There were a lot of efforts to bury the fact that Jensen Huang had an affair with a Chinese spy, and then even to bury his second affair as well, and to get everyone to ignore the obvious implications of this. Then the second affair was revealed with executive Kimberly Powell, who directly reports to him. Even then, many doubled down on defending Jensen Huang as CEO of Nvidia.
This creates a tricky situation for Nvidia, given that Jensen Huang had over 50 direct reports and did not believe in succession planning, and also for the White House.
It also creates a tricky situation for many in Silicon Valley, who have invested heavily in their relationships with Jensen Huang and in the idea that founders are as Gods.
Nate Silver: I think, because it happened on top of the midterms and the midterms were a huge story, people are still underindexing on how seismic the NVIDIA story is. Especially when you read the deeper reporting on it.
Rob Miles: I felt a little bit bad about attacking Jensen Huang in the past, but now I feel a lot better about it.
I was probably still wrong, since I went from “This guy’s decisions and arguments seem surprisingly bad” to “Maybe he’s not as smart as people think he is” instead of “Maybe he’s compromised”. Chalk one up for Conflict Theory I guess…
Nathan Calvin: Hey maybe NVIDIA’s PR person was telling the truth when he said that Jensen’s relationship with Alice Huang was neither unusual or unexpected.
Bloomberg TV: In the interview, Huang said that his interactions with her were typical of those with Chinese customers and executives.
To what one would hope would be the surprise of absolutely no one, Jensen Huang turned out to be having at least two affairs.
In any sane world an undisclosed affair with a direct report is a lot less terrible than an affair with a Chinese spy. It is still quite bad. In America, this is still a sufficiently large breach of conduct that CEOs often get fired for it on its own.
The other question is, now that the second ant has been spotted, how many more ants were there in this kitchen? It would be surprising if the count stopped at two.
Ryan Mac, Tripp Mickle and Georgia Gee (NYTimes): Jensen Huang, the leader of Nvidia who is under investigation for an affair with a woman who U.S. intelligence determined is a Chinese spy, also had an extramarital relationship with [Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care], an executive who reports to him, according to five people who worked at the company.
… Mr. Huang, 63, and Ms. Powell, 48, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose, Calif., hotel during a Nvidia conference in March, according to two of the people who worked at the company. The New York Times has not seen the video.
Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people.
… Mr. Huang’s relationship with Ms. Powell has been discussed inside the company, the five people said.
… Mr. Huang is among a long list of chief executives of American companies who have had relationships with subordinates. Brian Krzanich resigned in 2018 from Intel, the chip maker, after acknowledging a “past consensual relationship” with an employee.
Once the second affair was revealed, they were not going to wait for the investigation or try to bury the situation. Jensen was on his way out, and has now resigned. We still eagerly await the results of the investigation, for other reasons.
Jensen Huang Had to Resign
This is 2026, so only after the second affair could we be sure that was how this would turn out, and even then there were people trying hard to defend him. It really, really should not have required the second affair.
These quotes come from before the revelation of affair number two (of N):
Gabby Miller (Politico): “The potential for extortion is so tremendous that something as sensitive as Nvidia chips, I just think he’s got to go,” Cramer told POLITICO late Tuesday.
“If the worst thing he did in real life is infidelity with this woman who may or may not be a Chinese spy — but she might be — that’s enough, because whatever else there is, we don’t know. And to me, that’s a security risk.”
… Gabby Miller (Politico): “Step down Mr. Huang, right now,” Kudlow said on the financial and economic affairs program he hosts on Fox Business Network, characterizing such a move as a “commonsense action.”
Yes. Obviously. You fall on your sword, as Jensen Huang was forced to do.
Seven Billion in Sales to China Enabled by Jensen’s Ties to Alice Huang
Megaspeed may only be the secondary scandal. The primary scandal could be Shanghai Century Litong, which became the central supplier to Chinese companies and facilitated at least $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips.
The timeline and circumstances strongly suggest that Century Litong was able to do this, and get status as a preferred Nvidia customer shortly after being founded, through the influence of Alice Huang, despite her having zero AI background.
Jing Yang: Alice & Jensen have known each other since at least 2023. By 2023, when Alice launched her chip biz with no prior background in tech, she quickly established her credibility by boasting her chuminess with Jensen. She told people that Jensen celebrated her birthday every year.
How exactly did the two Huangs met? We find out that Alice’s husband Kang Wei 康伟 got to know Jenson in the 2010s through gaming businesses.
The Information Staff: The two have built a rapport that facilitated the shipment of at least $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips through Chinese companies since then, according to two people who know her.
Alice Huang, her sister and her husband have built a labyrinth of companies spanning China and Singapore to acquire Nvidia chips, according to the people who know Alice Huang and corporate registration records. At the center of that corporate network is Shanghai Century Litong, a China-based company that was founded in June 2023 and, by October, was added to Nvidia’s list of preferred cloud partners, a status that comes with priority access to Nvidia’s chips.
Four months after Century Litong was established, its major shareholder, listed in Shanghai Stock Exchange, disclosed that Century Litong had earned the credential as an Nvidia preferred partner for cloud services—a designation it continues to hold, according to Nvidia’s website.
… Century Litong’s addition to Nvidia’s preferred list couldn’t have happened at a better time.
… Century Litong’s clients were China’s largest technology companies, which cannot buy restricted Nvidia chips themselves.
That made the company the go-to supplier for Chinese tech firms racing to develop their own AI systems.
“Whatever chips that the U.S. and Chinese governments don’t allow for sale, Litong has them.”
Jensen Huang Attempted to Make Himself Unfireable
The standard way for a tech executive to be unfireable is to own enough shares and voting power that you cannot be fired. Jensen Huang did not get to choose that easy way. He came to the game too early for supervoting shares. He and his wife together only have 3.6% of Nvidia’s shares. Which is worth over $140 billion, but won’t let him control the company.
Thus the hit to Nvidia being so large, on the order of 20%.
