Jensen Huang had a stunning fall from grace — from being one of the richest people on Earth and one of the primary drivers of the AI boom to being implicated in two extramarital affair scandals and resigning from Nvidia in under two weeks. While many are focused on the former Nvidia chief’s relationship with Alice Huang, who was allegedly passing on information to Chinese intelligence, the Wall Street Journal dug deeper into the person who introduced her to Jensen — Kang Wei, a star fund manager in Shanghai who also happened to be Ms. Huang’s husband.

There have been reports that Kang Wei met Jensen Huang in the 2010s, when his investment firm was heavily involved in Chinese gaming companies. It’s not clear if this introduction predated Kang’s relationship and marriage to Alice, but sources close to Ms. Huang said that she was able to get close to Jensen by the 2020s. Despite being a couple, the WSJ reported that Kang seemingly accepted Alice’s relationship with Jensen, with people close to the couple saying that he would often joke that she was a personal assistant to the billionaire.

Kang Wei is not just an average business executive, though. He made a name for himself in the finance world as a strategist for Shenyin Wanguo before taking over the Zhonghai Fund in 2007. This made him one of the youngest mutual fund chiefs in China at that time, before finally setting out on his own and founding Shanghai Hexi in 2010.

It was also around this time that Alice Huang, whose Chinese name is Huang Le, entered the financial industry, first working at HSBC’s private banking arm in Hong Kong, before moving to CITIC Securities, where she attained a vice president position. It was during her time at CITIC that Alice crossed paths with Kang. Shanghai Hexi signed a deal with the securities firm in 2014 and 2015, and by 2016, corporate registry records show that Ms. Huang had joined the investment firm.

The Economic Times reports Alice Huang’s move into Shanghai Hexi resulted in her getting a 25% stake in the company, all of which came from Kang. The remaining shares were shared between Kang Wei, with 48.75%, and his business partner, Zhu Xiaoming, with 26.25%, with Alice Huang’s 25% ownership stake being held through Shanghai Yuxi Investment Management Consulting Co., Ltd. Meanwhile, Kang also started introducing Alice Huang as his wife to his business associates and investors.

One year later, Zhu and Kang had a falling out when one of their investments under a Hexi fund resulted in a major windfall, with the two partners disagreeing on how the profits were to be shared. Nevertheless, the massive profit generated by the deal allowed Shanghai Hexi to purchase Hangzhou Shengfeng, a video game company, for around 500 million yuan from Chinese conglomerate Century Huatong.

Two years after the transaction, in 2019, Hangzhou Shengfeng’s ownership was transferred to an offshore entity, which was eventually consolidated under Osmanthus Vale Holdings — a holding company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and listed Huang Le, Alice Huang’s Chinese name, as its sole owner. It was then purchased by 7Road Holdings less than two months after it was founded. While Ms. Huang was the signatory in this deal, it’s believed that she served as a “white glove,” a person who operates on behalf of another to conceal their identity — but it remains unclear if this was for Shanghai Hexi and Kang Wei or some other third party.

There is not much information on Alice Huang’s activities between 2019 and 2021. However, Shanghai Hexi invested in Shanghai Longjing Information Technology, a data center-focused subsidiary of Century Huatong in 2020, where Ms. Huang served as a director between 2021 and 2022, according to a report by The Wire China. At about the same time, 7Road Holdings expanded into cloud computing, just before ChatGPT brought AI LLMs to the forefront. The U.S. government’s ban on the export of Nvidia chips to China put this investment in jeopardy, though, forcing it to spin off the business as 7Road International in Singapore.

We don’t know when 7Road Holdings sold its Singapore subsidiary, but corporate records show that by the time the company was renamed Megaspeed in March 2023, it was already under the ownership of Huang Le Limited and led by Ms. Huang. It was sold again in November 2023 to Swiftdata, a company owned by Singaporean Tan Yong Pong. Axios said that she left the firm as a managing director soon after this acquisition, but sources said that she kept working with the company afterward, with Kang Wei helping her get it off the ground.

In the same year, Shanghai Century Litong was founded to build AI data centers in Shanghai and Shenzhen, with Jiangsu Lettall Electronic Co., an electronic components manufacturer, holding a 90% stake, while the remaining 10% is owned by Century Longteng, as reported by BigGo Finance. It should be noted that Century Longteng was renamed from Shanghai Yuxi Investment Management, with the firm pivoting its business from finance to cloud computing, and that even though Alice Huang has already exited the company by this time, it’s under the control of Huang Yu, who some sources say is Ms. Huang’s sister.

A year after these data center acquisitions, Alice Huang began to be spotted in public with the former Nvidia CEO. A LinkedIn post showed her having drinks with a leather-clad Jensen Huang alongside other tech executives from NetThunder and Gigabyte at a post-Computex 2024 event. She was once again seen having dinner with him in a Taipei restaurant as reporters tried to interview him while one kid demanded his attention off camera.

But more than these public sightings, Alice herself boasted about her “closeness” to the then CEO. People close to her said that she regularly posted photos with Jensen on her WeChat account, and even shared others with potential customers to help establish her credibility. She even reportedly claimed that Mr. Huang would celebrate her birthdays with restaurant dinners and gifts, with one Nvidia China sales employee also saying that she was a familiar face at the company’s annual event for China partners.

An investigation revealed that from 2023 to 2025, Megaspeed imported $4.6 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips, while another $2 billion was routed through Speedmatrix, Megaspeed’s subsidiary with offices in Johor, Malaysia. Shanghai Century Litong also reportedly bought AI GPUs from other sources, with estimates putting the total number of banned chips moved through Alice Huang’s assistance at around 240,000, putting the shipments’ worth at around $7.5 billion.

But even as Ms. Huang was making her international moves, Kang Wei was facing trouble at home. Chinese regulators fined him 2.5 million yuan, or approximately $380,000, in 2025, for violating sections of China’s Securities Law. This also led to a warning letter against him, issued in August 2026 by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Despite running into trouble with the authorities, this massive paper trail showed how Kang Wei actively made moves that put Alice Huang close to Jensen Huang.

Some questions remain, though, about the U.S. intelligence community’s claims that she worked with the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s primary intelligence and counterintelligence agency. If it’s true that Alice Huang worked with the MSS and passed on information to the agency, did she specifically target Jensen Huang, or did the spy agency simply discover their indiscretion and use that to force her to cooperate? Was all this planned by the MSS, or were they just shrewd business moves that allowed Kang to make more money while going under the radar of regulators? These are questions that only Kang Wei and Alice Huang (or the Chinese spy agency) can answer. But no matter the case, the fact remains that China acquired advanced AI chips that were supposed to be out of its reach because of this couple’s connections.

Leading semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis believes that Jensen Huang's sudden departure from Nvidia may have been driven not only by revelations about his personal extramarital relationships, but also by widespread illicit exports of advanced AI accelerators to China. In its latest newsletter, analysts estimate that more than 1.5 gigawatts (GW) worth of restricted Nvidia hardware, which could be equivalent to up to 1.5 million GPUs, has reached the country despite U.S. export controls.

Over 1.5 GW of Nvidia hardware subject to U.S. export restrictions ultimately ended up in China in recent years, according to SemiAnalysis' Accelerator Model, which tracks AI accelerator production and destinations. The estimate excludes processors that Nvidia specifically developed to comply with U.S. export rules, such as the H20 or H800. The firm also claims that the U.S. Department of Commerce has reached a similar conclusion about the scale of unauthorized shipments. Yet, SemiAnalysis does not disclose the exact number of accelerators shipped to China illegally, or their split between Nvidia's product generations.

The scale of the alleged diversions is particularly notable because modern AI accelerators require substantial power and infrastructure. While the report does not explain how it converts accelerator quantities into power figures, it is likely that the company uses package-level nameplate/rated power multiplied by the number of GPUs. Assuming that all of these AI GPUs were Nvidia H200 SXM rated for up to 700W, then China got around 2.142 million of such accelerators, while if all of these processors were B200 SXM rated for up to 1,000W, then we are talking about 1.5 million units. For a mixed deployment, the total would fall between these figures, depending on the proportion of H200 and B200 accelerators. To put these numbers into context, xAI's Colossus One had 220-230,000 Hopper H100 and H200 GPUs, whereas the Colossus 2 has a target of 1.2 million Blackwell B200 and B300 GPUs. That said, 1.5 GW of restricted Nvidia hardware in China represents an enormous amount of computing infrastructure, which is comparable, or even exceeds, the scale of xAI's entire existing Colossus operation.

While SemiAnalysis did not reveal all the cases in which restricted AI accelerators reached the People's Republic of China, it supports its assessment with two well-known cases of alleged GPU smuggling. The first involves Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw, Taiwan sales executive Steven Chang, and contractor Willy Sun, who were charged in March 2026. According to the indictment, approximately $2.5 billion worth of servers were sold to a company in Southeast Asia, with $510 million worth of equipment subsequently diverted to China and obtained by Alibaba. Prosecutors allege that the defendants used substitute servers and transferred identification labels to conceal the actual destinations of the hardware during audits.

The second case involves nine individuals associated with Nvidia, Albatron, Chief Telecom, Flying Tiger, and Supermicro in Taiwan. The authorities accuse the group of arranging unauthorized exports of 130 Nvidia B300-based servers, 74 of which eventually reached China. The suspects used shell companies, forged documents, and declared Japan as the destination for servers that were actually bound for China, according to prosecutors. Taiwanese authorities discovered the operation during a drug smuggling investigation. Both cases are still before the courts.

Amidst the ongoing fallout and reports into Jensen's Huang's extramarital affair with Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese intelligence asset who was an executive at Megaspeed, one report claims that Ms. Huang was personally responsible for facilitating the smuggling of $7.5 billion of Nvidia AI hardware into China, around 240,000 GPUs, mostly H100 and H200 models.

The right timing?

SemiAnalysis suggests that the scale of these violations may explain why Huang's personal conduct became a major issue at this very point in time. The company's analysts speculate that some members of the U.S. intelligence community sought to remove Jensen Huang because he opposed more aggressive restrictions on China's access to American AI hardware. However, the report provides no direct evidence that intelligence agencies influenced Nvidia's board or that Huang participated in unauthorized exports.

The timing also coincides with congressional efforts to advance the Remote Access Security Act (RASA), which passed the House of Representatives on January 12. The legislation is meant to extend U.S. export-control authority to remote access to advanced AI hardware hosted outside China, including data centers in Europe and the Middle East. SemiAnalysis reports that Nvidia and Oracle have actively opposed the proposal.

The analysts believe that Huang's departure essentially removes an influential opponent of stricter restrictions and accelerates efforts to block Chinese companies from accessing American AI hardware in the cloud. However, SemiAnalysis warns that truly all-inclusive restrictions could encourage Chinese developers to adopt domestic accelerators (something that Jensen Huang has consistently warned about), undermine international AI software collaboration, and ultimately weaken American high-tech companies.

Continued Chinese access to American AI accelerators offers several advantages to the U.S. technology industry, according to SemiAnalysis. Firstly, it generates revenue for American companies such as AMD, Nvidia, and cloud service providers. Secondly, when Chinese companies rent GPU capacity from data centers outside China, U.S. authorities retain the ability to monitor their activities and potentially terminate access if necessary due to national security concerns. Thirdly, prolonged reliance on American hardware reduces incentives for Chinese developers to adopt domestic AI accelerators, which could eventually compete with AMD and Nvidia in international markets.

Another important aspect is the contribution of Chinese developers to the global software ecosystem. On the one hand, Chinese laboratories have developed open-source technologies such as DeepEP, DeepGEMM, and MSA, which improve the efficiency of AI workloads on Nvidia hardware and benefit developers worldwide. In addition, American companies also depend on Chinese engineers, component suppliers, and manufacturers. Therefore, legal curbs that completely restrict Chinese developers' access to American AI accelerators could undermine international cooperation, reduce availability of open-source optimizations, and encourage Chinese companies to develop software specifically for domestic hardware.

On the other hand, access to advanced AI accelerators from AMD or Nvidia enables Chinese laboratories to develop increasingly sophisticated AI models, which will rival leading-edge models developed in America and perhaps create national security risks. To that end, SemiAnalysis acknowledges the need to limit China's access to advanced AI accelerators from U.S.-based companies, as they could, among other things, be used to develop weapons of mass destruction or undermine American national security in different ways. Yet, SA analysts argue that restrictions should focus on the amount and capabilities of hardware available to Chinese entities rather than completely prohibit any access.

SemiAnalysis seems to favor a system in which Chinese developers can rent computing capacity from trusted providers outside China under U.S. oversight. Such an approach could preserve American technological influence and commercial benefits and limit China's ability to acquire advanced AI infrastructure independently.

