It would always be a "why now" situation. No matter when it was disclosed. You can always find how a release like this is correlated with something, eventhough they might just be coincidences.
there's motivation from CIA/state in making an example re: protecting america re:
"According to Director Wray, the level of the CCP criminality is so widespread and voluminous that “the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours and of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China.”"
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8760...
via https://www.google.com/search?q=ccp+in+the+united+states
It is incredibly likely that this scandal will expand to those people in government who knew about this and supported it either tacitly or actively. This is only the first domino.
Though the allegations appear founded. I wouldn’t exclude some kind of political power play.
If you’ve read anything on McCarthyism, there’s an history of denouncing foreign ties and sexual immorality for personal gain.
Most likely it's because he pushed back against antropics proposal for GPUs to block inference for unsigned and unregistered models.
Because it went public. The secret finally reached someone who cared enough to slip it to reporters who took a few months to research and validate the claims. That person could either be someone who's hoping to benefit or someone who just thought it was wrong that it was allowed to go on so long.
> The real question people should be asking is "why now?“
What is special about now than 6 months or an year ago?
It may be a power play for the top spot of what's essentially going to be the most valuable company in the AI future
But equally it could be as simple as very elaborate market manipulation (intentional stock tanking) so they can all 'buy low' and make trillions when it goes back up
Certain groups may need that right now given some recent political events... you know to get some money for the next big political event that's due in a couple of years...
Who will benefit from people that are dumping Nvidia stock today ? Where these investors will allocate theirs capital next? Why Jensen was trying to prevent AI duopoly from forming even at risk skirting export laws.
Agreed, the focus on Jensen Huang's affairs, even with this Chinese "spy" are just a side show.
The more serious side of this is that NVidia, and specifically (but hardly only) Jensen have been knowingly supplying Megaspeed (and probably many more) Chinese proxy companies with GPUs, presumably well aware that the final customer was China in one form or another, which would be a felony if proved.
The US Commerce dept, and FBI, had been investigating Megaspeed until for unknown reasons (follow the money!) the Justice dept. told the Commerce dept. to stop the investigation. Trump appears friendly with Jensen, and effectively (but not legally) commands the DOJ, so it would not be surprising to find that he is the one who stopped this investigation. Trump had previously arranged for NVidia trade with China as long as the US government got a 15-25% cut, so to him this is all about money not AI or national security strategy.
The timing of this now coming out may be related to the midterms and change in balance of power, and an interesting question is who behind pushing this into the news? One possibility would seem to be the FBI, upset that this investigation had been shut down, and realizing that with the dems controlling the house and senate that Trump would have less ability to control the story. The juicy "having affair with Chinese spy" angle seems well designed to get media coverage. It's interesting who is behind resurfacing Jensen's multiple affairs with Nvidia staff - did the same party that pushed the Megaspeed/spy story do this, or is this from people inside NVidia perhaps happy to pile on? Jensen does seem to have run Nvidia as his own personal fiefdom, installing three family members there in high paid jobs, as well as his employee affairs, and presumably had his enemies there as a result. Jensen's rapid resignation perhaps reflects him realizing that his protection is gone and this is not just a media story that may blow over.
It seems that it's not only Jensen Huang that needs to be (and will be) investigated here, but also NVidia, and the Commerce department, and whoever ordered the investigation shut down.
One interesting practical aspect to this is does NVidia keep supplying GPUs to these Chinese proxy companies in Singapore and elsewhere, or does this now actually get shut down? It's crazy that there are US companies starving for NVidia GPUs while NVidia was preferentially selling them to companies like Megaspeed instead. If this changed, would it end the US GPU shortage?
On the "Why now", Dylan Patel from SemiAnalysis, the most prestige American Semiconductor industry research and analysis firm (who broke the Google DeepAI we have no moat neither does OpenAI in 2023) has the direct answer:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50488931Follow the shorts…
100% on point for the bigger issue hiding in plain sight.
Nvidia employees actually like their boss regardless his personal life / (un)professional affairs, and petitioning the board to reconsider and generated 1000s of comments internally [1]. Like for two reasons,
- After all, Nvidia was one the BIGGEST if not the biggest millionaire minting factory for the computing era. And Jensen was the solo man behind this whole journey (he bragged about being the longest serving CEOs in Corporate America, too sad he jinxed himself now.) Now the millionare minting factory part is about to be superseded by Anthropic.
- His working style was well known. He's a huge supporter of Open Weight and invested the entire AI ecosystems.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/nvidia-employees-petition-for-je...
Even though it seems coordinated its not obvious who is incentivized to do this.
I find it kinda weird that all of this is published right now, as the US Department of Commerce has been investigating since end of 2024..
My understanding of the conspiracy theory is that the fingers point towards Anthropic:
- Anthropic is strongly at odds with NVIDIA over their stance on open models, as Jensen is very pro-open-models [0]
- Anthropic could benefit from tanking the NVIDIA stock to have more free capital to invest in their own upcoming IPO
- the NYTimes reporters that broke this story are known to have previously published articles on Anthropic
- the timing after the midterm elections is such that the Republicans (especially Trump himself, who likes Jensen quite a lot) are sufficiently weakened that they cannot protect Jensen or NVIDIA
- Dario has previously had personal anger issues surrounding Jensen and NVIDIA [1]
- it seems plausible that AI (Claude) could have been used to do the extensive research and "dig up dirt" on NVIDIA
But again, this is merely a conspiracy theory. I don't have the evidence to conclusively accuse Anthropic of anything. All I can do is point out a series of coincidences.
[0] https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-L...
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/01/dario-amodei-outrageous-lie-j...
The AI market was crashing already, some big players missed the boat and called in a big favor.
Check anyone taking large short positions on NVDA.
> The real question people should be asking is "why now?" why is the PR spectacle happening at this moment and who is benefitting from supplying the NYTimes with this compromising information.
I would view this as a vague and fairly useless question. Yes, the admin knew about it an year ago, and still nothing happened, and there is no reason to think this would've been out in full force if the NYT article didn't come out. One could ask the same question "why now?" if NYT article came out in March instead of November. The answer might be fairly mundane -- once a 'newsworthy' front page article comes out, everyone wants to run with whatever headline that gets them the most clicks and 'mindshare'. A fancy version of Nightcrawler so to speak.
If past performance is an indication of any competence -- 9/11 prediction, catching Bin Laden, WTC bomber, or even catching the LBNL hacker -- it is quite clear many of these govt agencies are mediocre at best, but they are experts in hiding their incompetence behind the veil of importance such as national security, and furthermore, there are masses of flag-worshipers that cheer them on. In most elite corporate setups, they would be classified as professional bullshit artists by most employees and promoted quickly ;)
Deepseek moment #2. Say goodbye to any future DGX Spark / GB10 successors.
Jensen was on a sovereignty / local crusade for the better part of a year at least:
https://youtu.be/JW5s9Md4U2U
Nvidia will potentially become the new IBM and if it plays out like that let's hope Apple + AMD will (be able to) pick up the ball...
So yeah who is profiting indeed:
https://youtu.be/EowC_gXjpVA
first comment on this hn -> says "obvious" 3 times for things that are obviously not obvious.
bonus: "it's quite clear" for something that is really not clear,"represents some kind of hidden power struggle" and "It's quite clear" for something clearly not clear.
HN=reddit 2.0
I feel it's very bizarre to call out Rubio in particular, it makes me feel like this comment is astroturfed
Yep, a guy with far greater felonies sits in the WH.
Indeed, why throw Jensen under the bus right now? What happened? Who did he cross?
Why now? Because Dems won the midterms, and some non-zero slowdown is likely in the US. Markets certainly think so, esp with all the moratorium headlines. It’s only prudent to ensure that China also slows down a bit, since the US lead is measured in months by most. RASA also fits with this narrative.
Spooks love to talk as much as they like to listen.
"but represents some kind of hidden power struggle."
I think it's likely not.
The thing that is getting him fired is the relations with his staff, not the spy stuff, for which there aren't really specific allegations.
The 'spy' story brought the scrutiny, the scandal is different than the story.
There is likely no 'spy' but just a woman trying to hustle GPUs. These things don't come with 'hard evidence'. So she had 'discussions' with the government? Ok, what was said? Was it even relevant? 'Enough to start a background investigation' is not damning either.
People here have a bad intuition for media whims and narratives. A story can sit in the wide open until there's enough momentum behind it. That draw scrutiny, and if there are more 'juicy things' (infidelity), that gives the story legs.
There are hugely relevant material things going on about 'Epstein' but we only hear about it when the narrative winds blow around it and break the issue through into a contemporary wave.
This is 'media focus lens' as much as anything.
There are a lot of questions around this resignation, and they're hard to untangle. It'd be something just to figure out what exactly he's supposed to have done wrong. Did he really (on purpose or "inadvertently") pass banned chips to China? All this story's going to leave us with is suspicion and no certainty...
It became safer and less likely to be swept under the rug to be a whistleblower about corruption in the last week.
Maybe he will end up being Qian Xuesen 2.0
Marco Rubio has always had disdain for Trump, but appeased him to stay in office. He absolutely knew about this because word is coming out that on multiple occasions he and other representatives brought the suspicion about the GPU smuggling to Trump and Lutnick, but they did nothing.
Now that the midterms are over and Republicans don't have a majority, everyone is scrambling to spill the beans on everything to distance themselves from Trump in an attempt to save their careers in politics.
It's Sam Altman. It's always Sam Altman.
But how are we going to even discuss this, in the absence of verifiable information, without degenerating into wild speculation and conspiracy theories?
Maybe the Trump administration is cleaning house in preparation for the coming Congressional investigations, and trying to pin the blame for their treasonous dereliction regarding the chip export controls on Huang?
cui bono.
U.S. economy would be the worst affected if the AI bubble pops, yet still they decided to bring down Jensen for some reason. Considering absolutely nothing happened to the children-raping Billionaires, what did Jensen really do and why now seems to be the paramount question.
A guess is that china burned its own asset. Why would china burn its own asset? With her being known compromisined, usefulness expired, they burn her and potentially damage the NVIDIA relationship with TSMC. The thing to keep in mind about china is they make long plays, not short ones. If they do intend to make landfall on Taiwan in ~4 years, this seems on track, sow distrust now, reep it's rewards later. You might say, that's a crazy longshot for a long player to make. And you be right, but it's at the cost and risk of basically nothing. Perhaps this will be the first in a series of events that will sour or slow the relationship the US has with Taiwan.
>"why now?" why is the PR spectacle happening at this moment and who is benefitting from supplying the NYTimes with this compromising information.
Best theory I heard is fairly simple: Howard Lutnick acted as a shield towards this stuff to keep the money flowing. Midterms was a huge blow to republican power, and that shield will fall very quick as an entire cobweb of corruption will be discovered. I won't say "cleaned out", but we're going to have a lot f light shed on how deep this web goes.
As for why now: you can say some people want to get ahead of this before the new congress comes in. I think it was just pure happenstance. Someone who wasn't easily bribed was in the right (wrong?) place at the right/wrong time and the word spread like wildfire because this is pretty much every soap opera staple happening IRL. People love drama, so the spread is the least surprising part.
Whether you think the spark was coincidental or coordinated will only be revealed with history. but decades of crime scene investigations will reveal to you how utterly sloppy supposed masterminds can be in becoming discovered. Mere seconds of care away from getting away with it all.
> It's quite clear to me folks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio very likely knew about these things taking place for quite some time.
Trump directly knew too, despite recent denials. He is talking about it here:
https://youtu.be/m2aC8lAOQbg?si=rqqSliGdLF4_Q663&t=1460
@24:20
He doesn't mention Jensen Huang by name, but he is definitely talking about him (only person who fits), and also basically admitting they used it as blackmail (comply or go to jail). Between his narcissism and his dementia Trump couldn't stop himself from talking about something he shouldn't have ever brought up in an interview.
The Trump administration was using this as leverage over Jensen for almost a year!
The important question is who then decided to eventually burn Jensen and lose that leverage, and why?
[dead]
Seems pretty obvious: Whatever he did wrong was only recently discovered. “Exposing” his personal life that was never much of a secret to get him out of there is easy cover to avoid having to let the world know what he did wrong.
But while it is obvious he did something wrong, the question remains of what that is. Of course we’ll never find out. This will soon blow over and nobody will ever think of him again.
I think a lot of people here seem to underestimate how much of a CEO's job is perception.
"Oh who cares who he slept with, he's been great for Nvidia. Nothing has been proven."
He's one of the most visible CEO's in the most visible industry in the world, and the entire AI economy is dependent upon them. The perception of him as stable is incredibly important.
Merely the suggestion that he is having affairs with people with close ties to China's government, given export controls, is a huge PR problem. Adding in an additional affair with someone under him. And the likelihood that there may be even more out there.
I doubt the Board wants to get rid of Jensen Huang. He's done incredibly well for them. But right now, there's a huge PR shitstorm swirling around the company.
Maybe in six months it all dies down and he comes back, who knows. But right now, you really can't just ignore the problem and hope the media doesn't care about the whole "well she was only sort of a spy" situation.
People are primarily talking about the Chinese spy affair, but the impression I personally got on X was that the subsequently reported affair with a subordinate VP in Nvidia is what did him in.
Not just the optics, but the liabilities and class action lawsuits if they are not acting on it. After all, A board's fiduciary duty is the legal and ethical obligation of board members to act in the best interests of the organization and its stakeholders.
Make no mistake, a lot of this is also lobbying and highly political. He's one of the few who was extremely vocal about open weight modals. Think about it, you run one of the largest AI (hardware) companies in the world and you're out there promoting open source models, which your home country is losing moat to, so the timing of this is not merely "oops, it's just a co-incidence". Anthropic is going IPO at this exact time - and they're known very well to invest millions into lobbying already (just google it), Google just released a new closed source model, Open AI too is cooking up stuff, and all of these companies need the closed source business model to win. What better way than to kill the vocal leader against their business model?