When you look at the large decline in Nvidia’s stock price, that is the responsibility of Jensen Huang, the same way the rest of the history of Nvidia was due to Jensen Huang.
A Remarkable Lack of Contagion
While Nvidia was down quite a lot, other tech companies mostly were indifferent.
Joe Weisenthal (November 12, 7:11am): It’s still interesting to me how the market seems to be treating the Nvidia turmoil as an Nvidia problem that won’t spill out more broadly to other publicly traded companies.
NASDAQ-100 futures down just 0.6% after a strong rally yesterday. Nvidia itself off 7.7% pre-market.
Four hours later Jensen Huang had resigned. SPY was up 6bps (0.06%) while QQQ was down 7bps (-0.07%). Nvidia was down 5.16%. The ex-Nvidia market was up ~40bps.
The obvious theory is that Nvidia lost operational efficiency, but that also this is very good for chip export controls and for not selling Nvidia chips to China. Bloomberg’s Catherine Thorbecke writes ‘China is the Biggest Loser From Jensen Huang’s Downfall.’
So who can say if it is bad for other American tech companies or not.
That seems right to me. I do not see any reason to expect a large impact on the rest of the stock market.
Meanwhile, the press continues to write directionally incorrect drivel like this:
Dave Lee (Bloomberg): The American AI industry will surely move more slowly as a result. Nvidia is the bottleneck through which OpenAI, Anthropic and other global leaders do their work. Nvidia’s continued investment and support has been the backstop behind companies building data centers as quickly as possible, a linchpin for attracting further funding for this deeply costly enterprise. This is happening when “the U.S.-China AI model performance gap has effectively closed,” according to a Stanford report.
That is simply false. American AI will if anything now move faster, because Nvidia chips will not be diverted to China. The market agrees. And the US-China AI model performance gap not only has not ‘effectively closed’ it is widening over time.
If Jensen Huang proves essential to Nvidia’s ability to produce the best chips, then over time yes that would eventually create a problem for the rest of American AI. I suppose we will find out exactly how essential his man was on that front.
In many ways it is now moot, but we should remember who defended Jensen Huang.
The message was a combination of:
We like money. Jensen Huang makes us money.
We do not care about national security, or chip smuggling, or about sleeping with a subordinate, or lying to the public. We care about money.
When outperforming CEOs are fired the stock then underperforms, and we cannot imagine why that might be correlation rather than causation.
We want the ability to do similar things and not get fired, and are not about to give up all that hard work we did sucking up to him.
If you read between the lines, we actively approve of all of this vice signaling, and we are so relieved that Jensen Huang turned out not to be a Wife Guy.
Again, we cannot emphasize enough that we really, really like money.
(Optional) It had to be a Natsec or Anthropic or even EA plot to point out that Jensen Huang had an affair with a Chinese spy, and also had an affair with a direct report, ‘they’ ‘assassinated’ him, you’re not paranoid enough, etc.
The Kobeissi Letter: Our message to Nvidia’s board: Do not fire Jensen Huang. There is no clear replacement for Jensen Huang. We are confident that his departure would ultimately be a net negative for Nvidia, its shareholders, and the AI Revolution.
First, take a look at the data. History also suggests that removing a successful CEO will come with a significant cost.
A study of 187 forced CEO departures from S&P 1500 companies found that removing outperforming CEOs resulted in negative long-term stock returns. This case would be no different, in our view. Jensen Huang is the definition of an outperforming CEO. Nvidia’s board must not make a decision in the heat of the moment.
The board should take the time to conduct a thorough investigation and consult with shareholders, with a strong emphasis on the latter.
Quite literally, Nvidia’s board should convene a special shareholder meeting and hold an advisory vote on this decision. This is the most consequential CEO controversy in world history. Shareholders deserve a say.
In addition, Nvidia’s stock is now down -35% in 26 trading days, nearly half of which is a result of the recent scandal. We believe Jensen Huang’s potential removal as CEO is now ~80% priced in.
Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh: Most remarkable ‘too big to fail’ rally around the man I’ve ever seen going on. Feels particularly discombobulating given the security elements of this affair. This… isn’t really about personal misconduct, y’know?
“Oh so now it’s a crime to have an affair with a Chinese spy who is also the CEO of company that’s evading export controls while you also lobby the US government to go soft on evasion and weaken the controls?”
Alec Stapp: The funny part is it’s even worse than that: They were lobbying to protect her and her company!
… Nvidia was specifically inquiring about the Chinese spy when they tried to intervene in a Commerce Department probe. Imagine what else Congressional investigators are going to find once they start issuing subpoenas.
The drop in Nvidia’s stock when Jensen Huang fully resigned confirmed the ~80%.
They got an op-ed out of the Wall Street Journal by Asa Fitch and Aaron Back, saying that ‘the task for Nvidia now is to find a way to keep Huang on while reassuring shareholders, the government and the general public that it takes national security risks seriously.’
Amjad Masad went to full Conspiracy Town, to ask ‘who benefits from letting it be known that Jensen Huang had an affair with a direct report and a Chinese spy, when he wasn’t even trying to cover up his affairs all that hard before, hmm?’ He even suggested this is due to the ‘upcoming IPOs’ and that those who ‘want AI closed’ might benefit, and pointing to this fully paranoid rant trying to ‘pin’ this on Anthropic, as if the main thing going on here is that this is going to make Anthropic’s likely IPO price go up bigly. Do you believe in Anthropic Derangement Syndrome yet, anon?
Whatever happened, they ask, to muh freedums, I thought this was ‘Merica, they only knew about this because of government surveillance, and whatever happened to the sacred principles of snitches getting stitches, bros before hoes and lies before spies?
Basil: Ok but unironically the government used NSA spying technology to destroy the life of a major CEO over purely political reasons and this is extremely bad.
Dylan Higbie: I think determining whether the CEO of one of the nation’s most important corporations is in a clandestine relationship with a Chinese intelligence asset is within the purview of the US government.