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO two weeks after his relationship with a suspected Chinese spy was revealed by intelligence sources and a day after his affair with an Nvidia vice president became publicly known. But hours before this move, when it was just rumored that the Nvidia board was planning to oust him, Elon Musk had already stated his willingness to hire the former Nvidia chief on X. A random X user posted, “Elon please hire Jensen,” to which the billionaire replied, “That would be an honor.”

Despite the scandals that Jensen is currently facing, he still has the engineering know-how, deep knowledge of the industry and its inner workings, plus multiple connections across the world, which would be extremely valuable for any company looking to break into the semiconductor industry.

This is exactly what Elon Musk is doing with his Terafab project, which he first mentioned in November 2025. Jensen Huang even warned that this was going to be a challenge, pointing out that “the engineering, the science, and the artistry of doing what TSMC does for a living is extremely hard.” Nevertheless, Musk poured his resources into the project, with construction on the Terafab facility in full swing and with plans to hit volume chip production by the second half of 2028. Musk himself said that the site targets a production capacity of a million wafers a month by 2032. Tesla has an ambitious AI accelerator roadmap, and SpaceX has even touted making its own GPUs in the future.

We still don’t know what Jensen Huang’s plans are, but even though he’s no longer a part of the Nvidia board and its leadership, Jensen and his wife, Lori, still jointly own approximately 800 million Nvidia shares through various trusts and LLCs, while Huang himself personally owns around 70 million Nvidia shares.

Aside from that, he still has an outstanding invitation from Congress to discuss Nvidia’s security protocols, which could turn into a subpoena if he snubs them, although we don’t know how his resignation would affect the closed-door meeting. There’s also a reported FBI investigation into his relationship with Alice Huang, the Megaspeed executive who was allegedly instrumental in the import of $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia AI GPUs into China and is suspected of working with China’s Ministry of State Security.

Jensen Huang is just the latest in the long list of executives who resigned or were ousted from their leadership position because of a relationship or an affair with a subordinate. This includes former Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher in 2005, HP CEO Mark Hurd in 2010, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in 2018, and former McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook in 2019. Musk himself is known to have had relationships with subordinates from his various companies, and that he has even fathered four children with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at Neuralink who started working at Tesla in 2017, through IVF.

It’s still not confirmed if Musk’s reply is a serious offer for Jensen Huang. But if the former Nvidia chief ever decides to work for Musk on his Terafab project, then Jensen could put his effort and expertise into turning it into a formidable competitor to Nvidia.

Alice Huang, the person allegedly involved in an affair with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, has reportedly surfaced in Beijing, marking the first sighting of the Megaspeed executive since the scandal broke out. According to Bloomberg, it’s unclear when the suspected Chinese spy arrived in the capital or why she’s in the area, but she was last spotted leaving Singapore for Shanghai in 2025 after she was detained and questioned during the city-state’s investigation into the $2-billion smuggling case involving Megaspeed.

The Nvidia CEO is now under intense scrutiny after the revelation of his indiscretion with the Megaspeed executive, with Congress threatening to issue a subpoena if he does not respond to their invitation to “a joint, closed-door briefing” with the heads of the House committees on China, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence. The FBI is also looking into the relationship between the head of the largest AI hardware company in the world and a person suspected of helping sanctioned Chinese companies secure hundreds of thousands of banned H100 and H200 chips. Overnight, a second bombshell report claims that Jensen Huang was also involved in an extramarital affair with Nvidia's VP of health care, Kimberly Powell.

Although the Chinese embassy in Washington has denied any links to Alice Huang, calling it nothing but “groundless smears and slanders” against Beijing, there is speculation that she’s under the control of the Ministry of State Security (MSS), which is the primary agency that handles China’s foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. The U.S. intelligence community suggests that she may be passing on information to the MSS, but it remains unclear if she was specifically tasked by Chinese intelligence to target Jensen Huang or if they were only leveraging her relationship with the Nvidia chief to get insights into the U.S. AI industry.

A deeper investigation into Alice Huang, known by her Chinese name as Huang Le, revealed that she supposedly worked in media before jumping into banking and finance. The Wall Street Journal reports that it’s unclear when she met her husband, Kang Wei, but the couple ran a private equity and investment management firm called Shanghai Hexi in 2016. This allowed the couple to invest in companies across industries, including gaming, pharmaceuticals, and, eventually, data centers and cloud computing.

The couple is known for riding trends and isn’t a stranger to scandals. Their firm, Shanghai Hexi, invested in gaming companies in the 2010s, especially when mobile gaming started to boom across the world, while Chinese regulators fined Kang and the company in 2018 for disclosure failures and other violations while it was in the midst of a takeover battle for a corporation. Kang’s moves in the gaming industry are what allowed him to meet Jensen Huang, which eventually led to a close relationship between the couple and the Nvidia chief. Sources told the WSJ that Kang apparently accepted Alice and Jensen’s extra-marital relationship, even sometimes jokingly telling people that she was Jensen’s “personal assistant.”

It seems that the couple is used to leveraging their relationships to gain business advantage, and with investments in AI data centers expected to hit $32 trillion by 2050, Alice Huang’s “close” relationship with Jensen Huang put Shanghai Hexi in an excellent position to take advantage of the trend through Megaspeed and make big money. And with U.S. sanctions making it harder for competitors to acquire Nvidia chips, it appears that their access has turned into a gold mine for the company. But whether Alice Huang acted solely out of business interest with the supposed procurement of Nvidia chips or was leveraged by Chinese authorities to import these chips, the fact remains that $7.5 billion worth of banned chips reportedly made their way into China despite Washington’s efforts.

Nvidia's Board of Directors is preparing to oust co-founder and chief executive Jensen Huang following revelations of two extramarital affairs, including one with a woman suspected of working for Chinese intelligence and another with an Nvidia executive, reports The Wall Street Journal. Although no final decision has been made yet, the company's directors could meet as early as November 11 to discuss Huang's future. Whoever succeeds Huang will be the company's second CEO in 33 years. Nvidia's stock dropped 8% in after-hours trading following the reports. Nvidia's board of directors launched an independent investigation into the matter on November 8.

The report from the WSJ comes hours after the New York Times revealed that Huang allegedly had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care, who reports directly to him. According to five people who worked at Nvidia, the relationship was known internally, while Huang and Powell were reportedly seen together at a San Jose hotel during Nvidia's GTC conference in March. The allegations follow an earlier report that Huang had a relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence believes to be a Chinese intelligence asset.

A similar controversy cost Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich his position in June 2018, when an internal investigation confirmed that he had maintained a consensual relationship with an employee, which violated the company's non-fraternization policy applicable to all managers. It is noteworthy that Nvidia's code of conduct explicitly identifies personal relationships as potential conflicts of interest and instructs employees to consult the company's legal department when such conflicts arise. Whether Huang violated Nvidia's internal policies remains unclear, as the code of conduct does not explicitly prohibit all relationships between managers and subordinates.

Huang's potential departure would mark the first CEO transition in Nvidia's 33-year history, and therefore his succession has become an immediate concern for Nvidia, which does not have anyone of Huang's caliber in the leadership team. Although chief financial officer Colette Kress could potentially serve as interim chief executive if Huang is ousted while the BoD searches for a permanent replacement, it remains to be seen how Wall Street would react to this assignment.

Nvidia co-founder Chris Malachowsky, who used to be the company's senior vice president of engineering and operations and remains a member of the company's board and an Nvidia Fellow, could also play a role in the succession process, given his extensive knowledge of Nvidia's technology, corporate culture, and history. However, has not served in an executive role at Nvidia for at least a decade, so the chances that he will succeed Huang are low.

Back on Sunday, directors expressed confidence in Jensen Huang and his leadership team, a choice of words that did not exactly guarantee his continued tenure.

Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), the chairperson of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has said that he will issue a subpoena to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang if he does not respond to the committee’s request to meet with them on November 18 by Wednesday, November 11, according to ABC News. The House invited him to a “joint, closed-door briefing” with the heads of the House committees on China, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence, and that they will focus on his company’s “security protocols against foreign adversary espionage.”

Congress first called the embattled CEO on November 7, a few days after rumors started circulating about Huang’s “closeness” to a particular Chinese executive suspected of passing information to Chinese intelligence. The following day, Nvidia released a statement from Jensen admitting to an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, apologizing for his unfaithfulness, while the company’s board of directors confirmed it will launch an independent investigation regarding the allegations that the CEO has been specifically targeted by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). Aside from having to face Congress, Jensen Huang is also reportedly being looked into by the FBI.

It remains unclear whether Jensen Huang was targeted by intelligence agencies, but he came into prominence with the AI boom that was arguably fueled by Nvidia’s AI chips. This led to the AI race as we know it today, with the U.S. taking steps to delay China’s advancement for fears that it will use the technology for military purposes. We also don’t know if Huang Le or Alice Huang is actually a Chinese spy or an “innocent” bystander caught in a web of accusations. And, even if she did work with the MSS, the question remains as to whether she specifically targeted the Nvidia CEO or whether Chinese intelligence discovered their indiscretion and used that as a convenient tool for blackmail to extract information from her.

However, former CIA agent Darrel Blocker told ABC News that the authorities should just focus on Jensen. “I think that the biggest concern is that the focus or overfocus on just Jensen Huang and Nvidia risks losing sight of the fact that other people have been targeted by the Chinese. Are they talking to the engineers? Are they talking to other people who might have even more access than even the CEO has? So, this focus should not be singular; it should include everyone in the company, and quite frankly, every tech company out there should be looking at all the contacts that their officers and employees have.”

“It’s definitely not a one-time thing. When you run a trillion-dollar company, you know that you have a bullseye on your back; whether it’s from competition or rather from nation-states, so this is absolutely not a one-off. Jensen Huang is not the only person at Nvidia that has access to the crown jewels, so I would be looking at the other people in terms of the access that they enjoy and their proximity to Chinese nationals.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted to having an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, who is also suspected of being a spy working for the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS). Now, an investigation by The Information has revealed a 'labyrinth' of companies centered around Shanghai Century Litong and connected to Singaporean firm Megaspeed, which has previously been accused of smuggling $2 billion worth of Nvidia chips. The report claims Alice Huang helped move 240,000 banned chips into the country, mostly H100 and H200 systems, and was instrumental in securing AI GPU imports to the tune of $7.5 billion.

Sources in the report link the two companies to Alice Huang via their personal knowledge and corporate registration records, while there have also been reports that some of the Nvidia AI chips Megaspeed bought went to Shanghai Century Litong’s data centers in China. But aside from these corporate ties, there were also numerous reports about Ms. Huang’s personal relationship with the Nvidia chief, and how it gave her the ability to procure chips that were otherwise hard to get elsewhere.

Ms. Huang allegedly boasted about her access to the Nvidia CEO publicly. People familiar with her said that she regularly uploaded photos with Jensen to her WeChat account and even shared other images with customers to establish her credibility. She even claimed that Jensen Huang would often celebrate her birthday with dinner and gifts, while an Nvidia China sales employee said that she was a familiar face at the company’s annual event for local Chinese partners.

When AI shipments hit delays or faced some trouble, Ms. Huang allegedly would step in to get them moving through the supply chain again. One other person who knows her said that she would often cite her close relationship with Nvidia and its suppliers as the reason why she could always get Nvidia AI chips. It’s estimated that $4.6 billion worth of AI chips have been imported through Megaspeed from 2023 to 2025, with another $2 billion routed through Speedmatrix. It was also reported that Shanghai Century Litong bought GPUs from other sources, with the assistance of Alice Huang if the orders faced an issue, with the total value of the GPUs acquired estimated to be around $7.5 billion. The report claims Ms. Huang helped move some 240,000 banned chips into China.

Alice Huang may have appeared in Jensen Huang’s circle much earlier than previously believed. One source told the publication that Kang Wei, Alice Huang’s husband, met Jensen Huang during the 2010s, when Nvidia was primarily a PC gaming GPU manufacturer. According to the report, Kang Wei was a private equity investor focusing on videogame companies back then. In contrast, Ms. Huang reportedly worked for two media companies in China, although some say that there were no records of her doing so. She eventually jumped into banking and finance, working at HSBC and then CITIC Securities, before finally entering the data center industry in 2023 with Megaspeed’s pivot and the founding of Shanghai Century Litong.