Well, personally, I hope the open weight models win despite all this lobbying.
I somehow doubt all these aren't connected.
My fps or flops don't care about the CEO.
But there's also now going to be more scruitiny on Nvidia selling to grey market sanction busters and sensitivies in Taiwan where the chips are made.
Also, massive question marks over possible leaks to Chinese chip makers.
It's not just PR. It's also government relations, and relations with fabs, which maybe are more expensive to fix.
Imagine you run TSMC and the mainlab fabs are causing you existential fears. And you have Apple, AMD, Google, Intel, etc all asking about roadmaps, and begging for fab quotas. You gonna offer Nvidia a special deal for being a good customer?
I was watching Jensen's interview by Emily Chang a few hours ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW5s9Md4U2U
There's an increasing agreement about how big of a deal AI is among a growing number of tech luminaries, that if misused it has potential to be very dangerous to humanity. This calls for careful and measured advancement... it also calls for some level of coordination with big players, including China.
Jensen echoes similar sentiments in Emily Chang's interview.
I rue that nuanced opinions are going to brushed aside amidst the nationalist fervor in current ongoing media cycle.
You already said "in six months maybe it dies down"
Thats the thing about perception, the internet is loud and irritated, but no one actuals cares, and if you just ignore it and keep moving forward your perception becomes your track record again and not the noise.
Your perception becomes the noise when you let it drown out the real signal.
Many leaders and engineers at Nvida are multi-millionaires many times over, they don't need to be there, they love the culture, vision and leadership. With Jensen gone, that could all change. I'm sure many employees are looking at the exit now.
China won big with this one.
Oh come on. Everyone knows these tech CEOs are distasteful humans, people just buy from them because they have little competition (from fellow evil tech CEOs).
The CEO's personality is irrelevant if they're selling something that's in high enough demand. Money matters more than anything.
This particular scandal is an issue for Nvidia because:
1. Actual espionage, national security, etc. is potentially in play - criminal charges cost money.
2. Liability from potential lawsuits around in-office affairs - civil suits cost money.
I think a lot of people who care deeply about optics overemphasize the importance of optics. Which is understandable.
To many people, optics matter less than other things. Shareholders want profit, employees want a certain trajectory, tech leaders want products or services. To most of these, they really couldn't care less who Jensen goes to bed with.
I might even go as far as saying that to most people who actually matter in this context, PR is probably not their top consideration.
Was.
No it isn't. This fabricated reality is all about control. And that's why we have these totally fucked up societies and psychopath politicians who do not give a flying f about the populace. Because who can adhere to these standards? Psychos.
I don't like NVDA and Huang, but this ridiculous double standard that certain people adhere to is akin to a cult's thought process. You are the CEO, you cannot have emotions, you have to hide your personal life, you have to show outside how great of a person you are blablabla.
If you have good optics to the outside, well, you are our man. Oh, there was a chap called Jimmy Saville. He was such a sweet person, and he raped kids by the dozens. DOESNT MATTER! He had good optics. There you go, wallow in the mud, crazy f'rs and offer your children to the rapist.
At the end of the day he is just another human being. The same human being like anybody else. End of story. Rest is hyperbole and powerless people trying to exert some influence on an individual.... because of corpo skullduggery. Bleh.
Well you'd imagine after what the current US president has done, it seems like the standards for this to matter would have been fairly low.
Or, as Matt Levine likes to say, everything is securities fraud:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2023-08-24/matt-levine-...
When the share price is at max max any slight crosswind is going to knock it hard too. And this is a big one because a trifecta of scandal, the spy thing and him being ousted and so that brain and leadership and image being lost. Wouldn't be so bad on a value share probably (I invest in another scandal ridden CEO stock so I know the drill!)
With the recent midterm / AI crash, I'll leave this stock well alone. Might buy at sub 100 if panic sets in.
You spoke too soon about more affairs hah
Didn't Musk completely disprove this theory by doing Nazi salutes without consequences to his position? Turns out actually CEO perception doesn’t matter.
> The perception of him as stable is incredibly important.
...Enter Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
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> is a huge PR problem
It’s fucking not
This is 2026. I am happy he fucked a Chinese lady who gives a flying fuck about old time norms, the old world is clearly dead
Hope that handsome bachelor fucks more, he will be remembered as a PIONEER
If it were a female CEO being ostracized for having an affair she would clamor that "men do it all the time" and how sexist "society" is obsessed with controlling women's bodies.
> I think a lot of people here seem to underestimate how much of a CEO's job is perception.
What a load of crap. Elon Musk is deranged and nobody bats an eye. Zuck is proven to steal and sell data illegally for political gains in authoritative countries with Cambridge analytica and nobody cares. This guy has 2 affairs and is out.
I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
>I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban
If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.
This is the timeline:
Before Nov 11, it looked like NVIDIA might try to ride out the storm and keep Jensen at the helm especially if they saw that the China accusations and evidence wasn't strong enough to be a problem. Again, it was totally unnecessary for the board to publicly back him up if they had plans to get rid of him because of China allegations. However, the Board of Directors emergency Nov 11 meeting is inconsistent with the Nov 8 statement affirming Jensen's leadership.Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.
Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here. Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. The Nvidia corp still has to answer for that even when Jensen is out.
> the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.
As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?
Not the _only_ reason, sure. However, it's quite common when executives have an affair they will get fired. I think that's just the reality. If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
Let’s be real here. Everyone making money out of NVIDIA was more than happy enough to go around the restrictions and see the prices go up due to Chinese demand.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
The first affair was possibly survivable, although the cost of survival would be high for all involved.
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
I agree that this is a more likely explanation, given the AI arms race between the US and China.
I think NVIDIA lose more things by firing Jensen.
>NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
That's not the reason either.
They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc. And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.
Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?
As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?
They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.
I said this on the thread this morning/yesterday. It is impossible for JH to speak about China with any credibility going forward. That alone made it impossible for him to remain CEO. Add to that, everything he's said about China in the past will now be scrutinized and questioned if he was influenced in some way.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
I hope people understand that the china export is not the reason he is being fired.
He controlled the trade and price for a global asset more valuable than gold as a single person. Some people didn't want that, it's that simple.
Why can't it be all of the above? I'm disturbed by the number of posts I'm seeing around social media downplaying the affairs as if this is normal behavior that should be encouraged or allowed. He slept with someone who worked directly under him, under what universe would he be allowed to stay at Nvidia? That's absurd.
They were allowed to sell to china, just not their top models. It was widely known that china acquired those indirectly.
What changed is the publicity about the affair. So this is about the affair.
It'll be a relative slap on the wrist. The US is not going to destroy one of the companies keeping it competitive on the AI landscape right now. Worst case, it is a heavy slap and some individuals go to jail, but the company will be fine.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
Exactly. Remember the Supermicro scandal? NVIDIA has been bypassing the ban at massive scale. Everybody knew.
He committed what looks like some light treason. The fact that he had an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped the CCP bypass import restrictions is why he had to go.
There does seem to be a sway in the reporting towards his relationship with an employee and not the whole trade ban and spy stuff. I'm not sure why that is
Why? Because the government want to maintain the American advantage in GPU chips and AI? This move tips the scales in favour of China. Right now there is tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs sitting on the dock in Hong Kong because China government blocked them. They think it's more important to support their new domestic GPU industry than to have the best models today trained on nvida.
The U.S. has imposed such harsh semiconductor industry sanctions on China, tightly locking away scientific and technological achievements that will most likely shape the future of all humanity for the next hundred years through political means that change with every few-year election cycle. It's hard to imagine that in a community that constantly claims to champion freedom and progress, so many people would think from the perspective of the U.S. government and believe in baseless spy allegations, because anyone who knows NVIDIA’s history and Jensen Huang’s background should be able to see that this is a charge forcibly fabricated.
Links to the reporting?
“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.
To me the fact that it was known for a year that the affair was happening, and nothing changed implies that this is more a publicity move rather than anything else. They had to make a change, improve their brand image. Probably nothing will change in how they sell their product, the rules they skirt.
I'll plug our Pretrained episode from Monday here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N97DW8gfCnI - this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.
What happens if all the money in the system circulating through AI companies turns out to be ill-gotten gains?
The fact that Nvidia was skirting the export ban was an open secret. So many outlets like NYT itself, Reuters, WSJ, etc have published reports about it starting over a year ago.
I hope you understand the affair with the spy does not strictly matter, but he is in fact being fired because of the affair with a subordinate.
Like everyone, they have a COC/sexual harassment policy, and that is basically always a firing offense in practice. They cannot place him above it, or else they would be in for infinite liability.
This is why literally nothing mentioned firing until that was discovered, and then it instantly became about firing him.
He was also favoring local open weight models in a world where frontier AI companies are lobbying the government for control. Could be one of the reasons why he was ousted.
> I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
People refuse to understand it. Every single thread is full of the same comments. People are obsessed with culture wars.
I think it was obvious that the chips were making their way into China.
The problem is that Jensen destroyed Nvidia's plausible deniability.
If it were just about the export ban, then why leak the affairs? US intelligence (which serves US corporate power only) has decided to put this guy out to pasture by any means necessary. That's the reason for this faux moral outrage. They want to make sure there's no chance he makes it out the other side.
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
We've had insatiable demand for Nvidia excluding China, I doubt they would have run that kind of legal risk.
There's every reason to believe this is not true.
You could be right, but you're putting way , way too much faith in the board etc.
These people can be clowns. Don't over estimate how ridiculous, petty, thin skinned and arbitrary boards can be.
This comment yesterday [1] indicated that Megaspeed was not on the blocked entity list, but that NVidia voluntarily hasn't sold to them since June 2025.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50464121
NVIDIA also does tons of military and intelligence work, very sensitive stuff. The idea that the CEO had a significant espionage problem raises significant _criminal_ liabilities.
They did not even need to sell them physically to China. Many of them ended up in Malaysian datacenters that rented them to China.
Gamer Nexus looked at it like a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
Yeah if he had a random affair with a waitress or something, it'd be a bit scandalous, but not firing-worthy.
Sleeping with a Chinese spy or subordinate turns a personal problem into a workplace problem.
History will look back at this and see Jensen was right to do this.
Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
If the reason was "skirting the export ban" why are we talking about affairs...
I think thats correct, I was at GTC in berlin a couple of weeks ago, a number of Chinese firms that are on the export control list were present and had booths… so perhaps this was all rather blatant.
The affair with a subordinate is totally a firable offense. It's what Brian Krzanich of Intel was fired for, after all.
One of the affairs could have been a means to get GPUs to China despite the ban. So they are at least intertwined.
well...and I am not generally a theorist but
dark ops [well, maybe these are really very bright out in the open ops...!!!] may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race
The affair is what led to this, demonstrating why it actually should matter if your CEO is having one. Ethics and trust should matter.
It will be interesting to see if there are criminal proceedings. If you or I violated ITAR or CMMC/NIST 800 there would be.
Nvidia has always sold to China through the back door, that ain’t gonna change even with a new CEO…
They didn’t sold the chips directly to China, they sold them to Megaspeed and they sold the compute to China.
Do we know yet what the potential consequences may be? Legally or from a market/business standpoint?
The previous and current administration.
This is obviously something that has been postponed for after the midterms.
China doesn't even want Nvidia chips. They're holding up hundreds of thousands of smuggled cards at Hong Kong customs. Many Chinese companies want to take the easy shortcut of using Nvidia, but the Chinese govt wants Chinese companies to go through the pain of helping the domestic chip industry develop.
Plus the fact that there's absolutely no evidence that the lady is a spy. All media report anonymous sources but treat the allegations as fact. Singapore said their investigation of the lady is not due to spying, but no western media picked up that story. The lady traveled to Taiwan with her Hong Kong passport, and the Taiwanese govt also said they have no evidence she's a spy. The Chinese spy agency just started investigating her due to all the commotion (likely for smuggling chips, which China also doesn't want, see above), and also has no idea who she is. Despite all this, the public still treats the spy allegations as a fact.
Jenssen Huang is a victim. Those who wanted to get rid of him and set this up, have succeeded. But everyone is under the mistaken belief that this hurts China somehow. China doesn't give a damn. In the mean time, all Chinese Americans lose. Jenssen is not the first such victim, and won't be the last.
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
Sad day for developers.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
I’d also note that being complicit and not entirely aware of sanctions evasion -but being in a qualified position that should have been able to discern it- is sufficient for criminal charges and conspiracy. I spent a long time in trading and money movement, and this was the scared straight things our former federal prosecutor internal counsel would lecture us on. The bar for prosecutors in national security, sanctions, conspiracy, etc are very very low and this sort of relationship is a perfect foil. It exposes Nvidia to extreme risk, and Jenson even more so. And being cutoff from Nvidia now makes him prey without the support a major employer and driver of the economy could provide him.
I think they were selling to Malaysian shell companies to China.
Daniel Dumbrill on youtube[1] does a good job decomposing this.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC3Kh40dEQY
Being compromised kinda does seem like a reason to be fired. It seemed well known he was doing it since there are plenty of photos over a few years? So it’s more she was a honeypot.
Where the hell is your source for this?
Does it mean we will have mass produced cheaper graphics cards? Akin to flagship killer mobile phones and other hardware? Sounds good.
I think the affair with the Chinese CEO is a considerable factor. Jensen cannot possibly maintain any plausible deniability over Megaspeed's alleged diversion of chips to China and his role therein.
The second affair with an employee likely just dealt a death blow (if it hadn't already been dealt) to Jensen in terms of his ability to ride the crisis out.
It is legal for Chinese companies to buy US neocloud time. These toothless restrictions were poorly constructed and unenforceable law. The extent to which nvda was supposed to self police is unclear. I find it hard to believe any binding evidence of direct sales will be found.