Well, actually, ordinary person surveillance also cracked the case, and also I happen to think that if the CEO of Nvidia has an affair with a Chinese spy that this is information that people need to know. And I think that Jensen Huang’s life is not destroyed, but to the extent that it is the person to blame is Jensen Huang. I don’t think that is just me.
If this had been Jensen seeing some high end escorts, and the government leaked it, then yeah I would not like that, although I still say if he saw one repeatedly and she turned out to be a Chinese spy then that is still on him. This was very much not that.
Those in Washington, by contrast, were relatively quick to correctly be rather pissed off. Jensen Huang has been pressuring them and treating them as adversaries and lying to them for years, and now we find out this.
Brian Nichols: This is probably one of the bigger disconnects I’m seeing between the Bay area and DC right now, from my limited vantage point? There’s much more anger at Jensen in D.C. than I think the broader tech ecosystem realizes.
Bill Bishop: Nvidia execs ran a smear campaign against proponents of chip export controls, bullied people on the Hill, they made so many enemies and now no one is afraid of them. I think we are still in the tip of the iceberg phase of what is going to come out.
If you want to sell out America in order to maximize Nvidia’s stock price, the one you should be furious at is Jensen Huang for allowing things to go down like this.
If you attack Nvidia, say by pointing out Jensen Huang had an affair with a major customer who also happened to be a Chinese spy for whom Nvidia helped attempt to quash an investigation, (you know, ordinary things that patriotic, totally-not-compromised companies do), then you know what to expect. There’s going to be a professional reaction, including a bot or sockpuppet army.
Peter Wildeford: I’m honored that the pro-Nvidia sockpuppet accounts care enough about what I have to say.
Luckily everyone’s favorite astroturf campaign analyst, Tyler Johnston, is on it.
Tyler Johnston (The Midas Project): In thousands of posts, a foreign influence network promoted Nvidia, attacked export controls, and defended Jensen Huang amid a spy scandal. It traces back to an Israeli influence operation that claims to have gone out of business.
Late last week, the Financial Times reported that Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was believed by U.S. intelligence to have had an affair with a Chinese spy. The alleged spy was a business executive whom American officials warned China recruited to gather information on the company and potentially push for chip exports to China.
In the following days, as the story bounced around social media, dozens of accounts rushed to Huang’s defense. They dismissed the report as resting on anonymous sources and insufficient evidence. Six of them said, in nearly the same words, that Huang had already made clear in May that Nvidia’s Blackwell and Rubin chips weren’t going to China — and thus concerns about the chip export angle were overblown.
The accounts belong to a network of over 400 apparent sockpuppet accounts that appear to have spent years promoting messages for various clients, including, over the past year, taking Nvidia’s side in Washington’s fight over selling advanced AI chips to China. The same network is actively supporting other causes, including backing the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan’s civil war, a group the United States has accused of genocide.
… The accounts also single out the people pressing hardest for limits on chip sales. No one draws their attention more than Chris McGuire, a former National Security Council official who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a leading advocate of export controls. Dozens of accounts in the network have replied to him more than 100 times since November 2025.
… Various posts from the network also attack Dwarkesh Patel (who had a heated debate with Huang that went viral) and Dario Amodei (who has taken the opposite position from Nvidia on chips and safety concerns).
… Of the more than 400 accounts The Midas Project has identified, most present themselves as Americans: X lists about 80% as based in the United States, though for nearly all of those it warns that the location “may not be accurate,” suggesting the account connects through a VPN or proxy.
… Nvidia isn’t the only shared interest that these accounts have. Over the years, this network of accounts has advocated for a variety of causes, seemingly on behalf of both corporate and political clients. This has included campaigns benefiting Israel, pharmacy benefit managers, manufacturing companies, and, most recently, the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.
… The network’s best-documented campaign, and its largest by volume, appears to be one exposed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Project Lighthouse,” a pro-Qatar effort that Haaretz reported was devised by a firm run by two aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Kelsey Piper: Who’s behind the swarms of influencer bots out commenting on Nvidia/Jensen Huang? Apparently the same accounts also post on behalf of the RSF in Sudan, and tie back to an Israeli company which pretended to shut down while under investigation for their pro-Qatar operations.
Side note I guess but X should be way more aggressive about banning these accounts. They’re pretty obvious. They make posting on this site very unpleasant.
These people did you a favor and made a big graphic showing they all post the same thing at the same time and update their bios/banners in sync. Just ban them all!!
Jessica Tillipman: Well, that explains so many of the unhinged replies I have received over the last 24 hours related to my NVIDIA posts.
Kelsey Piper: I saw a bunch of NVIDIA defending posts with like 5000 views and 100 retweets, and was pretty sure this was what’s up, but I appreciate someone doing the legwork
Tyler Johnston: Update: the majority of the accounts mentioned in the article were suspended in the past hour. The data explorer has been updated to reflect this.
Okay Maybe We Came on a Little Strong
Nvidia has long pursued a very heavy-handed strategy when dealing with Washington.
For example:
Samuel Hammond: This is the piece I wrote last year arguing NVIDIA was working to help China win the AI race.
Their GA team reached out within hours before coming to my office to scold and challenge me to present the serial number of a single smuggled chip.
Part of that strategy is to coerce other tech firms into toeing its line.
Nvidia sells its chips well below market value. This allows it to allocate those chips to the customers it prefers. That in turn makes it vital for all companies to stay in Nvidia’s good graces, lest they not be allocated the chips that are the lifeblood of their business.
That is how they temporarily strong armed OpenAI and Sam Altman into being dismissive of chip export controls in talks with reporters and in an interview, directly against both national security and OpenAI’s own interests, until internal pressures forced Altman to reverse course. Now OpenAI is joining the bipartisan effort to pass a chip control act by the end of the year.
Bill Bishop: “A person granted anonymity to discuss Nvidia’s strategy said the company is moving away from the “aggressive elements of the approach” that it once took in Washington. The person attributed the shift to new leadership in its federal affairs team, after Nvidia hired Bruce Andrews, a former Intel government affairs chief and Obama-era deputy Commerce secretary, as its chief external affairs officer in June. The office now handles outreach “in a way that actually builds allies versus enemies,” the person said.”