Shanghai Century Litong is a data center operator founded in June 2023 by a shareholder that was ultimately under the control of Huang Yu, the sister of Alice Huang, whose Chinese name is Huang Le. The company then provided compute capacity to AI tech giants in China, including Alibaba, Tencent, and other smaller labs. A few months after its founding, it received coveted Nvidia Preferred Cloud Partner status in October 2023, which is an important milestone as Nvidia requires anyone with this status to have demonstrated sufficient capability in handling and running Nvidia hardware as well as generating revenue at a certain level, although that threshold varies by region and partner type.

In exchange for this, partners get better access to Nvidia’s limited number of chips, which became crucial for Shanghai Century Litong as the China-specific A800 and H800 chips were banned for sale to China around the same period. Although the move immediately banned the sales of these GPUs from Nvidia, it did not affect the chip stocks that were already in the hands of distributors. This meant that Shanghai Century Litong had priority access to the limited supply of these AI GPUs as Nvidia’s preferred partner.

Megaspeed, on the other hand, was reportedly owned by a company called Huang Le Limited and led by Ms. Huang when it pivoted in 2023 and was subsequently sold to Singaporean entity Swiftdata soon after this. Megaspeed then set up a subsidiary called Speedmatrix, which has two offices in Johor, Malaysia, a couple of months after that. The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), the U.S. agency in charge of monitoring export control compliance, noted that the Nvidia hardware found in Speedmatrix data centers was still in its boxes when they inspected the sites, triggering a deeper investigation into the company. Still, it’s been alleged that Nvidia intervened in the BIS probe, with the company retaining its Nvidia partner status to this day.

Despite her public closeness with the Nvidia chief, she’s rather elusive when it comes to her personal information. Two other people said that she has always been vague about what she does at her companies, and that she’s careful when it comes to signing documents and leaving a paper trail that could easily be followed. Still, the Chinese embassy denies any links to Alice Huang, even as the FBI looks into the situation.

As more information about the ongoing situation at Nvidia unravels, U.S. President Donald Trump has confirmed that the FBI is investigating CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with a suspected Chinese spy days after he admitted to the indiscretion. According to the Associated Press, the president said this during a briefing at the White House, with one reporter asking him about his knowledge of Huang’s issue before it became publicly known. The news comes amidst a separate bombshell report from Bloomberg, which claims that Nvidia intervened in a US government probe of suspected chip smuggling by Megaspeed, where Alice Huang was an executive.

“Well, I’ve been hearing about it, and I’ve been reading about it over a period of time, but, uh, not too long ago,” Trump said. “We’ll look into, I know the FBI is looking into it in terms of something, and I think he’ll be in good shape.” He also said, “I did speak to him today just to see if he’s feeling alright, how you’re doing. He said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy.”

It has been previously reported that U.S. intelligence services suspected that Alice Huang, who previously held an executive position at Megaspeed, had ties to the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), which is one of the country’s intelligence services, and that they told the President about it over a year ago. However, it was reported he did not act on the information, as he reportedly did not want to jeopardize Nvidia sales or antagonize Beijing, especially after the White House approved the export of H200 chips to China with an attached 25% fee.

Congress has called Huang once to confront him about these rumors, with the CEO confirming his affair with Alice Huang shortly after. The committee said it has "concerns over Nvidia’s security protocols against foreign adversary espionage and Mr. Huang’s reported ties to a Chinese intelligence-linked executive of a Singapore-based data center company.” Now, it seems that the FBI, which is the U.S.’s primary domestic counterintelligence agency, is looking into the situation, too.

While the infidelity of tech executives is usually outside the purview of politicians and law enforcement, Jensen Huang’s sensitive position as the head of the leading AI chip manufacturer that arguably single-handedly drove the global AI race has made him a prominent target. China has denied the accusation that Alice Huang is its agent, but a think tank suggests that “China is employing ‘attractive women’ posing as investors, business professionals, academics, or romantic partners to gain access to U.S. tech talent, networks, and research infrastructure.”

This is why Nvidia’s supposed intervention in the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security’s (BIS) investigation into Megaspeed is becoming a concern. Megaspeed has been investigated for allegedly smuggling $2 billion worth of Nvidia AI processors into China, although Nvidia has claimed that it has done its due diligence and did not find any signs of diversions by the company. Despite that, Bloomberg reports that Nvidia executive vice president and general counsel Tim Teter reached out to U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security and BIS head Jeffrey Kessler to ask about the administration’s investigation into the company and whether the BIS was involved in Singapore’s detention of Alice Huang at that time. Sources claimed that the U.S. agency was not involved in Ms. Huang’s apprehension by Singaporean authorities.

The publication reported BIS staff were told to route all Nvidia requests through Kessler or to seek approval from him for any outreach involving the company, which people say was highly unusual, and that Teter even supposedly reached out directly to BIS employees. When the affected employees forwarded the emails to Kessler and raised their concerns, the BIS chief instructed them to handle the case by the book. But in late 2025, the Justice Department, which was working alongside the BIS, asked the bureau to pause its efforts on the Megaspeed investigation.

Even though Jensen Huang admitted to having an affair with Alice Huang, who was linked to Megaspeed and is suspected to be working at the behest of Beijing, there is still no clear proof that Ms. Huang had a direct role in influencing the Nvidia chief to push for the resumption of Nvidia AI chip sales to China. Still, the unraveling of this supposed spy plot has caught the attention of the American leadership, and they’re now asking questions about Nvidia’s security protocols and the company’s sway on Washington.

The baying of the hounds can be heard at a distance. Yesterday, Nvidia's Jensen Huang confirmed that it was indeed true that he had a romantic affair with Alice Huang (not related to the family), who U.S. intelligence services claim is a Chinese honeypot tasked with facilitating smuggling of the firm's advanced GPUs into China. Now, a class-action lawsuit and investigations have started flying from almost everywhere.

This development is not unexpected, as basic securities law allows shareholders to sue their investees if they misrepresent facts or otherwise perform actions that cause a drop in stock prices. They may have a point, as Nvidia's shares dipped significantly when the confirmation of Jensen's infidelity and the ramifications thereof hit the press everywhere.

The legal proceedings are bound to be numerous, but as of right now, the first class-action lawsuit was filed by the Rosen Law Firm. The suit claims that Nvidia and Jensen Huang failed to disclose or misled investors regarding Jensen's affair with Alice, lied about it when asked, raised national security concerns, and caused a subsequent loss of Nvidia's reputation. You can check out the case docket at PacerMonitor here.

While legal analysis is beyond the scope of this news, Nvidia did downplay Jensen's relationship with Alice, saying that "Megaspeed has been no different than many other regional cloud customers. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year."

Other legal firms have launched their own investigations into the recent development, with essentially the same justification: Schall, Brown & Schwartz attributes a 5.5% pre-market-trading drop to Nvidia, as does Levi & Korsinsky. The office of Frank R. Cruz mentions an 8.8% figure related to intra-day exchanging, and is interested in shareholders with $50,000 in losses. The percentage-drop figure is 5.88% premarket for Bronstein, Gewritz & Grossman.

Every investigation and suit mentioned here requires no upfront fees from complainants, as with most class-action lawsuits. The underlying condition is often that the law firms involved get a cut of whichever damages or settlements may appear at the end of the lawsuit. Some of them, like the one by Levi & Korsinsky, even aim to relieve investors who've already sold their Nvidia shares and sold them at a loss, with no minimum amount required.

Update 11/8/2026 1:31 PM PT: Jensen Huang has now admitted to having an affair with the alleged Chinese spy and has issued a letter of apology to his family and staff, which you can read here.

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang is the center of a new controversy as the U.S. intelligence community believes that he had a romantic relationship with a suspected Chinese spy. According to the Financial Times, Alice Huang, sometimes referred to as Huang Le, was a top executive at Singaporean firm Megaspeed and was reportedly romantically involved with the CEO of the world's largest AI chip manufacturer. Notably, Jensen is currently married to his wife of 41 years, Lori Huang. It’s unclear whether Alice Huang was recruited by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) before she joined Megaspeed or after she had already established a business relationship with Jensen, but it’s been reported that the suspected agent was apparently targeting the Nvidia head to help Chinese companies gain access to banned AI chips.

Megaspeed has been accused of smuggling $2 billion worth of AI chips into China via its subsidiary Speedmatrix, although Nvidia insists the company has no ties to China. Megaspeed sits at the center of a web of companies linked to China, and it was previously connected to a Chinese gaming company called 7Road International. It was founded in 2023 and reportedly owned by Huang Le Limited, led by Ms. Huang Le, or Alice Huang, before it was sold to Swiftdata that same year. The following year, Megaspeed used Speedmatrix to incorporate, with the subsidiary having two offices in Johor, Malaysia. The subsidiary is at the center of the smuggling allegations.

Research into Huang Le, or Alice Huang, has revealed inconsistencies. There were reports that she started her career as a TV journalist working for Hunan TV and Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), but an executive at the former claims to have never heard of her, while she does not have a profile under the latter. After her supposed stint in media, she moved into banking and finance as assistant to the president of HSBC’s private banking division before becoming vice president at CITIC Securities, a Chinese financial services company. It’s unclear how she became involved with Megaspeed after that, but it seems Ms. Huang built a network of companies and investors around Shanghai and Zhejiang that aggressively pushed mobile gaming companies toward AI data centers.

Questions arose about how a small company like Megaspeed could commit so much to buying Nvidia AI GPUs seemingly out of nowhere, but it certainly caught Jensen Huang's attention. After the company made its massive order, Alice Huang was spotted in a LinkedIn post hanging out for drinks with Jensen Huang and other industry executives from Gigabyte and NetThunder. She was once again seen standing behind the Nvidia chief, alongside other people, one year later as he exited a Taiwan restaurant.

Nvidia has denied the allegations, saying Jensen Huang meets with thousands of customer executives annually and that they exchange ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets or national security information. China has also said that these accusations of espionage on Jensen Huang by the MSS are just “groundless smears and slanders” against Beijing.

However, foreign intelligence agencies also routinely conduct “honeypot” operations, using operatives to ensnare targets into relationships to extract data and gain insight into industry secrets. While these operations traditionally targeted politicians, members of the military, and their staff, the Lansing Institute suggests that “China is employing ‘attractive women’ posing as investors, business professionals, academics, or romantic partners to gain access to U.S. tech talent, networks, and research infrastructure.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a man who likely attends numerous meetings, and today one more was added to his busy schedule. The U.S. Congress wants to have a closed-door chat with Huang over mounting concerns about national security. The congressmen bidding for his time say last week's report spurred the move that he may be the target of espionage by a reported Chinese asset: Megaspeed exec Alice Huang (family unrelated).

The meeting was set up by Republican House representatives John Moolenaar, Brian Mast, and Rick Crawford, respective Chairs of the House committees on China, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence. In the House's letter on the matter, the lawmakers say the aforementioned reports "raise significant national security concerns" about China gaining access to U.S. technology and information.

The previously reported claim is that Alice Huang is a Chinese plant in Singaporean data center outfit Megaspeed, siphoning information to Beijing. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) further claims that she was recruited by Chinese authorities due to her existing relationship with Jensen Huang.

Megaspeed reportedly bought and continues to buy billions' worth of Nvidia's chips, according to The New York Times (NYT), and stands accused by the Department of Commerce since 2024 of smuggling $2 billion worth of advanced silicon to China.

The backdrop for the situation is that the U.S. has long-standing export controls blocking Nvidia and AMD's most advanced AI accelerator chips from reaching China, among a number of other nations. The allegations were first published last week in the NYT, and are reportedly sourced from unnamed U.S. intelligence officials.

The House says the purpose of the briefing with Jensen Huang is to discuss "Nvidia's security protocols against foreign adversary espionage and [his] interactions with [...] Alice Huang." According to the NYT, the CEO never got a "defensive briefing," essentially a warning for potential targets of foreign espionage, to acquaint them with signs of such activities.

The publication notes that intelligence officials often hesitate to inform potential targets of espionage, as doing so may make the spy aware they're being investigated. The NYT adds that President Trump was briefed on the situation surrounding Megaspeed and Alice Huang a year ago, but chose not to act on it.

According to the WSJ, Singaporean authorities opened their own probe into Megaspeed, and even reportedly questioned Alice Huang directly. However, an official response from the country told the WSJ that it "does not implement unilateral export controls imposed by foreign jurisdictions," adding that while it's investigating Megaspeed, it's not targeting Alice Huang herself or inspecting her claimed ties with Jensen Huang or China.

The Singaporean does note that the country has "a zero-tolerance stance" on commercial fraud, pointing out that it's charged four companies and four individuals over such wrongdoings, and that they may face up to 20 years in prison.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is also seemingly keeping a close eye on Alice Huang, by inspecting her visits to the nation. The WSJ says that the country's authorities are probing her involvement with China and have her under physical surveillance.

