So for a week now everyone’s talking about how Jensen Huang was apparently “honeypotted” by Chinese intelligence into letting embargoed AI chips be smuggled into China via a Singapore company called Megaspeed. And now it’s official, Jensen Huang is no longer associated with Nvidia, after 35 years at the company.
I think you’d have to be pretty dumb to believe that’s the actual story. But it’s an attractive one to the media. Spies! A rich man cheating on his wife! A man letting himself be fooled by an attractive younger woman who wasn’t after him for his personality and gravitas!
That’s bullshit. All of it.
Jensen Huang is not a stupid man, unlike almost everyone who’s publicly commented on the story, mentioning how he didn’t have a pre-nup and a purported divorce would cost him billions of dollars. It’s like there’s a “missing the point” competition out there and everyone’s dying to win it.
Jensen Huang and Nvidia were never out of step. They both see the American chip embargo as something to get around, an obstacle to business. Why would an unknown company go from spending $33M on capital expenditures one year to spending $3 BILLIONS on almost exclusively Nvidia AI chips the next year? Oh, and coincidentally, the liaison for this Singapore company just happens to be a Chinese national with an eye for Jensen’s sexy leather jackets…
Nvidia is a company worth over 4 trillion dollars. Its CEO doesn’t just step out at 5pm to drive home in his own car. Wherever he goes there are bodyguards with him, at Nvidia’s employ. The company had a number of people keeping tabs on what he was doing, with whom he was doing them, etc. I mean, if the notoriously unreliable US intelligence service were aware he was hanging around with someone who had a reputation of being a “Chinese spy”, interested parties on Nvidia’s board were well aware of it long before the CIA. And as long as things were kept out of the news, they didn’t mind.
Fact is that Nvidia pretty owns the AI market in the West, but the chip embargo prevents them from making headway into China, where the REAL big orders lie. Chinese businesses all have extensive relationships with the Chinese government, with all the financial flex that this implies. Getting chips into China was a goal that Huang and Nvidia have always had. Because while the US AI companies may juggle around with big numbers — hundreds of billions of dollars — a Chinese entity like Deepseek would open the possibility of trillion-dollar contracts. And that was something that Huang, and Nvidia, were really after.
Sadly, Jensen got to be a little careless about his image. Perhaps it could even be said that he wanted to flex with his new girlfriend in front of people, and TBH I can’t blame him. And that’s when things started going wrong.
My point is that Huang never got “tricked” into anything. He was doing what was objectively best for his company, and picked up a relationship in the process. Nvidia was never unaware of what he was doing or why he was doing it. In all likelihood no one involved in this story ever thought they would be found out, and even if they were, they probably thought that the company could keep operating as it was because as kingpins of the American AI industry they were just too big to fail. But the board lost its nerve when faced with criminal sanctions for violating the chip embargo, and now the company is in chaos. I do believe Nietzsche said something about this in Beyond Good and Evil — something about how an accused man shouldn’t downplay their actions but affirm them and even be proud of them.
But ultimately, the board members were, to put in this way, “human, all too human”.