Past Scandal at the Commerce Department
There has been a massive operation to smuggle Nvidia chips to China, and to sell those chips to entities and countries that would let China acquire or use the chips.
Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand are the number two, four and five importers of AI chips and have effectively bought ~$80 billion in chips this year alone. Do you doubt that the bulk of those chips will get used by China, one way or another?
This was not in any way a secret.
Patrick McKenzie: Watch for “We had absolutely no idea that a 10-20% worldwide allocation of chips to Singaporean companies was being diverted to China. How could we have possibly guessed that. We must have been deceived by an intelligence operation.”
As for how much of an open secret this was: Complex Systems, September 30th, in *an aside about Singaporean data centers.*
I claim no particular insight in chip allocations, semiconductor analysis, etc, just reading public docs and making straightforward inferences.
Complex Systems: Singapore would also be a terrible place to site data centers for any number of reasons, but be that as it may… Sorry. Singapore is a terrible place to site data centers for AI inf— ooh, well, big can of worms, isn’t it? There exist many data centers in Singapore for AI inference. That is not primarily because Singapore is an excellent place, but because it allows you to smuggle inference into China. But that’s another topic entirely. Anyway, you would not choose to source compute for Americans in Singapore, given your druthers.
After Megaspeed got cut off, Singapore sales that previously were reported as 22% of Nvidia’s revenue disappeared from filings, because without the Chinese market Singapore has very little demand for advanced AI chips.
We also now have this Bloomberg report on Aperia Cloud Services:
A Chinese company founded by Alice Huang, the woman at the center of a controversy dogging Nvidia Corp., procured smuggled AI chips that were installed at a Shanghai data center with links to Megaspeed International Pte, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.
Some of the servers were originally sold to Aperia Cloud Services, an official Nvidia Cloud Partner headquartered in Singapore, according to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.
… Specifically, Aperia purchased 22 servers from Dell Technologies Inc. that contained Nvidia’s H800 chips, which Washington restricted from sale to China in 2023. Bloomberg provided serial numbers of those servers to a person familiar with the transaction, who confirmed that Aperia was Dell’s customer.
Dell said in a statement that it “stopped all sales and support to Aperia International in February 2025 due to unauthorized diversion concerns.” That’s the month that Singapore arrested Aperia’s CEO on charges of defrauding server suppliers. He’s pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
In May of that year, Jensen said there was “no evidence” of chip diversion.
Tim Carney: For our allies: tariffs
For our enemies: cutting-edge dual-use technologies.
For over a year, the White House has known that Jensen Huang was having an affair with Alice Huang, and that Alice Huang was a presumed Chinese spy.
You would think that now, after all this broke, they would at least put Megaspeed on the Entity List? Nope.
Demetri Sevastopulo (FT): The US commerce department is delaying efforts to blacklist a company linked to an alleged Chinese spy who had an affair with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang despite concerns that it was smuggling advanced chips into China.
Several US government agencies pushed for Singapore-based Megaspeed to be included on the so-called entity list of groups connected to China that allegedly posed national security risks, according to multiple people familiar with the deliberations.
But the commerce department, which chairs the panel overseeing the list, sought over the past two months to delay new inclusions, one of the people said.
Several US government agencies pushed for Singapore-based Megaspeed to be included on the so-called entity list of groups connected to China that allegedly posed national security risks, according to multiple people familiar with the deliberations.
But the commerce department, which chairs the panel overseeing the list, sought over the past two months to delay new inclusions, one of the people said.
Nvidia claims to have a ‘voluntary block’ on Megaspeed in place for the past year.
Garrison Lovely: Before this was a news story, I guess there’s some argument for not tipping anyone off by blocking the company, but not doing it now? Nvidia also says it stopped selling to the company for over a year, but Megaspeed is STILL listed as an Nvidia Cloud Partner.
Lorand Laskai: Commerce hasn’t added a single company to the Entity List in over a year. That’s the longest stretch without using the trade blacklist in nearly two decades, possibly longer.
It’s not just Megaspeed. It’s a complete shutdown of all regular business. The lights are functionally off at BIS.
You can understand why there is temptation to pass the buck.
Demetri Sevastopulo (FT): The Pentagon referred questions to the commerce department, which said it did not comment on internal discussions about the entity list. The energy department referred questions to the White House, which declined to comment. The Treasury department declined to comment. The state department did not respond to a request for comment.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick decided, once again, he was not allowing this.
From the Axios report every relevant member of the Administration as well as Musk agreed to move forward, and Lutnick chose not to move forward. You would think he would have to do what Trump explicitly told him to do. He has decided to test that theory.
Marc Caputo and Maria Curi: One administration official has repeatedly stood in the way: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
… During the meeting, Bessent confronted Lutnick about why his department has resisted implementing the export controls, particularly on Megaspeed, the company at the center of the spy scandal. The group sided with Bessent.
Lutnick appeared to agree, but then muttered under his breath, “I need to check with the president.”
…”He’s stalling it out,” said one official, describing how Lutnick had previously met privately with the president to change his mind about the export limit.
… This is an ongoing concern with Howard and this issue,” said another.
Chris McGuire: This is a total breakdown inside the administration on a major national security issue. There has to be accountability for this. Congress obviously will investigate, but how is it that the President’s own appointees are just refusing to execute the President’s orders? I’ve never seen anything like this.
Tiana Lowe Doescher: I’ll just say it because apparently no other Republican will: Howard Lutnick is a threat to national security and his sons are making billions on the backs of American taxpayers, bondholders, and shareholders in way that would make Hunter Biden blush.
One Guess How They Trained All The Top Chinese Models
Yep. On Nvidia Blackwell chips that the Chinese are not supposed to have.
Will Depue says ‘this sounds insane’ but the only part that seems insane is that we have the technology to trace this. The part where they all trained on Blackwells is entirely unsurprising.