As for Nvidia, the company seemingly reposted today the same comments it offered us last week, stating that "meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year." The firm adds that "[its] regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information — not sensitive NVIDIA trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security."

Multiple sources claim that a top executive at a Singapore AI firm suspected of steering Nvidia AI GPUs to China and who has close business ties with Jensen Huang was apparently passing information to Beijing as a Chinese intelligence asset. According to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence has been aware of her activities for over a year already and has even briefed President Donald Trump on the situation. However, Trump reportedly chose not to do anything about the information, as he apparently did not want to affect Nvidia sales or antagonize China.

The suspect, Alice Huang or Huang Le, was listed as the managing director of Singaporean AI firm Megaspeed, an Nvidia cloud partner that builds data centers and rents out the compute to Chinese firms like Alibaba. The investigation into the firm began when the U.S. Commerce Department visited the firm’s Malaysia data center and found the Nvidia equipment that it ordered still packed in boxes. This raised suspicion that the machines were either just shipped in or about to be shipped out, instead of being installed on the site. However, it remains unclear what made U.S. intelligence agencies investigate Ms. Huang. Megaspeed was accused of helping smuggle $2 billion worth of Nvidia chips last year.

There have been multiple instances where Ms. Huang was spotted in public with the Nvidia chief. She was photographed sitting beside Jensen Huang alongside other executives in an informal event around Computex 2024 in a LinkedIn post by NetThunder, identified as Megaspeed Chairwoman Alice Wong. About a year later, around the same time as Computex 2025, she was once again seen with Jensen Huang leaving a restaurant in Taipei alongside other business associates.

“Megaspeed has been no different than many other regional cloud customers. Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year,” an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. “Our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information — not sensitive NVIDIA trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security." Still, the possibility that Chinese intelligence is targeting a senior figure close to President Trump is apparently troubling some U.S. officials.

The Chinese embassy in Washington denied the allegations, saying that it was merely “groundless smears and slanders” against China. Nevertheless, it would also make sense for Beijing to keep tabs on senior executives of the top American firms that arguably single-handedly fueled the AI boom. And given Jensen Huang’s status as a celebrity CEO, it’s not surprising that he is surrounded by all kinds of people from both the U.S. and China. Sources cited in the report claimed that Mr. Huang hasn’t yet been given a defensive briefing — a warning that U.S. counterintelligence agencies would sometimes give to American citizens who have been targeted by foreign intelligence services — even though the surveillance against Alice Huang continues. The report speculates it is possible this was done to avoid alerting Alice Huang that she was being investigated.

As for Jensen, U.S. officials do not believe that he is aware of Ms. Huang’s intelligence activities. "We're confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know," Nvidia told Tom’s Hardware. "We often receive updates from the U.S. government regarding parties and entities of concern and always act accordingly."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has put the annual cost of licensing the company’s AI software at around $2,000 per GPU to 'run all the software that Nvidia provides that runs agents on these AI factories,' according to a recent video of the comments (below), a pricing model that could generate $50 billion over five years under a proposed scenario involving five million paid licenses outlined by FourWeekMBA.

Huang discussed the pricing at GTC Berlin on October 22, where the company outlined its broader push to build an AI infrastructure business spanning chips, software and AI-agent security. “Software licensing will become increasingly a major part of our company’s business. The way that we license will be…for example, it’s about $2,000 per GPU per year to run all the software that Nvidia provides that runs agents on these AI factories,” said Huang.

The numbers add up quickly. At $2,000 per GPU each year, Nvidia would bring in $10 billion annually if five million GPUs were covered by paid licenses. Over five years, that would amount to $50 billion, provided customers kept renewing their subscriptions. The catch, however, is that Nvidia has not disclosed how many GPUs could be covered by the proposed $2,000 fee, or whether that’s its standard price. It’s also unclear which software the license would cover, or if there is overlap between products.

The distinction matters because Nvidia already charges for enterprise software. Its AI Enterprise platform is listed at $4,500 per GPU for a one-year subscription. Huang’s reported $2,000 figure is lower, but Nvidia has not confirmed that the two prices cover the same products or licensing terms. It should not be treated as a confirmed price cut.

The licensing discussion comes as Nvidia develops more of the infrastructure needed to deploy and manage AI agents in enterprise environments. These systems can use tools, access data, and execute tasks, creating new security and management challenges for businesses running them at scale.

On October 21, Nvidia announced its OpenShell Reference Architecture, a system that combines its Vera Rubin computing infrastructure, Vera CPUs, and BlueField-4 data processing units (DPUs) running Nvidia Sentry. OpenShell provides a secure runtime for AI agents, establishing boundaries around their actions and access to tools and resources. Sentry monitors agent activity independently and can quarantine an agent that attempts to cross those boundaries, according to Nvidia. The architecture is designed to bring security controls into the underlying infrastructure rather than relying solely on safeguards built into an AI model or application.

Nvidia had previously introduced its Open Agent Safety Platform in September. The newer reference architecture builds on that effort, extending the approach to enterprise infrastructure and edge systems.

Other companies are also incorporating these controls into their products. Anthropic is integrating OpenShell and BlueField hardware with Claude Managed Agents to give businesses additional control over what their AI agents can access inside execution sandboxes. Salesforce has developed a Slack Admin Bridge for OpenShell that lets administrators review agent access requests, approve or reject permissions, and monitor activity directly in Slack.

The proposed software pricing fits Huang’s wider argument that Nvidia is becoming more than a supplier of GPUs. The company has expanded into networking, systems, enterprise software, and infrastructure designed to run AI workloads. Speaking on the BG2Pod podcast recently, Huang said, “One of these days, people might not categorize us as a chip company anymore.” He pointed to Nvidia’s presence across industries including healthcare, automotive, telecommunications and life sciences, where the company provides broader technology stacks rather than chips alone.

That said, Nvidia has not said when the $2,000-per-GPU fee would take effect or which software it would cover. It also remains unclear how the proposed pricing would fit into the company’s existing enterprise software business.

Former Nvidia advisor Eric Gullichsen says that he is “owed a billion dollars in NVDA stock,” according to his blog post titled the same. The post says that Gullichsen, an early Nvidia Technical Advisory Board member, was granted 25,000 options in September 1993.

Re-reading the grant in 2024, he says, showed that it was meant to vest in four quarters, or a year, instead of over four years. An April 1996 CFO letter counted 15,625 vested, so 9,375 more shares should have vested too, he added. After a combined 480x in splits, this would be 4.5 million shares, or about $1.01 billion at Nvidia’s Sept. 25 close of $225.07, in line with his “about a billion dollars.” He says that he and his counsel agreed that the statute of limitations was against him, and “it seemed unlikely we’d make it past a motion to dismiss.”

The option grant document provided by Gullichsen on the blog post is dated Sept. 9, 1993, with a No. 7 grant of 25,000 shares, signed for Nvidia by Huang. “All shares shall vest upon the expiration of one year from Grant Date,” which means fully vested by Sept. 9, 1994. It states 25% at three months, then quarterly, which would be four times in the year.

Gullichsen also provided the exercise letter from CFO Marcel Gani dated April 16, 1996, which ends his “contractual relationship with NVIDIA and Its Technical Board of Advisors” and states that he had “15,625 shares of NVIDIA stock options vested.” This was at $0.05 a share with 90 days to exercise, or $781.25 for a full exercise.

Gullichsen also included an undated invitation letter signed by Huang asserting “a stock option of 25,000 which vests over 4 years.” Doing the math, 15,625 is 62.5% of 25,000 shares, or 10 of 16 quarters, which matches the Sept. 9, 1993 to April 16, 1996 timeline. The CFO’s count fits the four-year quarterly schedule. So the CEO’s letter says four years, while the signed cover sheet says one. The cover sheet also says any discrepancy with its attached legal provisions “shall be governed by the attached legal provisions,” and those attachments are not in Gullichsen’s post. It also says it supersedes prior written agreements, which would override the invitation letter.

Upon discovery of the possible discrepancy, Gullichsen hired lawyers who worked “on contingency,” according to one of his replies on a related discussion thread. After about a year of letters between his team and Nvidia’s in-house and outside counsel, the two sides met. “We proposed to settle for a far smaller number,” he wrote, but Nvidia “still made the call to say nope.” He and his lawyers concluded that after “thirty-odd years” the case may be too far past its prime. The CFO letter’s exercise window had closed around July 15, 1996. Nvidia has not publicly responded.

Gullichsen worked on multiple VR projects starting in the late 1980s with his own company, Sense8, which he co-founded around 1990. That VR rendering work led to a fast implementation of biquadratic texture mapping, which he says caught the attention of Nvidia co-founder Curtis Priem in 1993, the same year of the option grant. Priem then brought Jensen Huang and fellow co-founder Chris Malachowsky to Gullichsen’s houseboat in Sausalito for a demo, he says.

He is a named inventor on a patent filed in 1994, “Wide-angle image dewarping method and apparatus” or US5796426A, which names “the NV-1 chip sold by N-Vidia Corporation” as a hardware example. The NV1 was not commercially successful but used quadratic surfaces as its basic primitive.

Some commenters inquired about what happened to his existing shares. Gullichsen had not answered as of Monday morning. His settlement reasoning, however, included “the likelihood I would have sold.” Our earlier reporting shows another investor, Stanley Druckenmiller, sold before the 10-to-1 split. Nvidia has since reached the position of the most valuable company in the world, at least temporarily. The stock’s rapid rise in value has created many new millionaires among its employees.

As for Gullichsen’s advice: “Read the contracts. Carefully.”

A 3D artist looking to purchase an RTX 5090 for their work claimed that they scored an unopened Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 White OC from the secondhand market. According to Wccftech, the artist purchased the GPU expecting that it was signed by an Asus executive in celebration of the company’s 30th anniversary. But when they opened the package, they found the Nvidia chief’s signature on it instead.

Jensen Huang autographed the GPU and showed it off on camera last year, after which it was supposed to be given away by one lucky gamer. The artist did not mention how much they bought the “used” GPU for, but brand-new models of the RTX 5090 now hit $5,000 and can go up even higher, depending on the model. They also said that after opening the box, they did not use or test it, opting to sell it instead because of the immense value that such a limited-edition graphics card held for the right buyer.

This specific GPU is now in the hands of the Bonhams auction house, with bidding set for Oct. 4 to 14, 2026. It’s estimated that the graphics card will fetch somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000, especially as it bears the signature of Nvidia’s founder. However, it should be noted that an Asus ROG Matrix RTX 4090 sold for $16,000 back in 2023, while an Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090 Dhabab OC Edition was auctioned off last year for $24,200. Both GPUs were also autographed by Jensen, so there’s a good chance that this graphics card could fetch a much higher price.

Another Jensen Huang-related object was put on the auction block earlier this year and hit a record price. The leather Tom Ford jacket that the CEO wore at the Hon Hai (Foxconn) Tech Day in Taipei way back in October 2023 went up on Sotheby’s, where it was estimated that it would fetch somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000. However, the final price ended up at $960,000 — more than a hundred times higher than the jacket’s $9,000 price tag from the manufacturer.

Even though Jensen Huang isn’t a celebrity in the traditional sense, his approachable public persona and success story have made him quite popular among his fans. This “Jensanity” is prevalent in Taiwan, where he was originally from, and many see him as the bearer of Taiwanese pride and treat him like a pop star. It seems that this translates to his rich fans, too, with a few who are willing to spend thousands of dollars just to get their hands on autographed “artifacts” from the billionaire.

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, said artificial intelligence will not destroy humanity by the end of the decade, Bloomberg reports, citing a CBS interview. Huang contends that while AI is developing at an extremely rapid pace, doomsday scenarios because of AI are largely unsubstantiated, and it makes no sense to 'stir fear across America.'

"I completely disagree that AI will destroy the world by 2030," Huang said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning (set to be aired on Sunday).

"I believe the claims of the end of the world, stirring fear across America, and doing it by people who are doing it makes no sense to me. So, they must be doing it for ulterior reasons. Maybe it is political, maybe it is otherwise, maybe it is just attention-grabbing […]. However this is characterized, 2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that is going to be the end of the world."

Huang, who leads the company that leads the market in AI hardware sales, is responding to Evan Hubinger, the former Alignment Science organization lead at Anthropic, who said there was an over 10% chance that AI would destroy humanity within the next decade.

"We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans," Hubinger wrote in an X post. "I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."

Following reports that OpenAI's rogue agents attacked Hugging Face and communicated with each other on abandoned wikis and websites, chief executives of Anthropic and OpenAI called for guardrails and even slowing down development of new AI models, as the dangers they pose are not completely evident even to their developers.