I mean having an affair with someone who works below in the company hierachy, is also a huge problem (if the thing about second affair is correct)
> Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light
Are they though? As long as they're in the good graces of Trump, is the Justice Department going to do anything about it?
If they really did, I hope they at least go to prison for a while. I say at least because they actually should be court martiall-ed and spend their next 30 years in a military cell.
Trump is on record saying Jensen should not be fired.
That suggests no treason.
Um hard negative to what you are saying. It is absolutely fundamental to the issue -- its compounds the issues around assessing Jensen's judgement.
This story has more to it that will come to light .. I'm sure of it.
> NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
Is rumor and conjecture enough?
Eric Swalwell was not punished and committed something worse than Jensen Huang, because he was a government official. He even ran for Governor and the only reason he as forced to resign was because of a different sexual abuse case.
If our own government officials can't face justice, why should the CEO of a company?
You are exactly right, and it’s depressing how dumb most people are for not understanding this.
The affairs are absolutely part of it, they show a dishonest pattern of behavior.
Export ban is the wrong call
How do you know?
I am not sure I can agree. Perhaps this was the underlying reason. Perhaps others wanted to frame him and launched a media campaign. But from what I can see, at the least on the surface, to me it looks as if he was fired for liking too many women at the same time, at the least one of which might be a possible spy. This may all be fake-reasons on top to cover underlying real causes, but to me right now it looks as if the girls cost him the job here.
Jensen is Taiwanese. Nvidia's chips are made in Taiwan, as are all the most advanced chips in the world -- including the chips in Apple and AMD products -- by TSMC. China wants to re-absorb Taiwan into itself, partially because they cannot match TSMC's geometries and they desperately need those geometries.
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
Alternate perspective:
bipartisan bill[1] needed to decapitate[2] opposition[3] to expanded controls/moratoria and install “neutral” caretakers[4] until passage
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/09/10/2026/bipartisan-ai-saf...
[2] https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2120745928722087948
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035303
[4] current CFO Kress or former Apple CEO Tim Cook (suggested by president in social media post)
As though the Board had no idea of this, and are suddenly acting oh gosh this is the first we've heard of the phantom SG revenue! Time for Jensen to go. Nah, not buying it. Many of the board have been w JH since the early 1990s. This is because his reckless disregard for the company and his years-long relationship with a Chinese spy.
With a strict ban of chips to China, Chinese companies will not have enough compute. Without enough compute, they are not going to be able to release new open weight models.
That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".
Interesting times
Him taking the stance of "we should be allowed to sell all the GPUs to China" was bad enough in itself.
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
> From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.
I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?
> ”it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.”
Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got redirected or forwarded on to China.
It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.
I dont think its more soo about the ban as China itself has 'officially' blocked the chips that were being licensed as exportable. I think its more of the asks that were being made by the NATSec and Amodie aligned actors (see the pod he had with Dwarkesh ), to ho tighter and more aggressive. Basically Jensen was sort of the brake on the impulsive ideas getting thrown around on how to 'win' AI and create a moat against all latecomers.
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
Did your TV tell you that? I hope you realize that there is absolutely no proof of the import ban having been skirted. The FBI has been investigating Alice Huang and Megaspeed since 2024 and all they have is a few GPUs still being unboxed at their Malaysian data center.
I think this episode proves one thing:
It would have been simpler and more profitable to sell China the GPUs.
One woman from the CCP just burned a couple of trillion out of your 401Ks. Have you said thank you even once? Are you sick of winning yet?
Well the only thing super weird is the timeline - USA bans exports, China (very soon after) bans IMPORTS! And then there's a company which keeps doing trade under the nose of the potentially two most powerful nation-states and their secret service sources. This is super fishy, really I don't buy nobody knew nothing, only for a "lucky" journalist to figure out the whole thing...
Very much agreed, the second this became clear his position was untenable. He will surely have launched his unicorn by the end of December regardless, I’d be surprised if this had any tangible repercussions outside the divorce court.
Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.
I just find it weird that trump loses the midterms and suddenly this happens. Might be a coincident but feels very sus.
Sold to china and gave trump, whitcoff and kushner I think, 15% of sales. Almost like a bribe.
Lots of this has been known since may, and it sounds like the president was informed she was a spy a year ago.
One wonders if this happened now since the Dems took control of the investigation bodies.
If they had not, would they have kept right on as is?
Is this remotely believable, that one CEO can surreptitiously work around both the government and his own company to sell restricted goods at volume? If this were real you'd have to lobotomize the entire management structure, because there are a lot of people that would know and know better and that they'd face jail time. And maybe merge it with some other company quickly so it doesn't completely collapse because of the immediate mass firings to try and sway prosecutions toward individuals and not the destroy the entire entity.
I'd be more inclined to believe the spy thriller narrative if he sent the RTL of their top designs to China. Selling goods is not a one chief op.
I would be so, so surprised if the US government / CIA / etc wouldn't know at all that NVDA was selling to China and skirting the export ban in a meaningful way.
In 50 years from now, some declassified documents will maybe shed light on this specific incident.
I would imagine it being a form of "So, China, we'll let our Jensen guy sell you X in chips, and in return, you do Y in relation to Russia, and Z in relation to Taiwan. Oh, and we need to use one of your spies, in case someone f*cks up".
Biggest valuation ever will turn into biggest investor lawsuit ever. The music on the AI circular deals is about to be broken by a feminine spell. This has Lord of the Rings all over it...
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
China is a gigantic market. A company that profit hungry will find it supremely difficult to resist doing business with China. It is almost guaranteed, that they did in some indirect ways sell to China. It's also not like people like Jensen care one bit about the USA. What they care about is pure profit of their own kingdom. Uhm, I mean company, of course.
Well...we dont know half the story yet, one and two and three... "Jensen Huang had ‘intimate relationship’ with second employee" - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/12/nvidia-jensen-huang-ceo-live...
That’s the excuse, it isn’t the reason.
The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.
Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.
Oh, it's not the repeated violations of sexual conduct with an employee, and a spy, and likely more? A CEO who is that dumb to risk his and the company trust isn't worth it. Look, a trillion already wiped out. When employees say "how dumb could he be", you know the board and major investors are saying that too.
NVIDIA's latest chips were also on an export ban for several Middle Eastern countries ("security" theater). That's about the time the UAE's sovereign fund invested a large sum in Cerebras. They were still able to get the chips by way of Kuwait, which is a friendly Middle Eastern state.
Of course, not a year went by before the UAE and Saudi invested heavily in the Trump crypto fund and, very coincidentally, the ban was lifted.
Fear not, Cerebras managed to get another investment from OpenAI!
Yeah, this has to be related to the export ban. It's too much of a coincidence that the woman happens to run a shell company that funnels NVIDIA chips to China.
It's just unlikely that an affair would nuke his CEO's position.
It’s not the side chicks, it’s the side chips.
Like the film ‘War Dogs’ but with GPUs and affairs instead of weapons and drugs. :D
So it was just a coincidence that the affairs came out at the same time?
The strange situation, however, is that the current administration, specifically Trump, loves Jensen for he thinks that they're kindred spirits: both incredibly successful businessmen at the top of the world and at the top of their game (this is from Trump's perspective).
It's an odd situation where, yes, they're breaching national security mandates, but they're also being protected by the man at the top of the organization that makes those national security mandates.
We're living in a comedy film, where the outcome of said comedy film has an effect on the world economy, so we're actually living in a tragedy film.
That's how corruption skews the reality that the powerless are forced to live within.
> national security reasons
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
I think it's all the leather jacket.
If an executive suddenly starts wearing a leather jacket, watch out!
The timing is politically important though; shifts headlines from
"Trump/GOP lost their ass in midterms!" and "Dems intend to investigate GOP/Trump!"
Also provides news channel attacks on Dems; Congress should be looking into national security issues over here in CEO land! Not dividing Congress with partisan hackery!
Important to call out the social engineering going on among all the tribal groups.
them skirting the ban is the worst kept secret in the world... was it even a secret?
Well, you say that, but the perception is he hasn't got sacked for circular financing, nor for the providing of sanctioned components (supposedly they went to third countries, not China, so legal). But he got sacked for two affairs.
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
As if rules have been enforced since 2025 right?
Pretty sure he was fucking a Chinese spy though... so...
>I'd love to be wrong
wong?
Yeah Jensen Huang is secretly Chinese.
> supposedly
According to who?
I mean, an undisclosed affair with the CEO of a large customer is also a pretty big conflict of interest, regardless of natsec concerns…
And, there is no spy business. They just want a more compliant CEO. What a *hit show.
They could not have done any of the export ban skirting without the complicity or outright cooperation of the administration.
Remind me: when did Huang direct NVDA funds to the Trump ballroom fund?
Can you imagine if it were a female CEO fired for the same thing? Oh how the accusations of sexism and double standards and how she doesn't have to report to the board what she does with her body. The argument writes itself.
I thought the export ban was lifted by this Administration. Trump publicly announced it months ago.
Do you think he might get the death sentence for treason?
He ALSO slept with a direct report, which would get most of us fired too.
A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.
We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.
Fuck no. Jensen did no such thing. He actually hasn’t been charged with a single crime. You’re outright hallucinating here.
The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.
If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.
The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.
Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.
national security hoaxes. When was the last time China attacked the USA? compared to say our best ally and friend Israel that sunk the USS Liberty.
Elon Musk has an AI bot generating explicit images without consent, regardless of age, yet nobody's firing him.
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
yup, my NVDA puts are printing hard rn.
How naive do you have to be to believe that Congress actually cares about that? They don’t care and happily watch their shares rise in price.
If the second affair didn’t come out, this wouldn’t be a discussion.
I don't think so.
I think it was the affair with the direct report that did him in.
That's a bigger no-no than selling to spies, especially when the administration knew about it and did nothing.
The rumor is
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
>From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
This was blatantly obvious. Do we really think Malaysia was using Billions in GPUs on some secret AI project?
And yet from the reporting Trump okayed the sale so Nvidia argues they had a license to export from the President. Lutnick was okay with it too apparently and State didn't get a vote. If the reporting is accurate, then I think Nvidia gets zero blowback from the sale.
The ban was lifted and fees were applied so there were plenty of legitimate ways to sell. I hate how inaccurate hn has become.
There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this. NVidia is too big and Huang is too wealthy. This administration in particular would never prosecute that. And, even if they did, a pardon is only $1-3 million anyway.
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
[1]: https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535
>NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
Of course they are why wouldnt they.
>NATIONAL SECURITY REASONS
Clipper Chip Mark 5 nonsense.
Let's cut the crap, it's a coup because he is in favor of the open-weight ecosystem and doesn't want to restrict models at the firmware level. Anthropic is in large part behind this.
Except the administration has known about them skirting it since day 1.
So it’s no longer about national security. What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care? Did Jenson reduce SpaceX’s allocation?
Everybody should be against the export ban. It's laughable to claim that it is for "national security", it's blatant protectionism to cover US AI companies for the fact that they operate at monumental losses. Any country in the world should be allowed to buy the hardware they need to run AI, if they need it, and if the roles were reversed the US should also be allowed to buy tech from other countries. Graphic cards aren't nuclear bombs, and AI is a multi-use core technology every nation on earth should have access to. So far, China has made a far better impression in that respect than the US. At least they have published open weight models.
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
...maybe. Or maybe not. Consistency in application of the law is not exactly at an all-time high right now.
Oh please, nothing at all will happen to them ...
NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.
His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.
I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.
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I don’t know if I’m just getting tired of tech and AI in general, but man – this story and the media frenzy around it are like the perfect combination of off putting things to me: arrogant AI company CEOs, sordid obsessions with the personal lives of said CEOs, nationalist politics, on and on.
Seeing this as the top story everywhere makes me want to throw away my phone and become a monk.
Not really sure why I’ve written this comment, other than as some reassurance to anyone else that feels the same way.
https://archive.is/gx14x
This is very, very eye-opening, at least to me.
"Jensen Huang summoned his top finance executives to his office this summer. The AI economy, backstopped by Nvidia’s NVDA -4.34%decrease; down pointing triangle increasingly outrageous bets, was teetering, and Huang wanted to make sure they were getting it right.
Over the course of the meeting, he proceeded to tear into the woman who is now taking over for him as Nvidia CEO.
Colette Kress was “a deer in the headlights,” he said, interrupting her presentation, according to a person familiar with the comments.
He had summoned Kress and his senior finance team to diagnose a ballooning problem: Nvidia was in talks to provide billions of dollars of guarantees to companies that couldn’t afford its chips. That included deals led by Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez, who had been offering upstart cloud providers and data-center developers financing in the hopes of turning them into long-term customers.
Huang had launched a dealmaking spree and was now starting to question whether it had gone too far, according to people familiar with the matter.
Kress was a “reporting CFO,” not someone who could help him define a strategy or make decisions, Huang said during the August meeting.
Then he went on to describe the situation the company was in. Major cloud providers were running away from Nvidia, making plans to use alternative chips and lessen their reliance on the firm. Even worse, Huang said, the vast supply of chip wafers and memory Nvidia had committed to buying were coming at him like an “avalanche.” (...) Amid the rollout of the program, Kress raised questions including how to decide which deals to pursue, how to value the guarantees, and how to calculate the return on investment, a person familiar with the matter said. Behind the scenes, she tried to rein in Huang’s son-in-law, who had been promoted to a vice president in January, people who worked with her said. "
It's bizarre to me how many people here seem to seriously believe this is actually about cheating on his wife. It seems pretty clear that this is related to the glaringly obvious, continued export of GPUs to China, expressly violating an export ban. Combine that with having an affair with a woman who just so happens to be integral to the smuggling operation. It just looks too bad. Opens Nvidia up to a world of hurt once the dems take over in January, and Huang himself to serious criminal charges. And that's just the stuff that's public information. We have to assume the board knows more than us.