I’ve found conclusive forensic evidence that the top 4 Chinese AI labs—DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax and Ant Group—have built their newest models on NVIDIA’s most advanced Blackwell chips, which are barred from export to China.
This sounds insane, but I discovered that almost every AI model carries a hidden signature of the GPU that trained it. When a model is first set up, the starting values of its weights are laid out in a pattern that depends on the exact GPU. Each combination of GPU and seed number produces a unique pattern—a sort of fingerprint of the hardware used to create the model. Traces of that pattern survive training into the published model.
Again, this evidence isn’t based on any insider information or leaking. It’s based on a forensic analysis of the model weights released by the companies themselves.
I searched more than six trillion combinations of chip layout and seed number and matched them to open-weights models. In doing so, I found conclusive evidence that six Chinese AI models—including DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K3, and MiniMax-M3—were initialized on NVIDIA Blackwell systems. Four of the models match Grace Blackwell, the GB200 and GB300 parts in NVIDIA’s flagship liquid-cooled rack-scale systems.
I then verified these results on real hardware. Running unmodified PyTorch with the seeds I’d recovered, a Blackwell B300 reproduced DeepSeek-V4-Flash’s untouched starting weights bit for bit, and a rented GB200 reproduced Kimi K3’s to a correlation of 0.999995. A Hopper H100 reproduced none of DeepSeek-V4-Flash’s, and changing the seed by one broke the match. (DeepSeek’s seed is 953049583 by the way.) The method also was verified to match 24 known open-weights models to the hardware that developers said they used.
It is exceedingly unlikely that these results are a coincidence. Across six trillion combinations, the best accidental match should reach only about 8 sigma (i.e., eight standard deviations above what random chance would produce). The real matches range from 49 to 1,385 sigma, and even the weakest single test hits 20.
These were data-center-scale training runs. With some analysis of release schedules and model details, I estimate that the largest, Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Pro, used 2,000 to 3,000 Blackwell GPUs each. Clusters of this size cost on the order of $150 to $200 million each to buy, and across these labs alone would add up to more than half a billion dollars of export-controlled GPUs, not counting experimental compute or otherwise. It’s quite likely that we see multi-billion dollar expenditure on export-controlled GPUs.
I am highly confident in this result, and it has been independently verified by senior researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic. You can read the full report at http://unemploymentlabs.com/checkpoint-forensics
There is much more I’ve identified about these models through other forms of checkpoint forensics like this, and will have more to share soon.
… If you’re interested in covering this story, please reach out to press@unemploymentlabs.com.
Chip Export Controls Gain Momentum
So does enforcing the controls properly.
Matthew C. Klein: I am not a politics guy, but seriously enforcing chip export controls in the wake of these Nvidia shenanigans seems to hit the sweet spot of:
–Punishing corruption and self-dealing
–Being rigorous on national security
–Improving affordability for Americans (on the margin)
Derek Thompson: If you’re philosophically opposed to AI chip export restrictions, I think you should be the most mad about this timeline.
Like, I personally did not need the last 72 hours of news to make me doubt the wisdom of selling advanced chips thru to China.
But anybody on the fence or in a politically vulnerable position is going to look at this and go: oh shit, these anti-restriction ppl are corrupt and insane!
One of many problems with getting into bed with Trump is that he’s incredible at driving public opinion against everything he does, because everything he does is so sloppy and corrupt and terrible.
Derek Thompson: If you’re a China hawk, and you read the following revelations/allegations in a 48 hours period …
1. Jensen Huang is sleeping with a Chinese spy.
2. Nvidia has been selling chips to Chinese AI companies for years through a Singapore intermediary overseen by that Chinese spy.
3. Nvidia’s lawyers pushed back on a federal investigation into this illegal scheme.
4. The White House knew all of the above and did absolutely nothing.
… I think it is understandable if what happens next is your head explodes
Tom Cotton (Senator, R-Arkansas): Communist China continues to lie, steal, and deceive to acquire advanced American AI chips.
Congress should pass my bipartisan Chip Security Act to protect our technology from our chief adversary.
When you find that the CEO of the chip company was dating a Chinese spy for over a year,, allocated billions in chips to associated companies and likely helped at least partially quash investigations into those companies, I can see how that could lead to increased support for export controls.
Ari Hawkins and Gabby Miller (Politico): House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast, who is pushing for chip export restrictions as part of the defense package, told reporters Tuesday that the scandal has “100%” weakened Huang’s ability to lobby against the limits.
“It’s made a hell of a lot of people aware of something that they put little to no thought into before,” said Mast, a Florida Republican.
Inside Congress Live (Politico): [Johnson] joins House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who told reporters Monday he was “going to work hard to make sure” that certain legislative language “makes it into the final version” of the NDAA.
The comments come as Congress is actively negotiating measures to tighten controls on chip exports as part of the must-pass defense measure, including provisions that would give lawmakers a role in reviewing sales licenses and require companies to track chips to deter smuggling.
Reminder That Compute Is Very Important
This was a very good statement.
Senator Jim Banks: The AI race with China is all about who has the best and most chips. There are four main ways China gets access to chips:
1.) Buying them directly from US companies like Nvidia.
2.) Illegally smuggling them from other countries into China.
3.) Accessing them remotely through the cloud from data centers located in places like Southeast Asia.
4.) Building their own domestic chips in China.
The Chinese military has used advanced chips to further its capabilities while undermining our national security, and the Chinese government has used these chips to strengthen its totalitarian surveillance project.
Congress has a generational opportunity in this year’s NDAA to pass bipartisan bills that would address all four of the pathways through which China acquires chips.
While we need a full assessment of the damage done to our national security by recent revelations, we can begin today by setting a better course.
No excuses. No apologies. Let’s get this done.
Yes, over a sufficiently long time horizon China will manufacture more and better chips, eventually catching up to where Nvidia is today, but they are going to put maximum efforts towards that no matter what. There is no reason to assist.