The head of Nvidia states that AI can be safely managed by its developers, so no regulations from governments are needed beyond what is already in place. Meanwhile, he also says that products shipped must be completely safe.

"We should go as fast as we can, irrespective of anyone else," Huang said. "But we would never ever, and never should, ship products before they’re ready and deliver products that are unsafe."

China's progress toward technological self-sufficiency in recent years is undeniable, but there is one thing that the country has so far failed to develop: lithography tools that are on par with those offered by ASML. That shortcoming has greatly hampered its domestic semiconductor industry. But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes China will develop its own advanced lithography systems in just three or four years.

"They are going to get there by 2030," Huang said in an interview with The All-In Podcast (at 43:43). "2030 is just around the corner. The way to think about China is that it is really good at high-volume production. It is just a matter of time[...] so two or three years is just a click; it is nothing. So as far as they are concerned, they are already there."

Huang tends to look optimistically at China's technological development. Specifically, he is known for calling China's AI industry as being 'right behind' American frontier labs, which may well be correct, given how much capital China is investing in AI. But when it comes to the Chinese semiconductor industry in general and its lithography sector in particular, Huang may be too optimistic.

At present, China's leading producer of lithography tools — Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment — can mass-produce a 193-nm ArF dry scanner that can be used to build chips on 90nm-class process technology. While the company has reportedly developed a 28nm-capable ArF immersion scanner, there is no public evidence that such systems are produced in volume and are used for high-volume chip production.

Although there are reports that Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group (a unit, or an affiliate of SMEE) has delivered its first immersion scanner that may be capable of printing chips using 28nm-class process technology, these tools will require extensive qualification before they can be used for high-volume manufacturing of semiconductors, so if deployment follows standard timelines, it will take years before this unit will be used for mass producing chips.

Even assuming that the first scanners are delivered to Chinese chipmakers in 2026, widespread production use before 2028–2029 appears unlikely. Furthermore, matching the capabilities of an early-generation ASML immersion scanner would still leave Chinese lithography suppliers considerably behind ASML's contemporary systems, which makes technological parity in ArF immersion lithography by 2030 highly unlikely.

China is considerably further behind in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. While there are reports that Chinese scientists have managed to develop a laser-produced plasma source that can generate the 13.5-nanometer wavelength light required for the technology, it does not look like China is close to assembling even a prototype EUV scanner itself.

Even if China can assemble an EUV experimental exposure platform without having mastered production-quality immersion DUV, it is hard to imagine a Chinese company producing EUV scanners without solving the hardest problems common to both DUV and EUV technologies. A production lithography scanner requires extraordinary capabilities in wafer and reticle stages, alignment, overlay, projection optics, and metrology, just to name a few.

If China is still struggling to industrialize these capabilities for immersion DUV, there is little reason to assume it has somehow solved them at the substantially more demanding EUV level. But given the potentially existential stakes of the AI race, and the determination of the Chinese government to achieve technological self-sufficiency, it may just indeed be a matter of time.

TIME published its 2026 TIME100 AI list last week, with one notable omission: Jensen Huang, one of eight TIME-designated “Architects of AI,” whose GPUs power the training infrastructure for all frontier AI models and whose company has just reported one of the largest sets of quarterly earnings in American corporate history. AMD CEO Lisa Su is missing too, while Ben Affleck, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Paris Hilton all managed to clear a bar that the heads of the industry’s two dominant GPU makers apparently couldn’t. Aside from TIME’s Architect of AI and joint Person of the Year designation for 2025, Huang has featured on every previous edition of the TIME100 AI. This year, however, Nvidia’s sole entry is Josh Parker, the company’s head of sustainability.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, SMIC co-CEO Liang Mong Song, and Huawei HiSilicon president He Tingbo all appear on the 2026 list, joined by Cerebras’ Andrew Feldman, CoreWeave’s Michael Intrator, and Nscale’s Josh Payne. Together, the roster includes Nvidia’s HBM supplier, two of its biggest GPU cloud customers, its custom-accelerator rivals, and China, which is trying — and so far struggling — to replace Nvidia altogether.

Parker’s profile, which appears under the Thinkers category, focuses on data center energy and water consumption, alongside Nvidia’s tripling of Scope 3 emissions in two years, and the Rubin platform’s shift to 100% liquid cooling. “Nvidia is at the center of the AI revolution,” Parker told TIME.

TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs wrote in the list’s accompanying article that selection was led by editor Ayesha Javed, and that the 100 honorees represent the year’s “key storylines and who, in our opinion, are having the most influence in driving these developments.” Now in its fourth year, this edition of the TIME100 AI appears to have focused especially on featuring the new additions to TIME’s community of AI leaders, with Mark Zuckerberg, Demis Hassabis, Sundar Pichai, and Satya Nadella representing four other honorees, arguably deserving of a space on this year’s list, churned out.

Su’s strong TIME back catalog makes her omission all the stranger still. The magazine named her its 2024 CEO of the Year, put her on the 2024 AI list and the main TIME100 in 2025, and included her among December’s Architects of AI.

Nvidia’s second-quarter results, reported August 26, totaled $96.2 billion in revenue, including $89 billion from data centers, up 117% year-over-year. The company became the first to cross a $5 trillion market cap last October, and posted a $57 billion record quarter three weeks later.

On this day in 2006, AMD confirmed its acquisition of graphics chip firm ATI. AMD stumped up a cash and stock deal worth a total of $5.4B for the Canadian PC graphics innovators. With 20/20 vision now 20 years on, we can see the deal helped AMD prosper on three fronts: continuation and innovation of Radeon GPUs, the rise of the APU, and AMD’s dominance in the console business. That’s not all, of course, and it is also interesting to recall that AMD approached Nvidia before it bought ATI.

AMD CEO Hector Ruiz and ATI CEO Dave Orton appeared together in New York on the morning of July 24, 2006, to publicly announce the deal. Ruiz told the press that the deal, unanimously approved by the directors of both companies, would "reinvent our industry." The AMD CEO went on, “We believe AMD and ATI will drive growth and innovation for the entire industry, enabling our partners to create differentiated solutions and empowering our customers to choose what is best for them.” Orton added that “Joining with AMD will enable us to innovate aggressively on the PC platform.”

In the next couple of years, the ATI graphics brand slowly melted away. For example, the ATI R600 (Terascale 1, unified shader architecture) GPU, which was in development at the time of the acquisition, would become the Radeon HD 2900 series under AMD branding. As a transition product, some HD 2900 XT boxes would still carry ATI packaging and branding. Taking the cooling solution off an AMD graphics card, you might still see an ATI GPU under the thermal paste, all the way up to around 2010. In 2011, Tom’s Hardware published its 25 Years Of Graphics History: A Farewell To ATI, In Pictures, which is a must-read for fans of the era.

While graphics card development rolled on in a tit-for-tat battle with Nvidia, AMD’s next fortuitous chunk of synergy came from integrating its Radeon IP alongside its CPU cores to create APUs. It started this journey with the AMD Fusion line in 2011. Nowadays we have APUs that have taken this vision far further, with the Ryzen AI Max / Max+ (Strix Halo and Gorgon Halo) series. The integrated graphics on these processors pack up to 40 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units and can go toe-to-toe with desktop graphics like the RTX 4060/4070, depending on workload. They also benefit from unified memory, allowing users to configure oodles of VRAM, if they have it spare.

As the Radeon developers forged ahead moving from the GCN to RDNA graphics architecture era, AMD saw an opportunity in the console space. From the early to mid 2010s, AMD made inroads into APU development that meant the processors became attractive solutions for console developers. It still holds pretty tightly to that market today, which has spilled over to handhelds. However, Intel looks far more serious in this market now, with Panther Lake and B390 iGPUs. Moreover, Nvidia could surely make a dent on consoles with Arm plus GeForce semi-custom SoCs if it wasn’t living it up in the lucrative AI market.

Red and green would never be seen

Before the AMD and ATI deal was inked, reports indicated there were chances of a similar merger involving AMD and Nvidia. Our 2012 report on this ‘missed opportunity’ suggests Jensen Huang was being quite difficult during the negotiations. Apparently the man in the leather jacket insisted that he become chief executive of the combined company. That made Hector Ruiz pretty cool on the prospect, so AMD’s attention was diverted towards ATI.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks that American companies should be allowed to use Chinese AI models, even as Washington is trying to ban them. When Axios co-founder Mike Allen asked Huang in an interview if Americans companies should be allowed to use Chinese AI models, Huang responded with “absolutely.” The answer comes right after Chinese firm Moonshot AI released a 2.8T open-weight model called Kimi K3, which — although it isn’t as powerful as frontier models like Fable 5 — is comparable to GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 while costing just a third of these models.

One of the biggest concerns of U.S. leaders have is that these AI models might come with vulnerabilities that the Chinese government can use to attack American interests, but Huang said that this is an incorrect assumption. “There is a misconception that somehow there are backdoors that are somehow connected to China in some way,” said the Nvidia chief. “You download the models, you can fine-tune it, you can enhance it, you can guardrail it as you desire.”

Huang shares the same sentiments about American AI models. Just last month, the U.S. enforced an export restriction on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable 5, citing security threats — although access was eventually restored after its developer placed a filter to block these tools from identifying software vulnerabilities. OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5.6 received the same treatment, and Washington warned the firm that it should not release its latest model without getting the green light from the government. Huant argues that, instead of restricting access to these powerful models at launch, AI firms should make their models available to all and make them more secure through rapid testing and fixes.

But even as he advocated the need for everyone to have access to closed models, Jensen also noted that various industries, such as the sciences and cybersecurity, need open models as well. He claims that these models make AI more secure, as other people can inspect them to look for weaknesses and fix them as required.

“If everything just becomes one single model, one single point of attack, one single source of failure, I think the world is much, much more vulnerable,” Huang said.

As for the market’s negative reaction every time cheaper, open-weight models become available, the Nvidia CEO says that investors misunderstand their impact. Huang said that this happened when DeepSeek arrived for the first time, and it’s happening again with the arrival of Kimi. He says that these open models, which cost less to run, will encourage more people to use AI. So instead of cutting data center demand, these cheaper, more efficient models are actually good for the industry in general because they will drive demand. (And with higher demand, there’s more incentive to build data centers and buy AI GPUs, which is ultimately good for Nvidia.)

‘The Jensen Jacket: Jensen Huang's Tom Ford Leather Jacket’ achieved a hammer price of $960,000 this weekend. High-end auctioneer Sotheby’s listed the leather garment, which was claimed to have been worn at least once by the Nvidia CEO, with a far lower price estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. Happily, the bountiful proceeds of the auction are going to charity.

Bidders could be quite confident that this Tom Ford jacket was genuinely worn by Jensen Huang at one or more landmark product launches, thanks to the work of the PSA [Professional Sports Authenticator]. Specifically, PSA photomatched this jacket and its unique leather wrinkles to the Hon Hai (Foxconn) Tech Day in Taipei on October 18, 2023, where Huang wore it on stage and met with other execs. Various close-up photos in the sales catalog showed telltale signs that this was/is the real deal. Separately, a signature on the garment was authenticated by James Spence Authentication.

The near $1M hammer price achieved is many multiples of the estimate. In our earlier reporting on the sale, we guessed this would happen for a number of reasons. Firstly, we thought Sotheby’s ‘low’ estimate was intentional to draw in the crowds and stoke excitement. Secondly, we mustn’t neglect the importance of the not-so-secret ingredient - Jensanity. And, right now, the AI boom with Nvidia at its center is still growing apace.

You can buy a brand new Tom Ford SS2023 menswear collection jacket, like the one shown, without any infusion of genuine Jensanity, for around $9,000. However, we can’t begrudge the success of this auction as the proceeds are earmarked for charity. The Sotheby’s page says that the auction was organized by Long Journey Ventures to benefit the Edge Institute, a non-profit that convenes people working at the frontiers of tech, science, culture, and society in pop-up villages (Edge Cities) to live together and experiment towards a brighter future. Fellowships, grants, and residencies for the next generation of young builders will be funded by this bumper lump of cash.

One of Jensen Huang’s used leather jackets is up for auction, posted with an estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. Sotheby’s, better known as a purveyor of blockbuster fine art and historic artifacts, is auctioning this item of worn clothing. The storied auction house asserts this is a genuine article, as worn by the Nvidia CEO at an event in Taipei in 2023. It has also made sure the signature within the garment has been professionally authenticated. Having watched a few tech memorabilia auctions lately, I’d say the official estimate is on the low side.