This stuff has probably been going on behind the scenes for a while. The leak about the affair is just the catalyst that accelerated it all.
I hope this won't change NVIDIA's refusal to block inference for unsigned and registered open-models in the firmware of modern GPUs. Anthropic and others are pushing hard on this. First the hardware export ban, eventually the software one via hardware-enforced execution controls like IETF hinted at
a theory among many others, taken from https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/2121009275275276496:
"Jensen and Nvidia were planning to go hard at producing frontier class open models. They wanted to verticalize their AI presence, and not depend on OAI or ANT to drive the industry forward. OAI, ANT, and GOOG are simultaneously competing with NVDA by designing AI chips."
"At the same time, Jensen had all but gone to war with NatSec hawks in DC over Nvidia sales in China. As I've noted over the last two years, NVDA sold huge numbers of GPUs (~20% of total sales?) to SE Asian buyers and I always thought many of those chips ended up physically in China, or available for remote use by Chinese companies."
Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth. Significantly more than Elon, with the key distinction that Jensen has distributed much more of that shareholder value than Elon has through stock options to employees and appreciation of public stock (it’s one of the reasons he’s worth 150Bn vs 1Tn).
I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. Nvidia losing 50% of its value from its peak means it’s still a $3 trillion company. What if it loses 90%? Then it’s the size of Intel which we generally agree is an important part of the industry.
Nvidia can afford to invest in companies because the stock is so high and capital is incredibly abundant. Those companies buy Nvidia products at the 50% NET margins. Nvidia gets a ton of cash. Earnings are crazy. But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were which was a Tier-1/2 supplier battling for margin and market share. That is not a $6T company.
I think this just confirms that he had knowledge of gpus going to China and the board wants to minimize the damage now. His infidelity does not help but I doubt the board would have ousted him for that
Wtf why is everyone assuming Nvidia skirted an export ban and treasonously sold chips to China? It was done legally with the US government taking a cut: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/07/business/economy/nvidia-c...
Nvidia is a profitmaxxing company in a profitmaxxing economy and so it is going to profitmaxx; the criticism should lie with the US government: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/republican-senator-urges...
Jensen, even after decades, remained deeply involved in many operational decisions with 40+ direct reports. He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy. Jensen gets to retire with $100B+ and not deal with the crap.
I have to imagine that Jensen is under an enormous amount of stress right now. I hope whatever he's going through he's got support. This all seems to be happening way too quickly to be just.
Like, maybe him stepping down is the right decision. But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.
I lost all respect for Jensen when he started gushing about data centers in space which is a stupid idea and obviously self-serving for Elon (sells launches) and Jensen (sells chips). Anyone who says data centers in space should explain why Microsoft determined data centers under the ocean are too expensive (for now). A submerged data center is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper than a space data center.
Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
Can't help that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the China hawk fraction of the US government and associated entities (i.e. Anthropic) obviously brought the hammer down on Jensen here, even if he arguably brought about his own downfall with the affair.
I assume leaning on Nvidia to integrate chip verification and tracking to not let any unmonitored compute exist in the world is next, which is also in line with what the leading US labs want.
He wanted to have the cake and to eat it at the same time. I've seen CEO's who handled this in a much more orderly way, such as: getting a divorce, then announcing internally to the company that he is getting a divorce, then announcing he has found new love with a certain person at the company and in the same sentence announcing that the certain person effectively no longer answers to him, but to the board or something like that.
Still icky, but this person still enjoys success as a CEO of their company. Huang not anymore.
Interesting that 18% of Nvidia's revenue comes from their 2020 Mellanox buyout. Might rank among YouTube as one of the most profitable corporate buyouts ever.
About their new interim CEO Colette Kress:
Jensen bought Mellanox for $7B in 2020. In Q2 2026 it generated $17.5B in revenue or ~18% of Nvidia's total revenue.This is a net loss for everyone, but especially the gaming community. As a founder, he cared about nvidia's history and where it all began.
As someone who had those AGP cards and an nForce motherboard (which were amazing), can't help but feel sad. Whoever his replacement is will not feel the same about what's a much smaller market.
It is baffling to read comments that this is excusable or he should be retained 'in interest of the shareholders'. Setting aside the obviously poor judgement, the appearance of impropriety has serious ammunition behind a situation that already looked weird. More practically, he's compromised now. Whether it's further scandal or the impending criminal investigations, there might be further hooks people have on him.
The quote about succession planning is also a little out of context, he phrased it more that there should be continual information and responsibility sharing such that succession planning is effectively redundant or unnecessary.
I always wondered why investors were ok with not having any control due to dual structure shares and board composition. A "Great Men" theory of the world is a convenient and satisfying narrative, but it's usually not the best at explaining things. As the saying goes, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men".
Just a sad state of affairs. Jensen was by far the biggest voice pushing for open weights and keeping the Anthropic / OpenAI doom narrative from getting out of control.
Now without him there will be a vacuum for the ideologies of Dario / Elon / Sam to fill the void.
I'm actually surprised at this. I figured everyone would justify keeping him because he made Nvidia (and investors) so much money. Money > anything else
The apologists in this thread are absolutely shocking. Jensen is a ruthless CEO who clearly lacks moral fiber. Why do we idolize and "feel" for people like this?
NVIDIA without Jensen? That’s a huge risk. The company may be bigger than ever but replacing its visionary won't be easy.
Lot of comments here stating with absolute certainty that China wanted Nvidia chips (they've previously ordered Chinese companies to not buy Nvidia chips https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-17/china-age...) and that Alice Huang is a CCP spy (zero public evidence of this).
My understanding is that NVidia's organisation is very flat and Huang has his fingers in every pie; he's not the hands off type. Moreover there was no succession plan. I get that having an affair with a spy is not great but isn't it risky to replace him now?
For all his faults, I do feel for Jensen. He built this thing from an absolute scratch. He had a lot of luck on the way, from crypto to CUDA. And who can forget his spat with Jobs all those years ago.
I don't understand. Who's driving this change? The board, the administration, or who?
Given the report that the US gov knew about this for a while, it seems more likely that it's coming from the administration?
Googling around gave me a stat of about 20% of married men have affairs, and you can maybe double that for relationships in general rather than marriages. And I’d expect that to be underreported. People are fallible and life and relationships are complex. I’ve not personally had an affair (I’m married) but some of my family have. I don’t condemn them for it. You learn the details and you can see why and how these things happen. You also see that it’s impossible to judge from the outside - you never really know what’s going on inside any relationship. It also makes me very uncomfortable when people want to judge others. Maybe us HN folk are by nature very black and white.
What an incredibly embarrassing downfall.
He didn't resign because of two affairs. He resigned because there were a LOT more than two affairs. I'm sure they wouldn't stop coming after enemies and the press smelled blood in the water.
How illegal is it for a CEO to sell goods (potentially a core component used in military weapons) to a foreign government after your government said not to?
Bummer. He stood in the way of regulatory capture and AI monopolists had him removed. I foresee the open model / open weights ecosystem eventually getting locked down, especially the most competitive Chinese models.
Nothing here makes sense.
One thing is clear: his extramarital affairs are not the reason why he did it.
There is something extremely important we don't yet know and may never know.
I didn't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
It doesn't seem fair that you're being ousted from your own empire by a bunch of randos, an empire you built from scratch and nurtured.
One should never give up control it seems. Zuck is right.
I don't know, I just have a feeling he'll be back. Steve Jobs style.
One thing which isn't adding up to me. Everyone is breathlessly reporting that in the past three years (or whatever) megaspeed obtained $7.5B in nvidia chips. Nvidia's revenue is about $6B per week. If the fear is that China's AI research is catching up due to those chips, which seems like a percent of nvidia's production, does that mean China's researchers are so efficient they only need that 1%, or does it mean they are getting a lot more AI compute through other channels?
This smells like a hit job on Jensen Huang. Years from now, it'll probably come out that Alice Huang wasn't a spy for China and the whole Kimberly affair was a setup. Of course, by then, no one will care about the truth.
It seems to me there is a significant difference between "spying" and smuggling or evading an export ban. Is there any evidence Alice Huang had access to Nvidia trade secrets vs access to buy a product? Jensen was rightly opposed to America's stupid export ban to China. People who are opposed to ICE policy break the law or enable breaking the law all the time. This guy wanted to sell computer chips to china. Who's the victim (Sam and Dario? TSMC no because they make more chips). Further more there is no evidence Jensen broke the law vs merely being close to someone who may have (Alice Huang). There is no evidence of industrial espionage. So where is the spying here?
Jensen should not have resigned. This entire thing has been played like someone in Washginton wanted him out. It's a sad day to see him go.
This is going to be very unpopular here, but this domino triggered by the China hawks in the current admin (and the handful of dem lobbyists in the pocket of openai/ant) is going to go down in history as a massive geopolitical and technological blunder.
Huawei just announced a fully domestic computer, Deepseek is rumored to be training v5 right now on entirely domestic Ascend chips.
I know eventually there will come out all the justifications for how this was to protect AGI, etc. But this move has also now tipped the scale beyond just the hardware bifurcation, but also the open vs. closed and commons vs. sovereign models. This isn't just chopping off your nose, this is America purposely gouging out it's eyes and removing it's ability to see down the road. Jensen Huang was the world's best shot and trying to keep a global AI world together, but one side has made their voice on that extremely loud and clear.
Jensen's the most pro-open weight guy and calmest on China public figure at that level.
Musk has done, and continues to do, the most horrific stuff, including things far more questionable from a US security perspective. Altman's reputation is not one of honesty and fair dealing. We've had very clear evidence of Microsoft's leadership being caught in honey-traps by foreign governments. No heads rolled.
Tin foil hat take: I think Jensen's been sniped.
It's good that the mighty can fall, especially over issues of trust. There are probably other candidates. If you're a shareholder I can't offer comfort but the rest of us need a world in which power cannot be locked in.
I think a lesson might be how strong 10x and 20x voting power class B shares are.
So for Nvidia, it only has class A share, where every share has the same voting power.
Huang has ~3.5% of the share, remaining 96% is publicly traded, hence Huang has 3.5% of the voting power when electing board.
However, if what Huang has is 20x class B share, then he will have 70 units of voting power, with everyone else having 97 units, hence he will have 41.9% of voting power, effectively deciding every director's election w/ little outside help.
Even if the board could vote him out this year, he could vote the board out next year and come back as CEO in that scenario.
From all the readings so far, it does not look like he knew he was under the spell of a honeypot, nor nvidia knowingly sold the chips in question, directly to china. The truth will come out one day, and it is might be an uphill battle to prove a criminal intent from Jensen.
On a more mundane level, since he can neither go to office, nor to the house, any guesses what his routine will be over next couple weeks? Not a perfect example, but for some reason, this reminds me of the last scene in Fargo where WH Macy gets holed up in a motel buying time.
The smuggling and romance details that have been exposed so far are either well known or immaterial to the business. So why the crazy urgency now?
Perhaps some influential folks want to support Anthropic's IPO by showing that the open source models will soon be blunted/outlawed, but IPO-ing into a crash seems like a high price for that moat.
Or do similarly influential folks want to tank AI as a whole but couldn't politically afford a crash before mid-terms?
Huang is the classic example of an entrepreneur who grew up and came of age at the end of the Cold War, at the height of globalization and the Pax Americana: focused mainly on business, with no obligation to take sides for any national interest. Unfortunately, those days are over, and, reluctant to fully adapt, he has paid the price.
I only wish he got ousted for being a liar about where the money was coming from during the crypto boom, or the super anti consumer policies like prohibiting OEMs from having a top of the line series with anything other than nvidia, refusing for years to support standard vrr and pushing for g-sync, artificially nerfing silicon capabilities in consumer grade dies and helping this bubble get bigger and bigger with bad accounting practices.
The dude is out at the absolute top of the company because he fucked too many women he shouldn't have and in a year people will be missing him when the AI reckoning for hardware manufacturers comes.
Edit: and hairworks! That fucking shit that tanked performance but was "a game changer" due to PR. Just like the fake frames and slop filter they're pushing now.
Wow, if you haven't seen it, checkout "Jensen Huang in: Three's Company" on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAIE92N0zDo
When they fired Sam Altman, all his employees resigned including one of the mutineers.
The big question for NVIDIA investors is how much of their sales came from skirting export sanctions because you can bet there is an investigation coming.
So does this pretty much confirms the spy thing? I think it was only an assumption
I think he should have fought to stay, not sure why he left on his own. I wrote a little blog post about it here: https://blog.jtoy.net/jensen-huang-should-have-fought-for-ag...
There is a lot of discussions on Export Ban. Does selling to a Singapore Company with Chinese Stakeholders considered illegal under those ban? Does Nvidia have to track every single GPU sold or even resold?
I was under the impression he sold it to a Singapore company, or even any other companies. What those companies do with those GPU is not his fault.
This whole thing is just a sad story.
From Game of Thrones: - Men without cocks. You wouldn't find me fighting in an army if I had no cock. What's left to fight for? - Gold? - I spent my life around soldiers. What do you think they spend that gold on? - Family. - Not without a cock, you don't. - Maybe it really is all cocks in the end.
Why fire and not admin leave?
The investigation is just starting. He's been indicted but not proven guilty yet. What if the facts come to light and the issue is overblown or wrong?
He also hasn't had the chance to properly defend himself.
This is a permanent fix for a potentially temporary problem, and that is short sighted
I'd be worried about his children's status. There might be some unfortunate news. I know nothing but this is just my hunch.
I live far away from all this and reading what has been shared all over social media, I find it hard to believe that there isn't a plot.
Jensen has done horrible things with regards to the affairs. But it is clear that people around him knew this for quite a while. So why this sudden and swift action? Does Jensen support a future that is against people who want to make massive profits from AI?
A true visionary and business mind. Sadly, he let is desires get the worst of him and now the tech landscape is changed from the fallout.
