When the CEO of the world’s most valuable company is ousted, you have to ask some questions. And let’s be clear: he was not ousted because of his ladies.
Reuters is now reporting that he had an affair with a third unidentified person. And we don’t know who this is. A third woman has hit the towers.
If the problem in Silicon Valley were tech bros who couldn’t keep their pants up, you’d have to oust three-quarters of Silicon Valley, most of whom are gigantic dorks who are never able to draw ladies’ attention until they become billionaires. Now throw on the leather jacket and add $1 billion, and suddenly you’re very attractive to the ladies.
But that is not why Jensen Huang is being ousted. So despite the fact that there are reports that he wasn’t just sleeping with an alleged Chinese spy, but he was sleeping with a member of the company — the vice president of health care, Kimberly Powell — but also a second employee. That isn’t the real reason he is being ousted from Nvidia.
And herein lies the mystery, the scandal, and the fallout.
Why exactly is Jensen Huang gone? Because again, if this were just about Jensen’s dong, then we wouldn’t be talking about him.
According to Bloomberg, Huang is walking around literally saying, “I’m a piece of sh*t,” which is a little performative. Huang has said he doesn’t care what happens to him at this point. His main concern, he says, is his wife and not ruining the lives of the multiple women now romantically linked to him in the public imagination.
But why is this a big thing? Because again, we all know if this is just about people cheating on their wives, unfortunately, it happens all the time, and it doesn’t make front-page news.
There are a couple of possibilities. The number one possibility is that Nvidia was illegally facilitating the movement of its chips into China.
That is a very rooted suspicion that a lot of folks have, and that the story of him sleeping with a Chinese spy is merely popping the lid on that story. CBC News has now reported that in October 2022, under the Biden administration, the Department of Commerce implemented export controls on advanced computing chips going to China.
Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra and Vera Rubin, both GPUs used for AI models, are blocked from being sold there. The U.S. government has two main reasons for blocking these sales. To maintain the country’s global lead in AI development and to protect national security.
Apparently, soon after advanced chip restrictions to China were implemented, many vendors set up illegal smuggling and an underground network to get the chips into China and sell them to companies there, according to Germany’s Deutsche Welle news agency.
The U.S. Commerce Department’s enforcement arm is allegedly understaffed to enforce the restrictions. Now, a legal loophole is sometimes exploited to send chips to China. Nvidia can’t sell its most advanced chips directly to China, but it can sell them to other countries. Third-party data centers can then rent access to those data centers to companies affiliated with China, so Nvidia could sell the chips to a company that then rents that computing power to a Chinese company.
Many things can be true at once about Jensen Huang. One: absolutely brilliant, tremendous at his job; takes a company of 30 years’ standing and turns it into a global powerhouse by running people ragged, running himself ragged, taking 60 direct reports and all the rest.
Two: it could be that his business sense tells him selling to China is better for Nvidia, because the more clients you have, and the more people in competition, the more people will buy your chips.
That doesn’t mean he despises the country or is a traitor, but it does mean his self-interest certainly coincides with his political viewpoint. Well, here he was with Dwarkesh Patel, talking about why we ought to sell chips to China:
Why is it that we don’t come up with a regulation that’s more balanced so that Nvidia can win around the world instead of giving up the world? Why would you want United States to give up the world? The chip industry is part of the American ecosystem. It’s part of American technology leadership. It’s part of the AI ecosystem. It’s part of AI leadership. Why is it that your policy, your philosophy, leads to United States giving up a vast part of the world’s market?
That is a gigantic mistake to be shipping sophisticated microchips to China. And even Jensen had to take the public position that the most sophisticated microchips ought not be sold to China. So if he really believes that there’s no threat at all, we should just be selling all of the most sophisticated chips to China.
In any case, whether the chips were illegally passed with Nvidia’s tacit approval, or sold to a company that then sold them to another company that then sold them to China — whether any of that has to do with this alleged Chinese spy having an affair with Jensen, the mystery is growing, not shrinking.
As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, as recently as the summer of last year, Singapore, the home of Megaspeed — the firm that was run by Alice Huang, who is the alleged Chinese spy who was sleeping with Jensen — was officially one of Nvidia’s biggest markets, generating 22% of the chipmaker’s revenue.
Then, practically overnight, it disappeared from the company’s financial disclosures, and Nvidia’s spokesman this week said the company placed Megaspeed on its block list in June 2025, which it says prohibited further sales or shipments and that the voluntary cutoff remains in place. The last period for which Nvidia reported revenue tied to Singapore was the fiscal quarter that ended in July 2025, the month after Nvidia instituted the block.
Again, this raises some pretty serious questions, with special consideration for Megaspeed. Was Megaspeed a Chinese front company? Was it passing intelligence or chips, or both, to the Chinese?
The Trump administration seems really defensive about all of this. This morning, Attorney General Todd Blanche questioned whether Alice Huang, the person sleeping with Jensen, was actually a spy:
I don’t have any I don’t have any concerns. So let us be clear at this point that it is not actually crystal clear whether Alice Huang is in fact a spy.
For what it’s worth, The New York Times first reported that Alice Huang was a spy on October 29, and they quoted U.S. officials. U.S. officials believe the businesswoman seen with Jensen Huang in Taiwan is a Chinese intelligence asset, and the Financial Times then followed up a week later and reported that Jensen Huang was romantically involved with Alice Huang.
Meanwhile, President Trump was working hand in glove with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Jensen Huang to loosen restrictions on shipping chips to China. That starts to look incredibly dicey for the White House. And so the way to cut off that train of logic is to say, well, there’s no way for the president to even have known that she’s a Chinese spy. Certainly nothing definitive. So it’s an independent policy decision to allow Nvidia to sell sophisticated microchips to the Chinese.
And in fact, according to Semaphor, in January, the general counsel for what was then the world’s most valuable company delivered a blunt directive on chip export controls to more than a dozen government officials.
Just as a matter of policy, it starts to get a lot uglier. If it turns out that the commerce secretary or the president knew that the person he was talking to for advice was sleeping with a Chinese spy, then that is why you see the administration saying, “Hey, we don’t even know if she is a Chinese spy.”
Again, there are a lot of questions and not enough answers right now. The White House, for what it’s worth, is apparently discussing pretty openly getting rid of Lutnick.
According to Reuters, senior White House officials are discussing whether to push Lutnick out amid this spy scandal.
I think that among the cabinet secretaries, Lutnick has done the president the worst service, especially his extraordinary allegiance to the failed tariff economic strategy, which is where the president’s approval rating really began to decline.
So again, this thing started as an AI scandal, and it’s quickly turning into a government scandal as well. This is one danger of a deeply enmeshed administration. When you have a combination of business and the administration, a corporatist economic policy always ends up with people in bed together in the most lewd ways.