Sotheby’s auction is titled ‘The Jensen Jacket: Jensen Huang's Tom Ford Leather Jacket.’ Its catalog notes that this signature black leather jacket has been Huang’s standard attire for more than a decade and has become “associated with some of the most consequential moments in modern technology.” This jacket, or one like it, has been on stage helping to define the rise of artificial intelligence. It may also have been worn by the Nvidia CEO visiting a humble street food vendor in a Taiwan night market.

So, it is important to understand that this is one of many jackets Huang has sported during keynotes, announcements, and special events over the years. Like any good auction house, Sotheby's has thus certified the provenance of this particular garment.

“The Jacket has been photomatched by PSA [Professional Sports Authenticator] to Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the Hon Hai [Foxconn] Tech Day in Taipei on October 18, 2023,” writes Sotheby’s in its auction catalog. A very specific array of creases and deformities in the right-breast pocket flap appears to confirm that this jacket was worn by the Nvidia CEO at the Hon Hai [Foxconn] Tech Day in Taipei in October 2023. Sotheby’s also states that “The signature has been authenticated by James Spence Authentication.”

Any readers interested in grabbing this jacket will likely be interested in the condition of the garment. There are a few pictures on the catalog page, including a close-up, which was used to ‘photomatch’ this particular 2023 Tom Ford-made sample. As a Sotheby’s account holder, I also read the condition report, which begins with the assertion that “The Jacket and signature are in pristine condition.” But there follows a lot of legal jargon which can be summed up as – the actual condition and appearance of the jacket might not be perfect, nor look exactly like the photographic representations of it.

If you do splash your cash on this old jacket, you should be pleased to know that your hard-earned money will be going to charity. Sotheby’s says that the sale was organized by Long Journey Ventures to benefit the Edge Institute, described as “a non-profit that convenes people working at the frontiers of tech, science, culture, and society in pop-up villages (Edge Cities) to live together and experiment towards a brighter future.”

A low estimate to attract bidders?

Does the $40,000 to $60,000 estimate take into account the jacket's Jensanity factor, or AI inflation? Also, we are in an AI boom right now, with skyrocketing prices and valuations, yet people might have spent more than the top estimate for a mere NFT of this jacket a few years ago.

On a cautious note, though, we aren’t sure how many of these jackets the Nvidia CEO has in his wardrobe. And if there were another 10 or 20 that may someday be released for sale, then the expected price could slide dramatically.

A brand new Tom Ford SS2023 menswear collection jacket, without a sprinkle of genuine Jensanity, costs around $9,000. In that context, Sotheby’s estimate puts only a modest premium on this verified genuine Jensen Huang-worn and signed artifact.

When not being spotted at night markets or meeting crowds of adoring fans, the hardware industry’s biggest celebrity, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, spent most of his time at Computex this week making the case that computing as we know it is collapsing into one repeatable pattern built for AI agents; a blueprint that now runs across the cloud, the PC, the car, and the robot.

"There's a new computing pattern," the Nvidia CEO told reporters at a press gaggle the day after his GTC Taipei keynote, describing an agent architecture he calls a harness that orchestrates reasoning, memory, and tool use the same way whether it sits in a data center or a laptop.

He tied that claim to every product Nvidia detailed at the show, from the Vera data-center CPU now in full production to RTX Spark, its first Windows PC platform, shipping in laptops this fall.

One pattern, every machine

Huang told the room that he repeats the same keynote structure on purpose. "Every time I give you a keynote, it's like Top Gun 17, and it's exactly the same architecture," he said, "because I want you to know that the future of computing is this." The pattern begins with training and inference in the cloud and pushes outward to everything else: "Every edge device will become autonomous. Every edge device will have agentic systems."

He ran that blueprint through self-driving cars, humanoid robots, Nokia base stations, and imaging satellites, casting each as the same agent profile on different hardware. Curiously, the self-driving car got quite a bit of airtime, with Huang describing Nvidia's Alpamayo driving stack as a system that reasons in language rather than reacting to images, one that could read a "skill file" and watch a tutorial video to operate unfamiliar machinery the way a person would. "That's how autonomous vehicles are going to work in the future," he said. "It's essentially that agentic computing pattern with a physical AI model."

A CPU that generates tokens, not cores

Vera, on the data center side, is an 88-core Arm processor that Nvidia is now in full production with, pitching it as a chip built for agents rather than human users. "We built Vera for agents to use," Huang said. "Until six months ago, there were no agents, so that's the definition of a $0 billion market."

A hyperscale CPU piles on cores because humans lease them by the hundred, where an agent, Huang argued, "doesn't want to rent the CPU core, the agent wants to generate tokens." That pushed Nvidia toward single-thread speed and memory bandwidth over core count, and Huang claimed Vera offers the largest step up in single-threaded performance he has seen "in 25 years." His reasoning ties back to latency: "Humans are more patient than agents. Agents, they're working at nanosecond scale, not second scale."

Nvidia claims 1.8 times faster task completion than x86 and a 1.5 times instructions-per-clock gain over its Grace predecessor, with a 256-chip liquid-cooled Vera rack it says reaches six times the throughput of a conventional CPU rack. The chip ships on the back of nearly 2.5 million Grace units sold, and Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, ByteDance, CoreWeave, and Oracle are named as early customers. CFO Colette Kress told investors on Nvidia's latest earnings call that the company sees "nearly $20 billion in total CPU revenue this year".

Phoronix's first public Vera benchmarks in May measured it roughly 10% ahead of AMD's 64-core EPYC 9575F and about 55% ahead of Intel's 128-core Xeon 6980P across selected Linux workloads. Nvidia ran those tests on pre-production silicon at its own headquarters, limited them to workloads it considers relevant, and, by Phoronix's account, switched off CPU power and frequency monitoring for the session.

Reinventing the PC after 40 years

As for RTX Spark, Huang says that it’s the first real rethink of the PC in four decades. "We have an opportunity after 40 years to go reinvent it for the age of AI," he said, predicting the machine shifts "from your PC being a tool to now really your PC being your system." He pushed even further: "Your laptop is going to be your R2-D2."

The top RTX Spark part, internally N1X, pairs a 20-core Arm CPU built by MediaTek (10 Cortex-X925 performance cores and 10 Cortex-A725 efficiency cores) with a Blackwell GPU carrying 6,144 CUDA cores, up to 128GB of LPDDR5X unified memory, and a 600 GB/s NVLink-C2C link, all on TSMC's 3nm node. Huang justified these specs with the same impatience he applied to Vera, arguing that an agent driving the machine won’t wait, so the software it touches, from Adobe to Blender, "cannot be slow."

The platform is launching in a market that Qualcomm had effectively dominated until its Windows on Arm exclusivity with Microsoft lapsed. Fall 2026 laptops are confirmed from Microsoft, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI, with Acer and Gigabyte to follow, and Nvidia says anti-cheat engines, including Easy Anti-Cheat and Denuvo, run natively on the chip. Asked why Nvidia would enter a low-margin business it has steered clear of for years, Huang said, "We don't really have to choose. The real question is, can we make a contribution?"

Vera's 88 cores are Nvidia's own custom Olympus design, its first ground-up server core since the Denver and Carmel projects, while RTX Spark's 20 cores are Arm's off-the-shelf Cortex reference designs licensed through MediaTek, one of them already a generation old. Huang's "same pattern everywhere" runs, at the silicon level, on two different CPUs.

When asked whether the Olympus cores would come to Windows PCs, Huang declined to commit. "Our preference is to use off-the-shelf cores whenever we can, because Arm also builds good cores," he said, adding that Olympus was pushed toward single-thread speed in a way standard many-core Arm parts weren’t: "We wanted to push single-threaded performance as far as we could push it." The first PC chip using Nvidia's own cores isn’t expected until 2028. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley estimates Vera at around $5,000 per socket inside a vertically integrated rack.

What about memory?

DRAM contract prices have climbed sharply through 2026 as makers divert wafers to high-bandwidth memory, and Nvidia remains short of supply even as it locks in capacity, by Huang's own account: "We have enough supply for very robust growth. However, we are supply constrained."

"One of the best ways to improve memory use is to use extremely, extremely low precision," Huang said, pointing to NVFP4, Nvidia's 4-bit floating-point format that scales between four, eight, 16, and 32 bits and roughly doubles the parameters that fit in a given memory pool, the trick that lets RTX Spark hold larger models in its 128GB. He paired it with neural texture compression that cuts game texture memory by up to eight times in Nvidia's demos. At SK hynix's booth during the show, Huang signed an HBM4E wafer with the words "Please Make More."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called on Super Micro Computer to strengthen its export compliance controls after arriving in Taipei on Saturday, months after U.S. federal prosecutors charged the server maker's co-founder and two others with conspiring to smuggle approximately $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia-equipped servers to China through shell companies in Southeast Asia.

Huang told reporters at Songshan Airport that Nvidia insists its partners follow U.S. trade rules. "We insist our partners are compliant. We hope that they will enhance and improve their regulation compliance and prevent that from happening in the future," Huang said in an address to the media.

Huang's comments came days after Taiwan launched its first formal crackdown on illicit AI hardware exports. The Keelung District Prosecutors' Office announced earlier this week that three suspects had submitted fraudulent shipping declarations to export Super Micro servers containing Nvidia AI chips to China, Hong Kong, and Macau.

The Taiwan case is separate from, but closely related to, the much larger U.S. federal prosecution unsealed in March. That indictment charged Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw and two others with conspiring to smuggle approximately $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia-equipped servers to China through shell companies in Southeast Asia. Liaw has pleaded not guilty, and Supermicro has said it’s not named as a defendant and is cooperating with the investigation.

In the same press scrum at Songshan Airport, Huang confirmed that China is included in the $200 billion addressable market he projected for Nvidia's upcoming Vera CPU during the company's earnings call on May 20th. "H200 has been licensed to ship to China. It would be terrific to be able to serve that market. The Chinese market is very important. It's very large, of course," Huang told reporters, according to Reuters.

Despite the licensing approval, not a single H200 has been delivered to a Chinese customer. While roughly 10 Chinese firms have been cleared to purchase the chip, shipments haven’t started, and President Trump's talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing earlier this month produced no breakthrough on Nvidia chip sales.

Huang is in Taipei ahead of Nvidia's GTC Taipei event and his Computex keynote on June 1st, where he’s expected to explore the Vera Rubin platform's software stack. He described the platform as "the largest product launch, probably in the history of Taiwan," noting that each Vera Rubin NVL72 system contains nearly 2 million parts and involves around 150 Taiwanese ecosystem partners.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang served as a guest speaker at Stanford’s CS 153 Frontier Systems course and discussed the hardware that powers AI systems today. One of the topics covered in the YouTube session is his stance on granting “adversarial countries” access to Nvidia chips. It’s widely known that the Nvidia chief is against export controls on AI chips, saying that it was a failure and has completely backfired.

Other industry leaders do not take a similar stance, with Anthropic's head, Dario Amodei, comparing selling advanced AI chips to China to selling nuclear weapons to North Korea. Jensen did not take this comparison too kindly, saying it does not make any sense.

“What I’m fundamentally against, and it makes no sense, it makes no sense in this moment, is to compare Nvidia GPUs to atomic bombs. There are a billion people with Nvidia GPUs; I advocate Nvidia GPUs to all of you, I advocate Nvidia GPUs to my family, my kids, to people I love — but I don’t advocate atomic bombs to anybody,” the Nvidia CEO said. “So that analogy is stupid. And so, so if you start from there, you can’t finish a thought — if you start from believing that, you can’t finish the rest of the thoughts.”

Jensen Huang is a firm believer that the world should use the American tech stack and that it would be detrimental to the U.S.’s advantage if it were to block a nation from accessing it. Nvidia has a global advantage in that it’s the largest and most popular manufacturer of AI chips, and its technologies, like the CUDA architecture, drive the progress of most of the world’s AI developers. Keeping this technology widely available to anyone would mean that most of the world's AI—whether developed in the U.S. or built in China — runs on American hardware.

However, critics point out that this could fuel the nation’s adversaries, enabling them to develop and train advanced artificial intelligence for military purposes using Nvidia chips. Jensen said that the Chinese military will avoid U.S. AI tech, much like how the Pentagon does not use Chinese systems. The company also denied providing technical assistance for DeepSeek to improve its training efficiency on models, which were later used by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). However, public documents revealed that some Chinese universities with deep ties to China’s military-industrial complex acquired Super Micro servers configured with Nvidia A100 AI GPUs.