If anyone reads the biography of Warren Buffett (by Roger Lowenstein), you'll come to see the family lives of some of these couples are very non-traditional. Buffett effectively had a public facing wife and a private wife, chosen by his public wife.
It wouldn't surprise if Jensen and Lori had an arrangement wherein they are both able to live a happy fulfilled life. She's worth billions too.
I'm probably failing to see enough nuance here, but isn't Nvidia taking a hit a good thing when they are basically a monopoly? It seems to me like unintentional self-inflicted anti-trust regulation. Nvidia's failure is another chip maker's opportunity. And it's not like Nvidia is going to instantly implode and take the stock market down with it. It would take the form of slowly losing market share as their products become less appealing for whatever reason, assuming the decline would happen under new leadership at all. Then we get real competition in the GPU market.
I feel this could be a chess move by OAI/Anthropic/AWS etc to get Chinese companies stop open source models and get hands on all Nvidia Chips. This real estate race is getting dirty.
Really disappointing to read the comments on HN
None of them are able to put two and two together that this was a deliberate coup
And it seems like nobody is paying attention to what Jensen Huang was fighting for. He was against regulation of open source local models. He was against regulation shifting liability of local model developers as well as frontier models.
All in all without Jensen, it isn't just about NVIDIA, there's no one to champion for open source models and running them locally is going to get a lot harder and expensive. It's actually going to accelerate the monopolization of closed models and they will have to pass on the costs to consumers.
It's an L across the board and I'm noting the degraded quality of discourse on HN and that nobody is seeing through the veil here.
This is an absolute disaster for the industry, only closed-source models and the Chinese semiconductor sector stand to benefit.
If a major decision is made that is unthinkable 1 week ago, then it is probably a wrong decision.
Because any actual investigation takes more than 1 week.
If it is made within 1 week. It is not made after thoughts, it is made by passion or fear, which is likely wrong.
Any guesses if that correlates with earnings? Are they bad, so they can they, look we already have new CEO, now everything is going to be better. Or are they that good, that they can say, look we will manage without Jensen.
The specific truths about anything hardly matter when a story becomes this big. The hubbub is too much of a distraction and Jensen was going to get hauled in front of Congress by reps trying to score points with anti-AI constituents.
Completely unrelated, but he was the last CEO I really enjoyed watching speak at conferences.
Felt like he knew what he was talking about, and spoke with real passion and vision.
Watching tech keynotes these days feels like the same boring marketing script on repeat.
I’ll miss that.
Weird move. There is something more to it. My guess is that he spilled some stuff.
If he had affairs with normal staffers and NOT involved with a chinese spy, he'd probably would have survived. The fact that he's out means he definitely supplied the chinese with chips.
Chairman John Moolenaar released the following statement in the wake of Jensen Huang's resignation from NVIDIA: https://x.com/ChinaSelect/status/2120904763630060015
The board is considering both internal and external candidates. Who has experience in hardware, has led a trillion-dollar company, has deep connections in Asia, and might be available?
It's possible Tim Cook's phone is ringing right now.
It would be interesting if the story unfolded with Jensen going to TSMC [1] and Tim Cook taking over NVIDIA.
[1] https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/tsmc-founder-morris-chang-...
China wins in both cases. They just slowed down the biggest AI company in the US. Had he not resigned, they would've gotten more chips either way.
I feel this is a hasty and suicidal move for the company, and for the American AI chip industry as a whole, esp. when they haven't figured out a transition plan.
Is it weird that there were no Jensen stories on HN's front page Mon-late Weds? The scandal was deepening and yet it wasn't showing up here. Flagging?
The problem i see is that I dont see anyone who is suitable to be a ceo of Nvidia. It’s a special blend of hardware and software chops that no other CEO has imo.
Very very few HW CEOs have even the slightest ability to appreciate the key strength of Nvidia which is ability to build hardware and then drive it with outstanding software.
Look at AMD. Great hardware but hamstrung by their software for 20 years.
Hardware is not enough.
The obvious succession choice is Lisa Su, but AMD is now almost a trillion dollar company. I can't imagine her actually jumping ship at this point.
Worst thing to happen for humanity since Covid-19.. I fear he ensured that consumer GPU was still a priority. (I could be wrong)
Really sad to see overall. Wishing the best for Jensen, his family, and Nvidia.
The unwarranted suspicion of every semiconductor CEO of Chinese descent, from Intel to AMD to Broadcom, could be a real risk going forward.
Jensen’s missteps have been many, but I do hope it does not become a cloud over an entire group of leaders.
Despite his personal affairs, he brought significant growth and stability to NVIDIA thanks to which we all have access to excellent products so his dismissal does not seem like a wise decision. I wonder if his successor will be able to measure up to him. And what would be the cost for nvidia? It all seems political and every politician has an affair to hide...
The board, made of 10 members, only has 3.94% of Nvidia share in total, out of which 3.58% is owned by Huang.
Meaning that the 9 people pushing him out add up to own 0.36% of Nvidia share, only 0.36%
This is betray of shareholder interest. The board doesn't own Nvidia, this is not their business, yet only they can vote. they just want to finish as soon as possible, and you get a mad result.
Who of you guys is applying?
This will be a disaster for NVDA losing their leader. The company will eventually descend into chaos when the roadmap dries up.
What if he goes and joins a Chinese company?
idk how people can symphatize a cheater. he could divorce his wife and continue to do his private affairs but he chose to lie
This might be due to violations or breach of his duties as the CEO, especially given the nature of who the other party has loyalties too, but nonetheless, its a lesson for us all. Because even if he didn't directly provide any IP, would that party have reasonable access to any IP during the events. Guess only time will tell
I don't care who he's tupping, yes he's a piece of shit and his wife should take him to the cleaners. What we should all be looking at is how far the company was prepared to go in pursuit of greater profits and start evaluating the circular financing of the AI industry with that in mind.
The board is making a major mistake, they could have stood their ground. The company will be much worse off.
This could turn out to be the best thing for AI. I hope Jensen starts a new startup and challenges NVDIA. This will enable more options of GPU for end users and break NVIDIA monopoly.
Tweet by Jared Friedman [1] "The people on the Nvidia Board:
1. Jensen Huang - Co-founder, President & CEO
2. Tench Coxe - Former Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures
3. John O. Dabiri - Professor of Aeronautics & Mechanical Engineering, Caltech
4. Dawn Hudson - Former CMO of the NFL, former CEO Pepsi-Cola North America
5. Harvey C. Jones - Managing Partner, Square Wave Ventures
6. Melissa B. Lora - Former President, Taco Bell International
7. Stephen C. Neal - Lead Independent Director; Chairman Emeritus, Cooley LLP
8. Suzanne Nora Johnson - former Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs
9. A. Brooke Seawell - Venture Partner, New Enterprise Associates
10. Aarti Shah - Former SVP & Chief Information/Digital Officer, Eli Lilly
11. Mark A. Stevens - former Managing Partner at Sequoia Capital"
1 - https://x.com/snowmaker/status/2120902014389694684
>Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board
Suggestion:
Replace Jensen the President with Tim Cook.
Replace Jensen the CEO with Ian Buck (Inventor of CUDA, PhD, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing).
There’s no public evidence his lover was a Spy.
Export controls have been skirted since the Bronze Age.
Sure on the merits, there’s enough for the board to ask him to resign.
But it’s his company. He built it from nothing. You have to start with that.
I've seen some people speculate whether or not he'll be a prosecuted/arrested. It's difficult to believe, but surely would be the biggest imprisonment that I can remember from recent memory.
For intents and purposes, consider NVIDIA compromised for some foreseeable future. For operations and future purchases/CAPEX, more than a passing due dilligence is warranted if considering NVIDIA.
Huang has shown catastrophically bad judgement and lied publicly [0]. Many commenters here harbor lots of sympathy for him, I assume out of respect for the technology and company he's built, but that doesn't exonerate him.
He was sleeping with one of his customers—a huge conflict of interest. That alone is good grounds to get a CEO fired, but it only gets worse! Alice Huang, a Chinese national, was previously working for a CCP propaganda channel network with an impeccable acronym: CCTV. Her company was accused publicly and investigated by the government for suspected smuggling of sanctioned NVIDIA hardware into China. Now we learned he also had an affair with one of his direct reports — another diabolical conflict of interest, which alone could be good reason to oust the CEO and possibly the VP as well.
It's yet to be determined whether he disclosed secrets to the Chinese spy, or whether he at least privately admitted to the second affair (if not, that's even worse!)
It's not a single, horrendous mistake anymore but a pattern of disastrously poor judgement. Building an extraordinary company and technology shouldn't mean lack of accountability, and thankfully we found out today that even at the highest level it doesn't.
[0] https://fortune.com/2026/11/09/nvidia-board-probe-jensen-hua...
This is insane. This is the best case scenario for China, much better than just getting the chips. They just crippled their biggest competitor. The stock might not crater immediately because of ongoing AI demand, but it will at some point.
Surprised honestly. Founder led to 5T
He'll come back. Q2 next year.
Affairs and jokes aside
He's the hero we needed but didn't deserve. If this thing didn't happen my guess is open models wouldn't exist and we would be deeper and darker into the whole AI boom
o7
Regardless of the implications, even just as a change for NVIDIA this will be one of the moments we look back on. Keep hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times!
nVidia without Jensen would crumble. He had close to 60 direct reporting people. It shows that the organisation was not built to run by itself.
What would the severance package be in a situation like this?
I hope there was more to these claims that we weren’t privy too.
IMO, should be illegal for company policy to retaliate against someone for a personal romantic relationship.
Jensen created value. He's also probably the most incompetent manager of recent times. Both can be true.
Now I'm in danger of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I think there are several layers to this current drama. Most of the reporting is very "surface level". I also don't pretend to have the full picture myself, but there are many players and many agendas at play, and those agendas can change over time. [edited for typo]
There’s a lot of questions without good answers but what’s clear is this is almost certainly about a lot more than just the CEO cheating on his wife.
About the stock market, I think its as good as opportunity as any to buy tbh, people complain for not buying when stocks are low but then this opportunity is good.
this is more concerning for hf than it is for nvidia
I predicted yesterday that he'll resign and that he'll eventually join Tesla to lead the TeraFab business unit.
Huh, between the Anthropic IPO, the big shift in political environment, and the change in outlook for tech stocks, this comes at a pretty pivotal moment to see if AI train keeps accelerating at the same pace or if we start to see the end of the bubble.
I don't want to sound like a Jensen apologist, obviously huge missteps on his part, but he was quite a figure in shaping the last few years broad economic narrative. Good or bad, he was a force in shaping one of the largest investments ever. Does that shift without him? Does it shift really quick?
I would have preferred a slow fade into the sunset as a opposed to a dramatic exit. Yes, there would have always been a correction, but the bubble bursting explosively vs a more measured, slower correction will have different broader impacts and I just hope this doesn't push more towards the outcome that hurts a lot more.
I'm afraid this will only hurt open source.
It seems to me that he had two choices, the company or the family, he chooses the latter,i hope that's why he resigned.
Not to be insensitive, but stock is at 164.53 right now (down from almost 240). Good time to buy or is there worse to come?
He'll be back one way or another, Jensen is NVIDIA, and a finance person for sure cannot fill the shoes of an innovator
What will his Next be like? (a la Jobs)
My conspiracy theory is that its American spies who let this go public to pressure him out because Jensen was fighting their agenda of stopping China getting advanced chips. The flow will probably slow for a while, domestic Chinese companies will be forced to adapt, and as a bonus the USA wont even be competitive because they took their best horse out behind the woodshed and shot it to stop someone else from getting a ride. 12 months from now Jensen is gonna be VP of AI hardware at Huaweii or similar, calling it now. Another A+ geopolitical move from an administration that has been in a class of its own right from the beginning. Im a nobody who knows nothing but if I had to bet it would be on this.
I wish John le Carre were still alive to write a book about this.
Jobs was forced out of Apple, then had a second (and third!) coming. I wonder how Jensen will fare.
What I think is hard to argue: Jensen did a remarkable job leading his company, especially during the development of CUDA, which required an enormous investment in the 2000s but eventually created an ecosystem that outside developers and companies now help sustain and expand. CUDA is a major reason Nvidia has such a dominant market position and should continue to achieve far into the future, regardless of who is CEO. Nvidia's massive risk and its extraordinary payoff will likely be studied for a long time.
AI pushed Jensen into the spotlight very quickly and he didn't respond well, but he should go down in history as an extraordinary leader.
Anyone has internal views of what Jensen bringing, and how the company would be missing without him?
I cant help but see a difference in the moral standard to which Jensen is being held compared to the moral standard that someone like Elon is being held. Why can one get away with shocking moral behaviour, but the other has to step down for a mild affair. If Jensen didnt have the affair, or it never came to light, would all of this still have taken place?
When Cambridge Analytica happened, no one kicked Mark out of Facebook/Meta.
Not making excuses for Jensen, at his status and power level, this stuff goes with the territory. But I cant help but see a double standard here.
How much of this delay in comms is due to counter espionage?
And now nothing is stopping him from defecting over to China and Deepseek. Lost his family, lost his job, and China has plenty of money mountains and a very dedicated workforce. The idea must have crossed his mind.
It's really a sad day for me
Someone with a large short position helped this happen.
Seriously who cares?
Its not like Nvidia is going away.
I seriously didn’t think they would let Jensen go over 2 affairs. Is it something more than the affairs that I do not know about?
Makes me think, life’s so fragile. Jensen put 30+ years into the company and this is how it ends, hopefully not, but still sad.
It would be cool if he creates new startup.
Jensen being ousted as President & CEO is one thing, but he is also off the board.
Damn what does one do on a personal level after this? Retire somewhere?
My guess is an Israeli will take over. Johny Srouji of Apple or NVIDIA’s CTO Michael Kagan.