80,000 Hours recently had a brief (for them) episode about this.
Dan Robinson: I will never get over the fact that “we can’t allow AI companies to slow down because we’re in an existential breakneck race with China” and “we need to loosen burdensome export controls on GPUs” are mostly coming from the same people.
If You Can’t Even Have an Affair With a Chinese Spy
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Did it hit you that a centibillionaire, Jensen Huang, is less free than a random plumber?
On the contrary. Jensen Huang was free to do whatever he wanted. He showed us this, rather conclusively when he carried on an affair with a Chinese spy. He then had to accept the consequences. That is also how freedom works.
Bloomberg identified some of the plausible candidates for the permanent position.
Donald Trump decided that was his job, and that Nvidia should go in another direction.
Stock Markets (Investing.com): Nov 12 (Reuters) – US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that former Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook should replace Jensen Huang as the CEO of Nvidia.
“NOW THAT Nvidia CEO JENSEN HUANG, who has done a fantastic job, has resigned, there is only one man to take his place – TIM COOK of Apple,” Trump said on social media. “A Legend replaces a Legend!” he added.
Cook stepped down after a 15-year stint as Apple’s CEO in September and is now executive chairman at the iPhone-maker.
Never mind anything the ‘legendary’ Jensen Huang did to cause this to happen. Or that it is not the President’s job to decide who the CEO of Nvidia is. Or whether Tim Cook would make any sense for the role. Or whether Tim Cook even would be interested in the job rather than enjoying his retirement.
The stock market has spoken.
Chip export controls will tighten, as will enforcement. Nvidia will be in a mess and will lose political power. What does that mean for the broader stock market?
Nvidia, the market says, is worth ~20% less than it was worth without Jensen Huang. At least a large portion of that is anticipated inability to execute and the disaster that comes with the lack of any succession plan and transitioning away from one person having over 50 direct reports. Some of it is that Nvidia could be in quite a lot of hot water as this investigation plays out. And some of it is losing out on all those sales to China.
Nothing here is investment advice, but I am not untempted by this new price level.
The rest of the stock market is fine, and roughly indifferent. Even TSMC is not showing a beta to NVDA, which implies both that chip production will be fine. Risk of conflict over Taiwan has not risen substantially. Prediction markets show the chance of a Taiwan invasion in 2027 are at the low end of their range, and Taiwanese stocks did not underperform.
The downside risks of disruption and the upside benefits roughly cancel out.
I am not an Efficient Market Hypothesis Guy. The market often makes wrong way moves in AI, does not actually understand exponentials and rarely asks the right questions. So yes, if you want to say ‘the market has no idea what it is talking about’ then you can go right ahead, but you do have to be willing to bite that bullet.
This was an expensive mistake by Jensen Huang. But yes, we will all be fine.
Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO of Nvidia and left its board.
CFO Colette Kress will be interim CEO. Here is a quick profile of Kress. Here is a look at some of the potential long term successors.
There were a lot of efforts to bury the fact that Jensen Huang had an affair with a Chinese spy, and then even to bury his second affair as well, and to get everyone to ignore the obvious implications of this. Then the second affair was revealed with executive Kimberly Powell, who directly reports to him. Even then, many doubled down on defending Jensen Huang as CEO of Nvidia.
The Nvidia board disagreed, and was preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang prior to his resignation.
This creates a tricky situation for Nvidia, given that Jensen Huang had over 50 direct reports and did not believe in succession planning, and also for the White House.
It also creates a tricky situation for many in Silicon Valley, who have invested heavily in their relationships with Jensen Huang and in the idea that founders are as Gods.
This post covers all related events since my initial post.
If you haven’t seen it, this short AI video is obligatory, as is this one.
The Daily Show has coverage of stage one. They weren’t being all that subtle, huh?
Odd Lots had an essay on the Megaspeed scandal. As Tracy Alloway says, one simple takeaway is that Nvidia could have easily sold all these chips to Americans.
Matt Levine has additional coverage. Derek Thompson summarizes this ‘insane scandal.’
And of course, right on schedule:
Table of Contents
A Second Ant in the Kitchen
To what one would hope would be the surprise of absolutely no one, Jensen Huang turned out to be having at least two affairs.
In any sane world an undisclosed affair with a direct report is a lot less terrible than an affair with a Chinese spy. It is still quite bad. In America, this is still a sufficiently large breach of conduct that CEOs often get fired for it on its own.
The other question is, now that the second ant has been spotted, how many more ants were there in this kitchen? It would be surprising if the count stopped at two.
Yes, according to Reuters, there was a third ant in the kitchen, another employee.
There is not yet any word of what Ms. Huang will choose to do about all this.
There Was Going to Be an Investigation
The Nvidia board had hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct its ‘independent investigation.’
Once the second affair was revealed, they were not going to wait for the investigation or try to bury the situation. Jensen was on his way out, and has now resigned. We still eagerly await the results of the investigation, for other reasons.
Jensen Huang Had to Resign
This is 2026, so only after the second affair could we be sure that was how this would turn out, and even then there were people trying hard to defend him. It really, really should not have required the second affair.
These quotes come from before the revelation of affair number two (of N):
Yes. Obviously. You fall on your sword, as Jensen Huang was forced to do.
This was a good statement from the Select Committee on China:
Seven Billion in Sales to China Enabled by Jensen’s Ties to Alice Huang
Megaspeed may only be the secondary scandal. The primary scandal could be Shanghai Century Litong, which became the central supplier to Chinese companies and facilitated at least $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips.
The timeline and circumstances strongly suggest that Century Litong was able to do this, and get status as a preferred Nvidia customer shortly after being founded, through the influence of Alice Huang, despite her having zero AI background.
As Rob Wiblin says, this is all pretty crazy. We know national security was compromised, and now we know one of the major ways that this happened.
Jensen Huang Attempted to Make Himself Unfireable
The standard way for a tech executive to be unfireable is to own enough shares and voting power that you cannot be fired. Jensen Huang did not get to choose that easy way. He came to the game too early for supervoting shares. He and his wife together only have 3.6% of Nvidia’s shares. Which is worth over $140 billion, but won’t let him control the company.