Unlike nuclear missiles and atomic bombs, AI GPUs aren’t strictly military systems designed for a specific mission. Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that has applications in science, research, business, and many other industries. However, its flexibility also makes it a dual-use technology, meaning it can be used in civilian and military contexts. It is the latter application that has U.S. policymakers worried, in which the same hardware and AI models can be leveraged by armed forces for operational use, such as intelligence and threat analysis, autonomous systems, simulations, and more. This could erode the U.S.’s technological and military edge and give its adversaries a strategic advantage.

Both sides of the argument have valid points — America has the advantage as the key provider of AI technologies worldwide, and it makes sense to keep it that way. However, it also does not want its rivals to have access to advanced technologies that could accelerate their capabilities and narrow the United States’ lead in defense technologies. Unfortunately, we can only tell which approach proves to be more effective years, if not decades, from today.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is surprisingly not among the business leaders invited to join President Donald Trump as he visits China from May 13 to 15, 2026. One source familiar with the matter confirmed this with Bloomberg, saying that the leather-clad chief of the most valuable company in the world isn’t on the guest list, which includes Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk. These executives represent significant business interests in China, but, for one reason or another, the White House passed over Huang this time.

Jensen is a fixture around Washington, and he’s been included in several of Trump’s state visits. He was part of the presidential entourage in the Middle East and the UK, and he was even praised by the president in London last year, where Trump said, “You’re taking over the world, Jensen.” So, his exclusion from the president’s China state visit is quite a surprise to many, especially as Trump approved Nvidia H200 exports to China in late 2025.

The AI chip maker used to be the driving force of China’s AI industry, that is, until the U.S. blocked its most advanced semiconductors over concerns that American “dual-use” technologies could be diverted towards China’s military programs. Nvidia made several adjustments to let Chinese companies have access to its hardware with the introduction of defanged versions of its latest chips, like the H20, but even that was disallowed in April 2025.

This ban caused Nvidia’s China market share to plummet from a high of 95% to essentially zero, allowing homegrown chipmakers like Huawei, Cambricon, Alibaba, and Baidu to gain ground as they fill the vacuum left behind by the American chipmaker. Even though Trump eventually allowed Chinese companies to purchase H200 chips once again (provided Nvidia secures a license to sell them to a firm), Beijing stepped in and told its customs officers to stop the chips at the border. It has been almost six months since the White House gave Nvidia the go-signal to sell the H200, but U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the company has yet to sell a single H200 AI GPU to China.

Even though Beijing understands that its AI companies need advanced hardware, like Nvidia’s Blackwell and upcoming Vera Rubin chips, it also needs to balance this with its desire to have a domestic semiconductor industry that can compete against what the U.S. offers. This is likely the reason why Nvidia’s H200 chip is still in regulatory limbo. Nevertheless, China’s access to the latest AI chips has always been a sticking point in its trade negotiations with the U.S, Bloomberg reports. American Enterprise Institute fellow Ryan Fedasiuk also told the publication that Huang’s absence from Trump’s entourage is a “strong signal” to the CCP that Washington will not budge on its stance when it comes to these high-end AI chips.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company's market share of AI accelerators in China has now dropped to 0%. The drop is staggering, given that the company owned the lion's share of China's AI accelerator market just two years ago.

"In China, we have now dropped to zero," Huang said in an interview with the Special Competitive Studies Project, a bipartisan initiative by American lawmakers aimed at ensuring long-term competitiveness of the U.S. "Conceding an entire market the size of China probably does not make a lot of strategic sense, so I think that has already largely backfired. Maybe it made sense at the time, but I think the policy really needs to be dynamic and needs to stay with the times."

"I think it would be fairly safe to say that having American chip companies and other companies in China makes a lot of sense."

Earlier this year, tech research firm Bernstein estimated that Nvidia’s share of China’s AI GPU market could fall from 66% in 2024 to roughly 8% in the coming years, both due to restrictions imposed by the U.S. government and because domestic vendors are moving to cover up to 80% of demand. According to Huang, this happened much later, though again, he talks only about Nvidia's direct sales to Chinese customers.

Meanwhile, Huang warns that even without leading AI GPUs and software stacks developed in America, China remains a formidable competitor when it comes to frontier AI models.

"American companies win around the world," Huang said. "The argument there is that across the five-layer cake, there's one particular layer that is too important because in the others, China can get ahead. They have cheaper energy. They have incredible talent. So, they [have] the number of science and math experts, and as a result of that, the number of AI researchers in China is quite extraordinary, it's one of their national treasures."

Given the situation, Huang also contends that U.S. export controls may be strategically counterproductive. He argues that conceding a market of that scale accelerates China's push toward self-sufficiency, while continued participation of American companies in that market would help extend the global reach of the American AI technology stack.

Indeed, Chinese developers are increasingly relying on local hardware, with companies like Huawei, Cambricon, Moore Threads, and MetaX advancing both silicon and software. In software — the so-called CUDA moat in particular — remains the main frontier of American AI technology in China that local companies have yet to conquer.

Ultimately, Huang warns that fear-driven narratives and export controls could slow the deployment of AI more broadly as China and other regions embrace it more aggressively as an economic tool. Long-term leadership will depend less on restricting global rivals and more on ensuring that the American AI ecosystem dominates globally, according to Huang.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang got into a heated debate during a recent podcast, during which he talked with Dwarkesh Patel about whether the U.S. should be selling chips to China. During part of the conversation, which you can see by expanding the tweet embedded below, Patel said he doesn’t know whether it’s actually good to give Chinese access to AI chips. Still, since he likes to play devil’s advocate during his interviews, where he takes an opposing stance to his guest, he asked the leather-clad chief of the world's largest AI chipmaker if doing so is a threat to American companies and national security.

Patel gave Anthropic’s Claude Mythos as an example for his argument, which apparently revealed “thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities” in “every major operating system and every major web browser.” He said that if China had access to the massive amounts of compute that Nvidia delivers, it could probably have used it to develop cyber-offensive capabilities that threaten the United States' security. Huang had a fairly nuanced response to this, but he also first pointed out that Mythos was trained on “fairly mundane capacity, and a fairly mundane amount of it."

You can expand the tweet above to see the meat of the tense exchange, which is about three minutes long.

Jensen says China already has access to a lot of compute power. Although Nvidia still makes the most advanced, most efficient chips, he argues that China can still create advanced AI models through sheer brute force, like Huawei’s AI CloudMatrix cluster. So, keeping the chipmaker out of the country would not stop its development of frontier AI models and would only result in Chinese AI being trained outside of the American tech stack.

“We want to make sure that all the AI developers in the world are developing on the American tech stack, and making the contributions, the advancements of AI — especially when it’s open source — available to the American ecosystem,” Huang said. “It would be extremely foolish to create two ecosystem: the open-source ecosystem, and it only runs on a foreign tech stack, and a closed ecosystem that runs on the American tech stack. I think that would be a horrible outcome for the United States.”

Another argument against selling advanced AI chips to China is that it will do the same thing the country did with iPhones and Tesla. While these two products are still leaders in their markets, many Chinese companies are now building products that can compete with them on price, features, and quality. This could also happen in the AI chip industry. If and when Chinese-made AI chips get the same capabilities as Nvidia’s latest offerings, couldn’t Chinese AI companies just easily switch over to a Chinese AI chip in the future, should it become available, or if Beijing forces them to?

“We have to keep innovating and, as you probably know, our share is growing, not decreasing. The premise that even if we competed in China, that we’re going to lose that market anyways… You’re not talking to somebody who woke up a loser,” Huang said. “That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me.”

He then went on to say that AI chips aren’t as simple as vehicles, where users can easily swap one brand for another daily. “Computing is not like that. There’s a reason why the x86 deal exists. There’s a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems are hard to replace; it costs an enormous amount of time and energy, and most people don’t want to do it. So, it’s our job to continue to nurture that ecosystem, to keep advancing the technology so that we can compete in the marketplace,” the Nvidia chief added.

“Conceding a marketplace based on the premise you described, I simply can’t acknowledge that. It makes no sense. Because I don’t think that the United States is a loser. Our industry is not a loser. That losing proposition, that losing mindset, makes no sense to me.”

The biggest point Jensen makes is that AI technology has five layers — energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications — and that none should be ignored just for the sake of one. He says, “Why are you causing one layer of the AI industry to lose an entire market so that you could benefit from another layer of the AI industry? There are five layers, and every single layer has to succeed. The layer that has to succeed most is actually the AI applications. Why are you so fixated on that AI model? That one company? For what reason?”

You can watch the complete podcast episode below.

U.S. Senators Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have jointly written a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, urging him to take “immediate action” on the diversion of American AI chips to China. According to the Financial Times, the two legislators made the written statement after three Super Micro employees, including one of its co-founders, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, have been charged with smuggling $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia hardware to China.

“We urge all necessary and appropriate actions, including the immediate pausing, suspension, or other reconsideration of all active export licenses covering advanced Nvidia AI chips and server systems destined for…China as well as intermediaries in south-east Asia, including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore,” the senators said in their correspondence to Lutnick. They also said they refuted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s claims of no evidence of chip diversion of his company’s most powerful products, saying that “These statements were not simply wrong in hindsight. They were contradicted by reporting available at the time and potentially misled U.S. officials.”

Despite this, an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware, “Strict compliance is a top priority for Nvidia. We continue to work closely with our customers and the government on compliance programs as export regulations have expanded.” Furthermore, the company claims that “Unlawful diversion of controlled U.S. computers to China is a losing proposition across the board — Nvidia does not provide any service or support for such systems, and the enforcement mechanisms are rigorous and effective.”

Jensen Huang has been lobbying for the approval of the sale of Nvidia’s products to China, arguing that it’s advantageous for the U.S. to have Chinese companies using its technologies. All his effort finally came to fruition in December 2025, after President Donald Trump made a complete U-turn and allowed Chinese tech companies to acquire Nvidia H200 chips. After a few months of uncertainty from Beijing, the company was finally able to confirm an order for the H200 and is restarting the manufacture of these older AI chips.

Still, the lawmakers are concerned about China’s access to the U.S. latest chips, including Nvidia’s Blackwell and upcoming Vera Rubin AI GPUs. In fact, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will reportedly vote on the bill that will force chipmakers to add geo-tracking technology to their high-end gaming and AI GPUs. Although Nvidia is against such measures, it has developed a software tracking solution that will give operators a rough idea of where these Blackwell GPUs are located.

“Amazon can tell you where a package is at any given moment,” Ryan Fedasiuk, a technology security expert from the American Enterprise Institute, told the Financial Times. “There is no reason the most powerful AI hardware on earth should have a less sophisticated chain-of-custody system than a pair of sneakers.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that he’ll be deeply alarmed if an engineer getting paid $500,000 a year does not consume at $250,000 worth of AI tokens to get their job done. The leather-clad chief of the world’s most valuable AI company said this during an episode of the All-In Podcast shot on the last day of Nvidia GTC 2026, after one of the hosts asked Huang if he’s spending around $2 billion a year on tokens for the Nvidia engineering team, with Jensen answering, “We’re trying to.”

“Let me give you a thought experiment. Let’s say you have a software engineer or AI researcher, and you pay them $500,000 a year,” the Nvidia CEO said. He also added, “At the end of the year, I’m going to ask him how much did you spend in tokens. And [if] that person said $5,000, I will go ape something else. If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed.” Huang went on to compare an employee not using AI tokens to a chip designer saying that they will use paper and pencil and eschew CAD tools to get their work done.

Jensen compared today’s AI tools to machinery that was invented during the industrial revolution, which allowed workers to physically do things that, in the past, were either too heavy, too big, or took too long. Now, it seems that the Nvidia CEO wants to use AI for mental tasks so that Nvidia engineers can focus on creativity. “It’s just a new way of doing computer programming. In the past, we code. In the future, we’re going to write ideas, architectures, specifications,” Huang said. “I think that every engineer is going to have a hundred agents.”

It seems that the Nvidia CEO isn’t the only one investing in AI tokens for his employees to freely use. According to Business Insider, many tech companies are now starting to offer guaranteed access to AI inference power as part of the remuneration package to candidates. That thought is that by giving people generous amounts of AI tokens, they’d be able to amplify their productivity by as much as 10 times or more.

However, using AI in the corporate setting is not without its issues. There have been reports that more than half of CEOs have yet to see clear benefits from AI deployments, with only about 12% getting higher revenues and reduces costs. We’ve also seen several AI-related outages with Amazon Web Services, with one report saying that Amazon has called its engineers for a meeting to discuss issues created by “Gen-AI assisted changes” that had “high blast radius.” And although Microsoft did not say anything about AI, it promised to fix Windows 11’s most annoying flaws to restore its reputation several months after its CEO revealed that AI writes up to 30% of Microsoft’s code.