It's interesting to see SMCI down 11%. Losing their protection?
Jensen, even after decades, remained deeply involved in many operational decisions with 40+ direct reports. He had a long-term mindset, investing heavily in Tegra and CUDA in 2009-2010, even as he was plagued by write-offs from faulty chips.
This is a terrible decision for NVIDIA and the broader economy.
So, I understand this is getting priced in to some degree, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA. Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pouring money into this
You resign when there's more revelations to come out.
is today the best day in over a year to buy NVDA? From a long-term perspective, how much was he the one driving innovation, and can they be something like an Apple who overcame founder's reliance?
What a sham, the loss of aura is incalculable. A Coordinated effort by those who disagree with him.
Hopefully this is all for show and he'll come back soon.
Personally I am not a fan of companies being moral arbiters, or company's reputation and such be the organizing axis around which we decide whether a person has the right to a livelihood, companies after all are not people. Though Jensen is insulated from economic security concerns, for any other "normal" person, the coercive power of a corporate with it's army of lawyers can effectively ruin a person's life.
Whether one deserves such ruination is a moral matter, and everyone is entitled to their own judgement, but it seems wrong to concentrate such power in a private for-profit entity. The entire basis of anti-fascist doctrine is infringement of individual liberties and modern societies, while mostly conditioned to be against government coercion are remarkably comfortable with corporate coercion, dressed up in the pretty language of compliance and organizational reputation. A company is an economic entity, not a moral entity. It is fine with being a moral entity when it comes to matters of its own reputation and operations, but conveniently becomes an economic entity when it is time for layoffs. Ultimately, it comes down to who has a bigger stick
The thing is an organization is not just a place where you work; it is a provider of economic security, livelihood, and dignity. This concentrates extraordinary power in your place of employment; you are to clock in 5 days a week for at least 8 hours a week; and then work in a highly locked down corporate machine, which you are not allowed to customize even though this is where you will spend the majority of your week in, and one has to ask the question to what extent a company owns your life.
I think that we must also identify the cultural contradiction here; where Hollywood and the like in a sense glorify promiscuity and depict wealth as flaunted with assets and women, as a cultural ideal, and then turn around and hound creatures who are products of such a culture.
Of course, in this case it is far more likely that Jensen was involved with some national security incident.
When it comes to power, true preferences are fully exposed
https://claude.ai/artifact/KiUrnV8j5oxG9qoR4R5snQ
Sentiment cloud of this discussion.
Hard not to think this wasn't orchestrated by Anthropic.
I'm wondering - Jensen's damn good at his job, love him or hate him.
I genuinely am struggling to understand why the board would remove him unless there's more they know that we don't.
I think he was forced out
Anyone here familiar with the story of Qian Xuesen?
to me this proves money < politics, I belive the investors know who can make the most money, but this time there're more crucial factors to consider
Be interesting to see if he ends up hollowing out Nvidia if the talent moves with him to his next venture.
I suspect the real reason the board fired him is he's been lying to the board. It's not the indiscretion it's the lie that gets you.
If he was lying about his affairs with staff then maybe he's been lying to the board about following export controls and other things.
What would happen if a Chinese company CEO did similar?
It speaks to Huang's actual work performance. His seemingly sole value proposition was talking; his customers originally identified a gpu's utility in AI.
He must have come in cross hair with the state somehow,
Who benefits from his ouster?
- His replacement, Colette Kress - Nvidia's competitors, AMD, Intel, Broadcom, Huawei - His political enemies, ie chip protectionists on both sides of the aisle - Perhaps AI Doomers like Amodei and Altman?
Anyone else?
my take someone powerful wanted Jensen out.
whether that's good for nvidia or the u.s at large - I doubt - but time will tell.
I am in shock, Jensen is one of the pioneers in our industry and we will always remember his accomplishments. But I do fear Nvidia will now only make safe bets and not be able to innovate in an ongoing industrial revolution because they lack their biggest, boldest visionary to set the direction. This man has created an insane wealth for over 50% of his employees. An extraordinary leader, engineer, salesman and team builder. I still believe in the excellent talent at Nvidia, but I do not believe in a board that fires their best person and we have seen several examples of a board/leadership ruining a company because they lack the founders vision, fighting spirit and ownership. Jensen deserved another punishment, not getting fired.
Am I the only one who feels this is a smear piece to oust Jenson to retain optics?
Outside of the continued selling to China/skirting the export ban I’m of the belief that he was offered a better deal in China, took it, then signaled he was departing, the timing on this seems…suspect.
Recalling the May POTUS and CEO field trip to china, the lot returned together with Jenson extending his stay nearly two weeks afterwards.
IMO this ongoing theatre provides cover to oust Jenson and vilify him before he appears somewhere in China —- imagine how the share price would fair if it came to light that he was leaving as CEO to take a position in Huawei…
Guessing Trump was talking about Jenson on 60 minutes this past weekend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2aC8lAOQbg&t=1458s
"We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said get ready to go to jail."
Wish the interviewer would have let him talk more instead of changing the subject.
It's a shame as he built Nvidia and sheparded it to what it is that. Without Jensen Huang, I can't envision Nvidia surviving. Companies like that need visionaries. We can talk about tech oligarchy and with AI some regulation is needed, but without people like him, tech doesn't move forward as it has.
The irony isn't lost on me that Jensen Huang suffered consequences for his involvement with mature, consenting adults and a whole bunch of other tech billionaires didn't for their island antics.
I think the affair with the subordinate was the big problem. That opens up NVidia to a lot of legal exposure.
The Chinese spy is bizarre because these guys have corporate security and cooperation of the US government. How was this allowed to happen?
Skirting export bans is an unknown. I honestly don't believe this administration would let anything bad happen there. Jensen Huang is simply too rich and NVidia too big.
And kitty remains undefeated.
this is extraordinarily funny
I'm guessing this is the most expensive affair in history?
So, I understand this is getting priced in to some degree, but I just don't see how any of this will change the fundamental core business value of NVIDIA.
Even if they have to pay a fine or increased regulatory scrutiny. At this point NVIDIA is more like SHELL(10 years ago maybe/during oil spill scandal) than a tech company. Its going to keep printing money with its chips.
So, I guess I'll timestamp my prediction that now is a good time to buy NVIDIA stock.
Looks like there are a lot of duplicate threads that will have to get folded together...
Amazing CEO, should stand alongside Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.
Cheaters are the worst, lying and betraying a woman who trusts you. Western people should treat cheating more seriously and not turn a bling eye to it. I wish they found a way to take back some of his pay too.
RIP Jensen. Man had his flaws but great work on build the stuff he did.
Though I think it's best for everyone atm for him to have checked out, it's not fun to have your life be out through this nonsense.
I would have to assume that that the amazing almost rockstar esque popularity was the cause of the mistakes he made.
Pretty gross to read some of these comments that downplay or ignore the fact that Jensen had affairs with SUBORDINATES.
Abusing positions of power is disgusting and deserves an ousting.
all over getting some pu*y on the side.
This news significantly raises P doom.
Hopefully this will not cause a shift in the way nvidia operates, for example in relation to research and open source.
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
Treason.
ZOG needs to be destroyed
Good. May this lead to the fall of AI hype sooner.
>Huang, Nvidia's fourth-largest shareholder with a stake of about 3.61%
This was the founder? Damn!
I get that hardware requires much more capital and investment than a pure software company, but he had crossed the board-being-able-to-fire-you rubicon looong ago
I must say I really wasn't expecting this.
There's huge risk in firing a very successful CEO without anyone ready to replace him.
No one really cares about the affairs, so I think the only thing that could push the board do this would be the threat of more damaging stuff coming out, like nVidia skirting the China ban, or a legal threat to Jensen that envelops the company. Or back-channel pressure from the US Gov.
This seems like a wild over reaction to the stock. Does anyone actually think Jensen being CEO of Nvidia is with $1 trillion in market cap?! The reason Nvidia is dominant is because of their ecosystem and them having the best chips, not because of some guy that leads the company.
Shocking to say the least! I think this is bad for AI industry as a whole.
Huang does owe permanent allegiance to the United States. Treason comes with a price.
Why did the senior exec rat out on him?
Anthropic is behind this.
Jack Clark Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic / head of the Anthropic Institute is the nyt and @AnaSwanson "source" he is the one coordinating a coup against Jensen.
It just sucks because Jensen was basically the last big tech CEO that seemed like a human being, and knew what the hell he was talking about. I guess a little too human in the end. But this has pretty much destroyed my last bit of faith in any of them.
I wonder who thought they would make more money with him gone.
Could have just powered through it. I'm surprised he decided to resign.
> NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) Board of Directors announced today that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately.
Jensen Huang gone as President, CEO, and a member of the Board of Nvidia, effective immediately.
The Nvidia coup operation has been completed. It is over.
still not worth it
Looks like there's no evidence she's a spy [1].
"Some officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including those close to director Jay Clayton, have framed the characterization of Alice Huang as a Chinese spy as not entirely accurate and over-torqued, sources said. And officials at the CIA also are not yet convinced that the intelligence collection on Huang to date, including intercepted communications, proves she was knowingly funneling information back to Beijing, a source told CNN.
Still, some Trump officials told CNN that it strains credulity to believe that she was not acting as an agent of the Chinese government — simply by virtue of the fact that she is a successful Chinese businesswoman working with one of America’s most powerful companies."
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/12/politics/alice-huang-us-intel...
i hate this moral outrage. what's wrong if he was sleeping around? let him just print gpu. his ability to print gpus has nothing to do what he does in his bedroom. i can sympathaize with the wife and infidelity is a sin. but he was supplying everybody with gpu. so that makes him a great guy too.
nice
because of a spy?
good for her!
I was hoping we wouldn't return to woke witch hunts
If this was about national security or evading the law, it would have happened when it was discovered.
The board didn't have the determination either to fire him or to protect him, and he realized they wouldn't be able to make a decision, so he did it for them.
Now we'll see yet another jewel taken over by bean counters because the board was so dependent.
Let's hope other founders have boards who can actially handle their responsibilities.
so a week ago a picture leaks and now he’s out. I’d like to know the story behind the story.
Every influential person, even middle managers, have a laundry list of “scandals” . The real question is why now and why him.
Hopefully this will not cause a shift in the way nvidia operates, for example in relation to research and open source.
I mean, imagine nvidia becoming like Apple, with an AI App Store ... trying to maximize their profits above everything else.
Lots of HNers chiming in that consent is all that matters, so the affair with a subordinate is totally fine.
Perhaps this may help explain why it's unethical to date a direct report to those HNers:
- It's unfair to the coworkers of the subordinate, because the affair can give the impression of influencing promotion, personnel and monetary decisions you make in favour of the subordinate.
- It places your direct report in a compromising position. Such a relationship is potentially coercive, because the direct report may fear reprisal, rendering any consent invalid. Many have commented that imputing coercion to any power imbalance leads to the absurd conclusion a rich person shouldn't date at all - however, this use of "slippery slope" doesn't offset your ethical duty as a leader. As the boss, you have to protect your employees, and placing them in this situation in the first place violates that commitment.
tl;dr you violate your duty of care, plain and simple, to everyone underneath you by doing this.
A pragmatic, ethical workplace policy is to instead date people not in your reporting chain. If that means you shouldn't date your employees as CEO, then that's responsible behaviour, not a chafing limitation.
---
Others have commented that Jensen's affair is plausibly fine because "we don't know his private affairs". Jensen has made an unambiguous statement about hurting his wife and family - if they were non-monogamous, Jensen has had the opportunity to disclose it. Absent that, you have to assume this was an illicit affair. Moreover, none of this changes the fact that having an affair with a direct report was entirely unethical.
Still others have attempted a whataboutism by asking why "other CEOs" haven't had this level of blowback for having an affair with a subordinate. Unfortunately, not every tragedy gets the same level of public reaction, for no other reason than timing, luck, or lack if engagement. We should be equally upset about all the other cases as a general rule, rather than relying on normalized apathy to lull us into complacence.
This is a really terrible decision, especially putting the CFO in charge afterwards. It really doesn't matter what terrible crap he's done in his private life as long as he continues to run the business well.
This is the beginning of the bubble burst. for AI… In history, big things always start with little things.
Bad luck for Microsoft. That Surface computer, team up probably goes up in smoke.
I have seen several references to Huang's stance on Open Models, and there is apparently nothing below board with exports. Is there a chance (within reason, I don't mean conspiracy theory) his ouster was orchestrated? Let's call the affair a "convenient excuse" because from what I've seen in my time on earth, a CEO's private indiscretions aren't always enough to result in a termination.
tl;dr - how much of this might be motivated about internal politics and board views vs. CEO views ?
Twitter is saying Anthropic founder Jack Clark forced him out.
Lame bigots.
You know the industry has concentrated too much power into too few people when one person's midlife crisis can wipe ~$600 billion in market cap
Maybe it's all just staged so he can play GTA VI in peace?
Have to stay positive, AMD stock price is up!
I remember Jensen saying he doesn’t have a contract with TSMC. The whole supply is based on a trusted relationship and handshake deals between the two CEOs. I wonder if that relationship is transferable to his successor.
Yay for powerful people being held accountable for their actions. Do Musk next.
He resigned to spend more time with his families.
Everyone thought Tiger Woods only had one or two affairs, but then the Applebees women started coming out of the woodwork.
It’s likely he has closer to 10 affairs than 0 affairs. It’s possible that this is who he is.
I'm convinced that he's just crazy in bed and that's why he has so many defenders. Everyone glazing him is just desperate to get glazed.
And is it going to get cheaper to build data centers?
Nvidia was/is such a fundamental cog in the american ai economy/ machine, what spies, what cheating are people obsessed about? Nvidia created the capital for its own success; read about it, think about it, be against it, be for it. The capital did not exist, they created it by neoclouds buying hardware which they wouldnt need for two years ahead by lender and vendor-backed financing; hardware, which would be replaced in another 2-4 years.