Instead Jensen Huang has tried to make it logistically expensive to fire him. There was a weak and mostly static board with no Chairman until after Huang left and the board appointed 73-year-old Harvey Jones. There was no successor. Jensen Huang kept over 50 direct reports. I see this as an intentional strategy.
Thus the hit to Nvidia being so large, on the order of 20%.
When you look at the large decline in Nvidia’s stock price, that is the responsibility of Jensen Huang, the same way the rest of the history of Nvidia was due to Jensen Huang.
A Remarkable Lack of Contagion
While Nvidia was down quite a lot, other tech companies mostly were indifferent.
Four hours later Jensen Huang had resigned. SPY was up 6bps (0.06%) while QQQ was down 7bps (-0.07%). Nvidia was down 5.16%. The ex-Nvidia market was up ~40bps.
Some are very surprised. Why did the rest of the market not care?
The obvious theory is that Nvidia lost operational efficiency, but that also this is very good for chip export controls and for not selling Nvidia chips to China. Bloomberg’s Catherine Thorbecke writes ‘China is the Biggest Loser From Jensen Huang’s Downfall.’
So who can say if it is bad for other American tech companies or not.
That seems right to me. I do not see any reason to expect a large impact on the rest of the stock market.
Meanwhile, the press continues to write directionally incorrect drivel like this:
That is simply false. American AI will if anything now move faster, because Nvidia chips will not be diverted to China. The market agrees. And the US-China AI model performance gap not only has not ‘effectively closed’ it is widening over time.
If Jensen Huang proves essential to Nvidia’s ability to produce the best chips, then over time yes that would eventually create a problem for the rest of American AI. I suppose we will find out exactly how essential his man was on that front.
Others don’t even fret it for Nvidia. Asa Fitch writes in WSJ that Nvidia Shareholders Won’t Miss Jensen Huang for Long. I think that’s going too far.
Even Now There Are Those Defending Jensen Huang
In many ways it is now moot, but we should remember who defended Jensen Huang.
The message was a combination of:
The drop in Nvidia’s stock when Jensen Huang fully resigned confirmed the ~80%.
They got an op-ed out of the Wall Street Journal by Asa Fitch and Aaron Back, saying that ‘the task for Nvidia now is to find a way to keep Huang on while reassuring shareholders, the government and the general public that it takes national security risks seriously.’
Tim Sweeney said the firing would be ‘Apple firing Steve Jobs level of idiocy.’
David Sacks, who has de facto been Nvidia’s chief lobbyist for several years, is among those who is in full denial mode that Alice Huang was even a spy and is instead demanding an investigation of those who revealed that Jensen Huang had the affair with her, because that is the DARVO playbook such people always use.
Amjad Masad went to full Conspiracy Town, to ask ‘who benefits from letting it be known that Jensen Huang had an affair with a direct report and a Chinese spy, when he wasn’t even trying to cover up his affairs all that hard before, hmm?’ He even suggested this is due to the ‘upcoming IPOs’ and that those who ‘want AI closed’ might benefit, and pointing to this fully paranoid rant trying to ‘pin’ this on Anthropic, as if the main thing going on here is that this is going to make Anthropic’s likely IPO price go up bigly. Do you believe in Anthropic Derangement Syndrome yet, anon?
Ege Erdil even declared that ousting Jensen Huang was an ‘obvious and transparent authoritarian act by the US government’ and that anyone who supports it (e.g. me) is ‘imo permanently discredited.’
I mean, FFS. Or I think this takes the cake, mostly for humor value:
There is also a strain that says that those who revealed that Jensen had compromised national security were government officials motivated by the fact that he compromised national security, as opposed to the other government officials like Trump who knew about this and did nothing, and this is unacceptable.
Whatever happened, they ask, to muh freedums, I thought this was ‘Merica, they only knew about this because of government surveillance, and whatever happened to the sacred principles of snitches getting stitches, bros before hoes and lies before spies?
Well, actually, ordinary person surveillance also cracked the case, and also I happen to think that if the CEO of Nvidia has an affair with a Chinese spy that this is information that people need to know. And I think that Jensen Huang’s life is not destroyed, but to the extent that it is the person to blame is Jensen Huang. I don’t think that is just me.
If this had been Jensen seeing some high end escorts, and the government leaked it, then yeah I would not like that, although I still say if he saw one repeatedly and she turned out to be a Chinese spy then that is still on him. This was very much not that.
Those in Washington, by contrast, were relatively quick to correctly be rather pissed off. Jensen Huang has been pressuring them and treating them as adversaries and lying to them for years, and now we find out this.
If you want to sell out America in order to maximize Nvidia’s stock price, the one you should be furious at is Jensen Huang for allowing things to go down like this.
There was a fake and rather lazy viral Tweet saying that Nvidia employees had signed a letter echoing the one signed by OpenAI employees during the Battle of the Board rather too closely. There is an internal post asking the board to consider employee sentiment, but that is all.
Send in the Sockpuppets
If you attack Nvidia, say by pointing out Jensen Huang had an affair with a major customer who also happened to be a Chinese spy for whom Nvidia helped attempt to quash an investigation, (you know, ordinary things that patriotic, totally-not-compromised companies do), then you know what to expect. There’s going to be a professional reaction, including a bot or sockpuppet army.
Luckily everyone’s favorite astroturf campaign analyst, Tyler Johnston, is on it.
After being exposed, it seems that the operators tried to cover their tracks, so Tyler Johnston open sourced all of his data. Also Twitter did actually start to ban them all.
Okay Maybe We Came on a Little Strong
Nvidia has long pursued a very heavy-handed strategy when dealing with Washington.
For example:
Part of that strategy is to coerce other tech firms into toeing its line.
Nvidia sells its chips well below market value. This allows it to allocate those chips to the customers it prefers. That in turn makes it vital for all companies to stay in Nvidia’s good graces, lest they not be allocated the chips that are the lifeblood of their business.