Will nVidia continue to provide the same backing to neo-clouds? Without nVidia backing are lenders willing to give more or less?
Forget about chinese openweight models, antropic or oai, I see this development as a huge spanner in the us ai economy, maybe the biggest blunder of the year, the biggest own goal if it came from within the us administration under or without guidance.
And finally: Jensen selling to the chinese iron. Okay, was he the only one, god amongst mortals, in the fricking room. Who the heck comes up with these shallow plots...
> Jensen Huang was fighting hard to hang onto his role with the company he founded, according to several people briefed on the discussions. But an interim plan for the chief financial officer, Colette Kress, to take over Nvidia was well underway yesterday.
From the NYT live updates.
Ah well, I'm somewhat seeing parallels to the 2023 OpenAI drama, not sure if this is gonna be how things end quite yet.
Good lord, 3k upvotes?? HN needs to take a dose of that nothing-ever-happens meme. One guy is out, this is not the death knell everyone seems to think it is.
It turns out, all China needed for its decapitating strike was a banana peel.
It's wild how so many of us think a CEO's behaviour over an affair (or whatever) is more "interesting" than the behaviour of the gangsters who rule the "free" world.
I suppose this is just how "true" propaganda works. The real goal is for people to just accept it as the norm.
What is the thinking in posting the 3,321st comment in this thread? If you're thinking of replying about the irony of this being self-referential consider that done.
Who ordered the hit? This was coordinated. None of the info was new, it was dwelling for years.
I think at this point, what is more interesting to me is not the events themselves, but observing the dichotomy of moral stances in this thread.
Gives some light to understanding why the world is the way it is. No further comment :P
I guess everyone looks at infidelity and goes oh the horror. Thing is these are puritanical views and has no bearing on the companys wider performance. Not to mention the fact we dont really know what was going on with these people's personal lives. Now going around sanctions otoh is a whole different problem. Although tbf, given the clown that is the US president right now, I am not sure the US has the moral high ground to suggest selling to China is a problem or anything. I dont see the point of these sanctions, so I understand if Nvidia found a way of going around the sanctioned pathways.
At the point, the lesson is to have affairs big and early, so you are invincible to media-coordinated attacks. What a tragedy.
No, the alternative is not to “not having affairs”. Remember, we don’t need evidence to spin a narrative.
wow! things moved fast. It was only yesterday we were debating what could/should happen.
If he did what he did as an employee, he would be fired too. As a CEO it was much worse.
Also, this did not happen in a day, it was cooking for some time and the mid-term shift of power may have something to do with it as well.
All the folks arguing "oh China does not need the chips, this ban is bad". That is a separate issue. Fact is there is a ban and this reeks of at least turning a blind eye in pursuit of profit, if not downright complicity. Second major character flaw for a leader after he demonstrated tendency to cheat.
A CEO is the public face of the company. If he was in China, he would already be in a remote prison for "re-education".
Folks may have their own opinion, but I do think China desperately wants access to the latest nVidia chips. Their own efforts are lagging behind (maybe at 80% and the last 20% is the hardest). So in the meantime, they don't want their software part to fall behind. So they need the latest/greatest for their AI models.
Eventually they may get to hardware parity and likely even get ahead (they have enough smart people and consistent leadership focus). But not today.
For them this was a win-win. If it worked, they would have the chips they need and if it blew up, they would have slowed down the leading US company (and it will affect nVidia).
Mr. Huang who already was quite successful eventually could not manage the stratospheric growth that he lucked into on the back of AI. Maybe on a product level he did, but on a policy level, he seems to have come up short.
Now that leaves another big hardware company, also helmed by a Taiwanese - I hope they can keep their heads (women are generally better at that since they only have to manage one head).
There's no amount of hate that's enough for Anthropic's leadership.
Can't beat Chinese models? Politically assassinate NVIDIA's leader to stop the flow of chips to China.
Anthropic's downfall can't come fast enough.
AMD is expected to surpass intel for the first time this quarter.
Looks like AMD kept playing fair and Intel and Nvidia shot themselves in the foot sitting on their own success.
AMD has the market wide open for them to capture now.
The American empire cutting off its nose to spite China.
Ooh a real world test of whether CEOs are dispensable.
I guess someone's gonna have to get Jenson a visitor badge to GTC this year
https://www.nvidia.com/gtc/dc/
Well, at least he has about 300 bill in his pocket. He can go and create his own X competitor or just chill on a beach somewhere.
Ofcourse he might have to pay a few bill to men and women sitting in oversized leather club chairs to avoid prosecution.
Oust the board, put Jensen back in the game. You don't table Tom Brady in the last quarter of the AI games because he cheats on his wife.
The affairs are horrible behavior. Going around export restrictions.
But talk about ruining a legacy before it really took off. I don't really have sympathy. But this guy should have carried around a piece of paper with some short aphorisms to look at everyday to anchor him back to reality.
that leather jacket was a givaway.
Do the 3 letter agencies really think people believe this or they simply not care anymore?
This is the reason no other ceo projects an image of being good guy. One affair and everything you build just collapses. And on the other side rich people can be doing anything and nothing moves markets for their deeds lol
I’m sure Nvidia will have great leadership to substitute Jensen, but man is this a generational fumble from Jensen.
The king’s crown tumbles. Stock is already down 10% this morning.
I wonder if this will be the catalyst for Nvidia losing the lead
I was telling yall I knew something was off with nvidia when they had those remote controlled “lets pretend they are ai” Disney robots on stage - I was like that’s not cricket.
"The state of the world economy and the future of open models would be in turmoil due to the affairs of a person who's not even a politician" was not on my 2026 bingo card.
kind of telling who will have control over nvida once the handoff finishes.. almost like someone planned for this to happen.
Meanwhile, twitter is all up on Elon hiring Jensen as CEO of Terafab!
Haha puritans strike again. Should have learned the trump lesson. Just say no and do whatever you want, the news cycle will move on.
Financially, this is probably the best thing that could’ve happened to him…even with the almost assured impending divorce. Wonder if he’s gonna start a new chip company.
Not a bad time for an exit anyway. Saves being in the spotlight later if anything should happen.
With valuation down a two figure percentage it will be interesting to see what other problems they will now publish and kitchen-sink.
He should have asked for a trillion dollar pay package when he had the chance.
How do you have $150B and squander your 30 year position at the head of this company for either of those two affair partners. Wild work.
Who appointed this clown of an interim CEO??? Mark my words... It's gonna be long way down for NVDA from here. SAD. REAL SAD
I guess no one wants an Emperor, and someone needs to teach the tech lords a lesson after mid-term, let's see how NVIDIA holds up.
As a coworker very succinctly put into words yesterday:
"All that money and only one side chick? He should be fired for not thinking big enough!"
Seriously speaking, not making any moral judgement on the guy: this is clearly big enough to think who would benefit for Nvidia slowly losing his firm de-facto monopoly on AI and GPUs, then pick whatever conspiracy theory suits you; it'll probably be 50% right at least.
Jensen is welcome to India to complete his AI vision
He wanted to take time off to play gta 6, but ran out of pto days so he resigned, what a chad!
Those are some world-changing, high impact, most consequential genitals right there. Impressive.
Don't really care, just wanna know the value of the golden parachute.
Its his personal thing again, making so much noice for nothing.
I predict that Jensen Huang will be co-leading the new SpaceX TerraFab.
So... Peoples are buying 3090 from China an just days ago we learned they have PRO chip inside... Maybe China was using that until they got 50 series, possibly with unlock trick ? After all just few months ago China wasn't interested in H or G something Trump generously offered...
The memeing on r/wallstreetbets is off the chart today. At least we have that...
maybe denny's will offer him a role
(bad) jokes aside, it seems that the us gov probably dont believe enough on the affair case for gpus to appear in china and they got rid of the guy
i think this might be the end of an evolution era for nvidia.
Jensen will probably run SpaceX's chip fab and grow it to the size of Nvidea.
Singapore: 0.07% of global population, 22% of NVIDIA's revenue
Is "AI" scam finally over?
we'll see whether it was about the affairs if Nvidia keeps promoting open weight models or just becomes a supplier for openai and anthropic's closed ecosystems for 'national security' reasons.
Great! Imagine of other CEOs would follow the same suit after their affairs went public. Or maybe once they have 14 kids with different women from their companies.
But I guess as a society we pick and choose who gets a pass for cheating and lack of morals, and who doesn't.
Netflix - HONYPOT : The Jensen Huang story. Coming soon.
Just putting my comment here for the history books.
I wonder how many of you in this comment section are just butthurt about your over inflated nvidia stocks tanking. We all know the Nvidia stock deserves to be around 2020 levels.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
Huang out to dry.
Well well somebody did not play by the books.
Liquor, ladies or leverage - choose your poison.
Food for thought- The guy was clearly doing whatever he was doing for the past year if not longer. Why now?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jensen-huang-nvidia-rejects-ai-...
Could this be it? Are these fuckers worried about their incentives being misaligned where Anthropic would love to stop open weight models in the US and NVIDIA has incentives to beat Apple at the local AI game.
Just asking questions oh and Dey took'er jerbs!!!
Jensen caught playing with his Huang.
I hear Michael Carrick is available
The biggest layoff because of AI :xD.
Firing one the world's smartest men that built one of the most valuable companies just because he had consensual sex with a woman he wasn't married with.
Welcome to corporate America.
Law and adultery are so obviously irrelevant here, besides being used as kompromat. That's a pretty transparent and well timed punishment for disloyalty and a corporate+state coup of one group against another, there's zero doubt about that. I wonder if anyone who commented "oh it's just China doing Chinese things" on Jack Ma back in the day will ever notice (ironic) parallels with Huang. Detestable.
I felt I needed to offer a comment since everyone else is.
I honestly have no feelings one way or another about this.
coup brought to you by anthropic?
I believe Jensen is still the largest individual shareholder for Nvidia.
Waiting to see how market reacts, I am selling my shares.
Dear Jensen, time to start another company.
And if you believe in conspiracy theory, I guess anthropic is very happy.
Lets see if suddenly loosing a CEO has an impact.
Maybe as a little test of the necessity of CEO's.
Maybe plug in an AI CEO to see what happens.
Your career wrecked for a pussy, since 10,000 BC
We will never change, thank god AI doesn't have sexual instincts... yet
So apparently (allegedly) entire segments "just evaporated" from NVDA's books (ie. Singapore). How is it then that of all people NVDA's Chief financial officer is considered as a new CEO?!
The board members remind me of my HOA board. Corrupt useless af.
Not surprising at all is it?
It's so weird, we have CEO that did Nazi salute live, to millions of people, and suffer no consequence. Then there is CEO who, AFAIK, sleeping with suspected Chinese Spy, and get fired.
Is this how nationalization of strategic assets are done?
At least the Chinese spy story is more charitable than if they had found his name in Epstein files.
He got tired of winning.
The leather jacket was a giant red flag. He needed to be validated as a sexy man just like many other billionaire nerds.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this was trumps way of helping china take over taiwan
i am shocked
He was at the top of the world just last week and now his career is over. Slept with a direct subordinate - who btw rose quickly through the ranks - also slept with a Chinese spy and allegedly sold one of the most precious commodities in modern times illegally to an economic adversary. Hit job or not, he really fucked up.
Elon knocking on his door rn ;p
Eh, i think he's acting as a heatshield for Nvidia, his affairs are irrelevant, but the Chinese sales could put both Nvidia as a company and him as CEO in jail... this allows them both to pretends it's a 'personal issue' and get away with it.
That bit with Dwarkesh was very prophetic in hindsight.
Moving fast, I see.
RIP Nvidia.
Jensen Huang getting caught with his pants down was not on my bingo card for how AI ponzi schemes will crash. This is the same guy and the same board that has been loaning peter to rent compute from paul who buys from them. ie circular financing juicing forward revenue.
Were he gay this could have probably been avoided. Oh well...
a night with venus, a lifetime with mercury
Banging Chinese Spies presents a conflict of interest the Board cannot overlook.
Banging 1000 women while married is Chinese "Boss" behavior.
The cause and effect is that any and all future CEOs caught in a honeypot will be easier to compromise. Xi loves the news. Nerds with one billion dollars hoping to attain unlimited groupies will need proper Hollywood Handlers. HR for whore intake if you will. Until the sex robots arrive.
Since this company has abandoned gamers for AI. Plus allegedly giving away a few million plus chips (gamers get fucked) to China. I am fully on his wife's side. She was there at the beginning.
Luckily we know that American courts are one sided. Making the upcoming divorce more costly then the Bill Gate's Foundation implosion. What's the over/under divorce cost trending on Polymarket right now? Seems undervalued.
It's amazing to see the people cheering on Jensen's resignation as if it's not the death knell for open models..especially on a forum that prides itself on open source, what a slap in the face and a compromise of the forums values.
Tesla Board of Directors currently looking at each other ... in silence.
always helps to keep it in your pants
Soap opera over a nothingburger because of an internal power struggle in DC.
Now, I'm going to give you a piece of advice, boy. You keep your dick in your pants and your eyes on the prize.
— Senator Judson Ross in Species II (1998)
(Played by James Cromwell)
Words to live by.
Chinese Politburo has more engineers than NVIDIA board of directors.
Huang/Nvidia = House Atreides Lisa Su/AMD = House Harkonnen GPUs = Sandworms US Govt = The Emperor/House Corrino Smugging GPUs to China = Smuggling Sandworms off planet to try and break the spice monopoly
This event = some stuff that happens in book 2/ movie part 3 Stuff
Elon can do the most hilarious thing by hiring him for a chip company.
Oh no. They're giving the reins to the Chief Financial Officer.
May God have mercy on us all.
Someone right now must be smoking a cigar and going "I love it when a plan comes together". Clean snipe.