That is how they temporarily strong armed OpenAI and Sam Altman into being dismissive of chip export controls in talks with reporters and in an interview, directly against both national security and OpenAI’s own interests, until internal pressures forced Altman to reverse course. Now OpenAI is joining the bipartisan effort to pass a chip control act by the end of the year.
Thus, once again, Nvidia is asking its customers to continue its fight against chip export controls, as Nvidia tries to adapt to its new much weaker position in light of recent revelations and needs to focus on questions like ‘keep our CEO’ and potentially ‘keep everyone involved out of prison and off the Entity List.’
Past Scandal at the Commerce Department
There has been a massive operation to smuggle Nvidia chips to China, and to sell those chips to entities and countries that would let China acquire or use the chips.
Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand are the number two, four and five importers of AI chips and have effectively bought ~$80 billion in chips this year alone. Do you doubt that the bulk of those chips will get used by China, one way or another?
This was not in any way a secret.
Also see things like this Wall Street Journal report, where numerous government officials noticed that Jensen Huang would happily sell chips directly to the CCP if only America would let him.
After Megaspeed got cut off, Singapore sales that previously were reported as 22% of Nvidia’s revenue disappeared from filings, because without the Chinese market Singapore has very little demand for advanced AI chips.
We also now have this Bloomberg report on Aperia Cloud Services:
Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk calls this the largest tech transfer in history and an insane scandal. Why was this allowed to happen, indeed? We need hearings. Senators are wisely calling for the preservation of records, and ranking Democrats on the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees have launched investigations into the Administration’s handling of chip exports.
For over a year, the White House has known that Jensen Huang was having an affair with Alice Huang, and that Alice Huang was a presumed Chinese spy.
You would think that now, after all this broke, they would at least put Megaspeed on the Entity List? Nope.
Nvidia claims to have a ‘voluntary block’ on Megaspeed in place for the past year.
It’s not a complete shutdown of all regular business. The lights are on when it comes to approving Chinese companies purchasing H200s. The lights are only off when it comes to trying to enforce the law.
You can understand why there is temptation to pass the buck.
New Scandal at the Commerce Department
President Trump was recently, after twice being blocked by Lutnick, again convinced to finally crack down on the companies smuggling Nvidia chips into China. He was ready to go. He consulted Elon Musk.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick decided, once again, he was not allowing this.
From the Axios report every relevant member of the Administration as well as Musk agreed to move forward, and Lutnick chose not to move forward. You would think he would have to do what Trump explicitly told him to do. He has decided to test that theory.
Lutnick was asked how Megaspeed was still, after all this, not on the Entity List. He reportedly said ‘I don’t know. I’ll look into it.’
One Guess How They Trained All The Top Chinese Models
Yep. On Nvidia Blackwell chips that the Chinese are not supposed to have.
Will Depue says ‘this sounds insane’ but the only part that seems insane is that we have the technology to trace this. The part where they all trained on Blackwells is entirely unsurprising.
Chip Export Controls Gain Momentum
So does enforcing the controls properly.
Chinese firms are rushing to rent Nvidia chip capacity wherever they can get it.
The remote access loophole is likely to be closed over Lutnick’s objections.
When you find that the CEO of the chip company was dating a Chinese spy for over a year,, allocated billions in chips to associated companies and likely helped at least partially quash investigations into those companies, I can see how that could lead to increased support for export controls.
Reminder That Compute Is Very Important
This was a very good statement.
Yes, over a sufficiently long time horizon China will manufacture more and better chips, eventually catching up to where Nvidia is today, but they are going to put maximum efforts towards that no matter what. There is no reason to assist.
80,000 Hours recently had a brief (for them) episode about this.
Also, I have gotten over this fact, but I understand why others might not:
These are often also the same people covered by articles like ‘the tech right pivots left.’
If You Can’t Even Have an Affair With a Chinese Spy
On the contrary. Jensen Huang was free to do whatever he wanted. He showed us this, rather conclusively when he carried on an affair with a Chinese spy. He then had to accept the consequences. That is also how freedom works.
What Happens Next?
Colette Kress is the interim CEO. Jensen Huang in late-summer called her a ‘deer in the headlights,’ referring to her handling of him putting up the financing for so many AI projects.
Bloomberg identified some of the plausible candidates for the permanent position.
Donald Trump decided that was his job, and that Nvidia should go in another direction.
Never mind anything the ‘legendary’ Jensen Huang did to cause this to happen. Or that it is not the President’s job to decide who the CEO of Nvidia is. Or whether Tim Cook would make any sense for the role. Or whether Tim Cook even would be interested in the job rather than enjoying his retirement.
The stock market has spoken.
Chip export controls will tighten, as will enforcement. Nvidia will be in a mess and will lose political power. What does that mean for the broader stock market?
Nvidia, the market says, is worth ~20% less than it was worth without Jensen Huang. At least a large portion of that is anticipated inability to execute and the disaster that comes with the lack of any succession plan and transitioning away from one person having over 50 direct reports. Some of it is that Nvidia could be in quite a lot of hot water as this investigation plays out. And some of it is losing out on all those sales to China.
Nothing here is investment advice, but I am not untempted by this new price level.
The rest of the stock market is fine, and roughly indifferent. Even TSMC is not showing a beta to NVDA, which implies both that chip production will be fine. Risk of conflict over Taiwan has not risen substantially. Prediction markets show the chance of a Taiwan invasion in 2027 are at the low end of their range, and Taiwanese stocks did not underperform.
The downside risks of disruption and the upside benefits roughly cancel out.
I am not an Efficient Market Hypothesis Guy. The market often makes wrong way moves in AI, does not actually understand exponentials and rarely asks the right questions. So yes, if you want to say ‘the market has no idea what it is talking about’ then you can go right ahead, but you do have to be willing to bite that bullet.
This was an expensive mistake by Jensen Huang. But yes, we will all be fine.