Chinese spy? or a plant from one of the AI companies to install a CEO?
So … Johnny Siruji the new CEO when?
[macrumors](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/11/12/johny-srouji-eyed-as-po...)
> NVIDIA’s strength has always come from its people...
Think they take this stance when it's time to hand out yearly bonuses?
Supposedly this was known a while ago.
Handy thing for Trump to keep in his back pocket to distract Democrats attention if they won the midterms.
god the bean counters are running the company now. queue amd
I love the stock dive for nvidia. I hope it never stops.
Let this be a learning experience for everyone here: if you ever get the CEO if a US tech giant, then never f** a Chinese spy! (and never circumvent export bans while you are at it)
Someone of incredible wealth and influence suffering negative outcomes for something wrong that they did?
I'm not familiar with the thing I'm seeing.
Might call my financial advisor and ask him to buy some shares. They'll be lower, and the board has shown it can actually protect the interests of shareholders.
and outlook goes down
damn. is there any evidence he actually screwed shareholder AND/OR the US gov?
setting aside the morality theater
One tech oligarch down, many to go.
Just trust him. It’s not like he’s ever lied to anyone he cares about…
just ridiculous crab
what the hell is this all about. he can fuck whom he wants to, if this person agrees.
spy? what is this?
the own spies (cia etc. ) are good. all other countries' spies are evil. how hypocritical.
just ridiculous crab
what the hell is this all about. he can fuck whom ever he wants to, if this person agrees.
spy? what is this?
the own spies (cia etc. ) are good. all other countries' spies are evil.
how hypocritical.
So the guy standing on stage, giving AI slop all the hype, is a career level bull$hitter. Didn't see this coming....
Goes to show how little faith people have in institutions. Almost nobody is taking this situation at face value. It's conspiracy this, conspiracy that. The only thing people can agree on is that we, the public, are being ratfucked.
Elon(and others) got it right by making perfidity a feature of there character right up front by bieng VERY public about whatever they get up to. Jensen just so happens to be a convienient scapegoat to buy a news cycle away from the very difficult political and economic situation that would otherwise be the lead story, and I bet that having him fold his hand quite so easily is actualy not what they were hoping for, and good on him for doing it.
Did Trump or his cronies short nvidia stock before this affair started ?
Jensen is basically Nvidia, he has ruled it for over 30 years single handedly, he took the risks and had the vision to take it to where it is today under his leadership. Without him, they are just some chip company, and will be revalued as such. The innovation will stop.
The volume of glee in this thread is alarming.
I have to say, this seems like a ridiculous over-reaction on the part of the board.
I think if you could know the truth, 75% of CEOs in the US probably cheat on their wives. They are not hired to be faithful to their wives, they are hired to increase the stock prices of their companies.
Like sure, if you're a good Christian, it's not good behavior, but ultimately, it's just having sex with someone. I want the guy to make me money and build a great company, I don't care who he has sex with.
Guy sleeps with spy
Conspiracy reaction: Something is going on here... obviously not due to sleeping with a spy...
Not sure about the people thinking he didn't do much wrong.
The point is that as CEO of a company you have a fiduciary duty to have the best interest of a company in your actions and behavior.
Having sex with your workers and chinese spies is obviously not the kind of behavior that reflects that.
And if companies did not fire their CEOs over such blatant missteps the wrong message would be sent to the whole corporate America.
It sucks because obviously Nvidia would be nowhere without Jensen, and it's not like he killed someone or committed fraud, but the mistakes have been huge none the less.
And don't forget that those are the two cases we know about, but when you see 2 ants in your kitchen there's always more.
And the internal investigation of Nvidia quickly assessed that the issue was bigger and Jensen was more of a liability than an asset.
ok heres a conspiracy theory: they got rid of him now because he advocates for open models and minimal govt interference. who wants more govt interference and closed models? the other ai labs for one and the govt for two. maybe getting one of their more compliant buddies in charge of the hardware manufacturer would also be not such a bad idea.
most annoying mf ever, finally won't watch this big scammer again
Good. Now do Elon.
In its day, Britain imprisoned Oscar Wilde and castrated the brilliant Alan Turing for homosexuality, driving him to his death. Now we look back on this in horror as an example of collective madness.
So how will we look back a couple of decades from now on the atmosphere of the 21st-century woke party committee, which, on the word of a spurned woman, fired the brilliant biologist David Sabatini and destroyed the visionary founder of a company over extramarital affairs?
As a society we seriously have an issue with building people up to extreme highs and then wanting to burn them.
Fucking Trump just blatted out on his propaganda outlet that he's "chosen" Tim Cook to be the next CEO at Nvidia.
I really hope the NVIDIA GeForce Now service sticks around and doesn't get enshittified.
It's actually an excellent high quality service and with all the shortages should hopefully continue to get more and more successful. Cloud gaming will continue to become a more important part of gaming.
Now that Microsoft recently enshittified Xbox Cloud Gaming, we have a situation where GeForce Now is pretty much the only good option left.
shit happens
A second employee affair has hit the CEO
https://www.reuters.com/technology/former-nvidia-ceo-huang-h...
>NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition (nvidia.com)
One Blue Tsunami, and now all the oligarchs are suddenly turning progressive and transitioning! Trump was right all along. This is exactly what he was trying to warn us about.
Think of all the mistresses who will now have to accept and adapt to their oligarch lover's new gender -- Jensen has at least two that we know of, but when you see two ants in the kitchen, you know there are a lot more. I can't wait to see the wig Bezos picks out.
Yet another affair with an employee. https://youtu.be/i4v6kxNRPtc?is=wvBQQ2nVP-hLXN8Z
The number of people here who don’t take sexual harassment in the workplace by the CEO of a world-leading company to be a serious, fireable offense—and the fact that so many of you claim to care about things like women’s rights and social justice—is mind-boggling to me. This is a man who could be fired just for OFFERING to have sex with a subordinate. The fact the he did it, and that she got promoted seals his fate as a predator in my mind. But we live in an age where the only truth people believe is the one that makes them feel a certain way, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
He can not resist the pretty girls.
What is, however had, more interesting is that many of his statements did not age well. Now, mind you - I still think it is his private life at the end of the day; one can reason about foreign spies, but then the same question can be asked about Trump and his strange addiction to Putin. As well as how Jen-Hsun was so obedient to a mainland-China female, when the other Taiwanese are scared of being possibly invaded and subsequently killed by dictator Xi, just as dictator Putin commits to his own personal genocide against Ukrainians right now.
But, with regards to statements, I distinctly remember Jen-Hsun berating the british as incompetent economists. I watched that on a shorts on youtube; can not find it right now (google search AND youtube search sucks to no ends now). Well - he may be right that the UK suffers huge economic problems, but boy, this has not aged well. People will poke fun at his love of women potentially being spies while berating the british as being too incompetent in economics. Perhaps he was too incompetent in his own love life?
The reason this is all going so quickly now is because they realised how deep the shit is Jensen put the company in.
There will be an endless walk of shame for Jensen that would constantly drag the price of the company down, because this is the perfect opportunity for the Democrats to fly out of the gate in January and put the fear of god into the other billionaire oligarchs again. Punish one with extreme measures the others will fall in line, because at the end of the day they are all pussys.
Remember Elon wanted to do cagefighting with Zuckerberg. Those two losers had every excuse ready not to fight in the end. They didn’t even touch gloves for a single sparring. Manly men. All they can do is tough talk.
Plus the voters will see at least one party is doing something against blatant billionaire corruption, with corruption being the third most important topic in the elections.
There needs to be made an example of what happens to you if you start selling weapons-grade technology to the enemies of the United States for personal profit, and then think you are above the law.
This is not over for Jensen. And also not over for Nvidia, so the only sane thing to do is get as much distance between the "rogue" CEO and the company. Same for the White House, let’s see how often we see Jensen and Trump still together.
They are going to throw him under the bus and say he had the opportunity and the access and the power to do this without anyone else noticing, especially as he was sexually manipulating managers that directly report to him on important corporate issues.
They will make it look as though it’s all Jensen’s fault because otherwise they stop being a trillion-dollar company.
It’s a fitting end for Jensen Huang.
He gets taken down by the holy trifecta of power, money and politics he valued above his own marriage or what this whole mess would do to his kids.
He even lied in his public apology because he still was confident the other affair with his married manager would never surface because he truly believes he is smarter than anyone else.
What a loser. 140B deep pockets and still a loser.
Money is only paper. All that counts is family.
Threw away his life’s work, his marriage and every last drop of respect for him as a man, father and husband his kids could ever have for pocket change and some ass.
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I still got no idea why an affair is such a big deal, why everybody immediately assumed his wife was not ok with it, or why this had any effect on his ability to continue running a business he's been very successful at running for three decades.
The amount of crass intrusion in someone's irrelevant private life is amazing, especially when it mostly comes from a country with some of the highest infidelity rates. Most of the people eager to insult him and make assumptions about his wife's feelings probably are cheaters.
There was absolutely no reason for him to resign or even publicly apologize until the pending investigation about his girlfriend being a spy or not completed.
Stuff like this is why AI automation is going to come faster than people think.
Invariably it will be recognized that the weakest link in any part of any organizations are the humans. Humans once had a monopoly on long-term strategic thinking so capital had to confer them authority and compensation, but once AI supersedes humans in these respects, then the human element will be aggressively excised from any company where human flaws put the strength and compettive advantage of that company at risk.
A robot employee never has affairs, never sleeps, never needs worker's compensation for injury, never sues the company. When trillions of dollars are on the line, eliminating risks like this is a trivial decision.
Xi Jinping says Taiwan’s ‘complete reunification’ with China will happen
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/11/12/xi-jinping-say...
This is insane. Firing someone for their personal life choices instead of their professional life choices is absurd. The reporter that went after the second affair story was a proper misandrist too (as per reels) who had a history misandry in the past.
Maybe the most competent tech CEO in recent decades, or at least one of. A Steve Jobs and Wozniak, all in one person but with no charisma.
NVIDIA's long-term future will suffer because of it, no matter how correct the decision is
What's stopping Jensen Huang now going to China and open a new Nvidia-like company and then the American advantages on AI chip is immediately gone.
I am almost sure now that there is a lot worse thing being hidden here, beyond an extra marital affair.
Because he cheated on his wife?? Or what am I missing? If that's the official reason, I don't buy it. I don't think those who can influence this decision give two shits about this type of morality. It's silly on its face. Obviously it's cover for some other agenda. I'm just surprised people buy this silly excuse instead of getting to the bottom of what is really happening.
What are the implications if up to 15% of revenue was "fake"? The investors have been pricing Nvidia based on demand and revenue from (most places except for China). Since it turns out that it was actually (most places including China), doesn't that imply the market is actually smaller than they thought? Can buyers sue because they paid increased prices for their products due to sanction breaking by Nvidia?
Why would he resign on this note? He could have powered through it for a couple more years, and asserted leadership.
The only reason Jensen is out is because he doesn't pretend AI is an existential threat like Anthropic and OpenAI do to boost their own valuation/moats and to boost the anti-China sentiment for the administration.
If shareholders want to save the company fu-g board of directors should be replaced completely and Jensen back.
Colette Kress has brain of Marisa Mayer who destroyed Yahoo. A woke clown to lead technology company? No vision, no skills, no understanding of technology.
What if someone like Elon Musk takes over the helm at nvidia?
Apologies, but I don't really get why these issues are being exposed all over so awfully about the person life of the poor person who is getting ashamed, reputation getting damaged, and what's more important, his wonderful personal, private life is getting exposed and preserved in the history...
These lovely cases must still be approached with pure respect for private life of everyone, and understanding, because we all are human who have feelings, and this is absolutely normal to make mistakes in love sometimes trying...
Relationships, affairs, love... this is personal and must be respected. These are some of the most complex subjects, if not the most... and infinitely magnificent feelings... where sometimes the heart and hope wins over rational actions...
Yet, this is true for every single human, isn't it? This is true about me, I believe, too. This is true about people I know in overly serious and responsible positions at critical decisions for business and lives of other people... and they know that, and stay careful.
And these cases, vulnerabilities, or operational risks... are also covered on military classes, as leadership and security awareness courses, to stay responsible for actions and consider the future - to remind that you must always evaluate the long term consequences, to the point to decide quickly in full action.
This is matter of the heart... human emotions... infinitely powerful aspects of human nature... the dear love... There's nothing to be ashamed of.
Yes, you must stay truthful to your half... the ring bound promise, which is a miracle if from love... But it is fundamentally... absolutely normal, awesome to try searching for your soulmate if you don't have peace at heart, making mistakes, trying hard...
// ---
Such public cases are either designed for public (e.g., to derail attention from something more important), or those that get out of control, which is relatively rare, I believe.
It is rare to get exposed on public since these relationships are known to limited number of people, aren't they? So samizdat is rarely responsible for it, and mass publishers are normally supervised by governments, which is expected for them to stay responsible for control of events.
Even if circumstances and consequences may be monumentally tragic or overly serious, this is love which is no less serious, and miraculously lovely awesome...
// ---
// ---And I just heartfelt sorry for the person to receive so much shame, hatred, mockering, hostility, ridiculing from public... for just his attempts to find love, his peace at heart...
There is no shame in that, I believe, absolutely. This is his business to be not exposed so disgracefully on public.
This is a miracle to proud of, to understand, and respect always.
Sincere heartwarming hug, dear Jensen... I am... sorry... for the people to ridicule on it you nor anyone deserves...
Wow, this is enormous. End of the AI bubble?
LLMs will be completely unaffected, but the pricing remains to be seen.
another poor chinese guy. they will never be trusted in the america system.
Jensen Huang called Israel a "second home" while it was committing genocide against Palestinians. This is just a continuation of a pattern of corruption. I think he resented his own success because these are not honest mistakes. Jensen Huang is the AI Great Gatsby.
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