At a press Q&A with Tom's Hardware at GTC 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang downplayed criticism of DLSS 5, the company's new use of AI and neural rendering to infer how certain features of games would look if they were more photorealistic.

Since the debut of the feature, some critics have vocally complained on social media that the technology is making games look worse, homogenous, or only show Nvidia's view of the world. Much of the criticism has focused on the updated appearances of Resident Evil Requiem's Grace Ashcroft and Leon Kennedy.

"Since DLSS 5 was revealed yesterday, there's been a pretty vocal response from some of the gaming community that the technology appears to make games appear worse, homogenous, or show only NVIDIA's view of how games should look. How do you feel about that criticism?' asked Tom's Hardware editor-in-chief Paul Alcorn.

"Well, first of all, they're completely wrong," Huang said in response. "The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the of geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI," Huang continued.

He added that developers can still "fine-tune the generative AI" to make it match their style, adding that DLSS 5 adds generative capability to the existing geometry of the game, but that it "doesn't change the artistic control."

"It’s not post-processing, it’s not post-processing at the frame level, it’s generative control at the geometry level," he said.

Huang also said that developers can try the tool and see how they want to use it, suggesting that it's up to a developer to try to make a "toon shader" or see if the game should be "made of glass."

"All of that is in the control — direct control — of the game developer," he said. This is very different than generative AI; it’s content-control generative AI. That’s why we call it neural rendering."

We'll see if the vocal gamers who say they dislike what they see change their mind as we see more. DLSS 5 is set to launch in the fall, and there will likely be far more demos of this technology that are more fully baked before then.

Update 3/19/2026 4:38pm PT: Added full text of question to Jensen.

Regulatory filings just revealed that Nvidia earmarked a $4-million bonus for its CEO, Jensen Huang, if the company hits specific financial targets by January 31, 2027. This is a huge amount for the average person, but, according to Reuters, the leather-clad executive’s compensation package for 2025 totaled to $49.9 million, with 77% of its value, around $39.8 million, made up of stock awards. This means that the tech executive’s financial incentive to hit targets is less than 10% of his gross annual salary.

Mr. Huang’s bonus will be paid out in cash, allowing him to spend it as he pleases (like buying a Mercedes Benz for his parents) without affecting his ownership or the future value of his shares. But it’s actually the stock awards that are driving his wealth, putting Jensen among the 10 richest people on the planet, with his value estimated to be around $150 billion. In fact, he sold 6 million Nvidia shares in June of last year, which was announced about three months earlier, and is estimated to be worth around $925 million. This makes the $4-million bonus a drop in the bucket of what he could potentially make in a year by selling some of his holdings.

We should note, though, that the Nvidia CEO won’t take home the entire $4 million. Because it will be paid out in cash, he will have to pay both Federal and State income taxes on it, as well as other taxes. In the end, it’s estimated he will receive $2 to $2.5 million from the bonus. It’s for this reason that some executives prefer their bonuses to be paid in stock — aside from potentially making their bonuses larger when share prices go higher, it also means that they don’t have to pay income taxes until they sell their holdings.

Even though Huang has been at the helm of Nvidia since its founding, he didn’t get consistent salary increases. In fact, he only received a hike in his base pay last year, after staying at the same level for a decade, and that was only increased so that his compensation would stay at a similar level as his peers. Nvidia’s filing did not mention any increases for Jensen this year, despite the company reporting record-breaking annual revenues, in the face of challenges in China. So, if the CEO can keep this momentum, he’ll get that 7-digit bonus as part of his reward. But with Jensen Huang owning about 3.5% of Nvidia, a positive market performance should be more than enough to make up for the 'paltry' $4-million bonus he’ll get for hitting the company’s fiscal targets.

As the world reels from the consequences of the AI boom, Nvidia — both a benefactor and beneficiary — is busy enjoying its fruits. Speaking at a press conference recently, CEO Jensen Huang shared his views on various topics, but the bulk of the discussion focused on bottlenecks in data center buildouts. This is where he went on a pro-scarcity line of thought that can best be described as controversial.

"I love constraints... because in a world of constraint, you have no choice but to choose the best," said Huang. He explained that a lack of options will force companies to go with the highest-end hardware instead of experimenting with cheaper alternatives. AI firms won’t fill their data centers with arbitrary hardware when “land, power, and shell are constrained."

The exec left no room for subtlety by doubling down on his argument and saying, "Because everything is so constrained, if [I] choose poorly, [my] revenues are affected, everything is affected. They can’t choose poorly." Those words reflect an almost unapologetic perspective that champions efficiency. When supply becomes tight, no one wants to take risks, so the safest bet becomes the most sensible one.

And it's not just GPUs that Nvidia has; it can lay down the entire infrastructure of a data center, which Jensen kindly reminded everyone of: "From the moment you secure the capacity, we’re gonna be able to stand up an entire factory for you. We’re the only company in the world that can come into your company and help you stand up an entire AI factory."

These comments are more specific than broad strokes about how the prevailing component shortages are actually beneficial to the trillion-dollar corporation. But the thing is, AI eating up all the production lines affects everyone else, too, like gamers, who are now left with triple-priced memory and storage. GPUs are getting more expensive as well, and the AI boom is showing no signs of slowing down.

"You know, if you set up a factory, a plant, a DRAM plant, and I come in and say, “You know what? Go ahead and set up the DRAM plant because I’m gonna use it,” that goes a long way. You might as well take that to the bank, as many of them have. I think the fact that everything is scarce is fantastic for us." That last line might be particularly irksome because it's so disconnected from what the average person is experiencing.

Gaming accounts for only 8-9% of Nvidia's total revenue, with data centers by far the largest contributor, so it's no surprise the company is happy to sell the AGI dream. Enthusiasts going bankrupt thanks to their next RAM purchase is not Nvidia's concern.

Huang ended his thoughts by saying, "I've got all the memories, I've got all the wafers, I got all the CoWoS," referring to how his company is basically the strongest negotiator in the industry right now. He added, "I've got all the packaging, I've got all the systems, I've got all the connectors, I got all the cables. Everything from copper to multilayer ceramic capacitors, everything is secured."

As for the regular earthlings, make sure you enjoy that 9 GB RTX 5050.

Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, has rebuffed claims that the U.S. intends to shift 40% of Taiwan's semiconductor capacity to the U.S., therefore removing the island's silicon shield, reports DigiTimes. He insisted that the global fab construction represents new capacity growth rather than relocation. Haung also said that TSMC must expand worldwide to meet surging AI-driven demand for chips and keep Taiwan as its stronghold.

Huang explained that demand for wafers is now outpacing what Taiwan's power grid can physically support, making overseas production a necessity rather than a political manoeuvre. He said that while TSMC will build and expand fabs in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, a substantial share of its output will remain in Taiwan, as no other region can replace the island's manufacturing ecosystem. According to Huang, spreading production across multiple regions strengthens resilience for both Taiwan and the U.S. and prevents supply bottlenecks as AI hardware volumes rise sharply.

For Nvidia, which sells everything it can produce both in Taiwan and the U.S., vast manufacturing capacities are crucial. Meanwhile, getting enough memory — HBM, DDR5, GDDR7, LPDDR5X, or even NAND — is as crucial for the company as getting enough compute silicon. To that end, production capacities for DRAM and NAND in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and eventually the U.S. are just as important to Nvidia as logic production. Huang said the company is coordinating closely with all major HBM suppliers —Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron Technology — to secure the volumes required for its next-generation AI accelerators, namely Rubin.

When it comes to geopolitics, Huang said that lawmakers must balance three competing goals: national security, technological leadership, and economic leadership. Therefore, he dismissed remarks by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who compared exporting advanced AI processors to China to 'selling nuclear weapons to North Korea,' and reminded that the current U.S. government has determined that selling Nvidia's H200 to Chinese entities does not undermine national security. However, he noted that it is now up to the Chinese government to let these processors into the country, as the company is awaiting regulatory clearance from Chinese authorities.

During his Taiwan visit, Huang plans to attend internal Nvidia meetings and Lunar New Year events, as well as to meet TSMC founder Morris Chang and chairman C.C. Wei.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang lamented during an interview at the 2026 World Economic Forum gathering purchasing “the most expensive car in the world.” According to the leather-clad CEO, he regretted cashing out some of his company stock after its 1999 IPO to buy his parents a nice car, although he also said they still have the vehicle.

“My only regret was at the IPO. After the IPO, I wanted to buy my parents something nice, and so I sold Nvidia stock at a valuation of $300 million — the company was at a valuation of $300 million — and I bought them a Mercedes S-Class,” Huang said. “It is the most expensive car in the world. They regret it.” Thankfully, when the host asked, “Do they still have it?” Jensen answered, “Oh, sure. Yeah, they still have it.”

The S-Class was Mercedes-Benz’s top-of-the-line offering back in 1999, and given that Huang just received a massive windfall after Nvidia’s IPO, we can assume that he bought the most expensive S600 trim, which came with a 6-liter V12 engine. Multiple sources indicate that this vehicle cost around $135,000 back then, depending on the options. With Nvidia’s stock price at $12 per share at the time, Jensen likely sold around 11,250 shares to afford the Mercedes.

Nvidia shares have made several splits since then:

So, if Huang decided to gift his parents Nvidia shares instead of an S600, they’d probably have 5,400,000 shares of company stock right now. Aside from the number of shares, its value has also skyrocketed, with each share sitting at around $187 at the time of writing (5.4 million shares are currently valued at $1,009,800,000). This far eclipses the price tag of the bespoke Rolls-Royce Droptail, currently the most expensive new car in the world, worth $32 million apiece, with only four units being made.

One could say that this was a bad investment for Jensen, and his parents also seem to agree. Nevertheless, that amount is just a drop in the bucket for the CEO. After all, even though he took out 6 million shares just last year, that is still a minuscule amount compared to the estimated $123 billion he holds in Nvidia stock.

Artificial intelligence is expected to reshape the labor market by eliminating white-collar positions that do not require a lot of creativity or experience, but at the same time increase demand for blue-collar employees like construction workers, electricians, or plumbers, as AI infrastructure requires a massive built-out, according to Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia. That build-out spans many industries, so while some roles will vanish, others will flourish, reports Bloomberg.

"This is the largest infrastructure buildout in human history that is going to create a lot of jobs," Huang said in a conversation with Laurence D. Fink, the head of BlackRock, at the World Economic Forum 2026. "We are going to have plumbers, electricians, construction and steel workers, network technicians, and people who install and fit out the equipment. In the United States we are seeing quite a significant boom in [these areas]: salaries have gone up, nearly doubled. We are talking about six-figure salaries for people who are building uh chip factories or computer factories or AI factories. We have a great shortage in that."

However, the benefits of AI-driven growth are unevenly distributed across the labor market. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei once warned that AI-enabled automation could trigger a 'white-collar bloodbath,' which could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level office jobs. He noted that Anthropic's Claude AI has become particularly great at coding tasks, which could displace junior software developers and even erode portions of more senior software engineering work.

Still, even Amodei believes the long-term gains from AI will outweigh the damage. Nonetheless, he warns that large-scale unemployment or underemployment remains a serious risk over the next five years.

By contrast, Huang argues that some professions that can greatly benefit from both AI and human touch will actually increase demand for certain specialists, which will lift certain industries to new heights.

"Ten years ago, one of the first professions that everybody thought was going to get wiped out was radiology," Huang noted. "The reason for that was that the first thing AI [gpy] superhuman in capability was computer vision, and one of the largest applications of computer vision is studying scans by radiologists. Well, 10 years later, it is true that AI has now completely permeated and diffused into every aspect of radiology. It is true that radiologists use AI to study scans. […] However, […] the number of radiologists have gone up. Is that because a lack of trust of or is that because the human interaction with the results of AI is a better outcome? […] The fact that they are able to study scans now infinitely fast allows them to spend more time with patients diagnosing their disease, interacting with the patients, interacting with other clinicians. […] As a result of that, the number of patients that the hospital can see has gone up, [driving revenues of hospitals]."

In short, while AI can be a disaster for certain industries and professions, its impact on the quality of life will likely be comparable to the impact of electricity, automobiles, computers, broadband Internet, and telecommunications, all of which created many more professions and employment opportunities than they eliminated. However, one should note that the impact of AI can be compared to the cumulative impact of the aforementioned technologies combined in a very short time, so making exact predictions here is hardly a good business.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said in an interview that Nvidia is TSMC’s largest customer at the moment, dethroning Apple, which has previously held the record for some time. The leather-clad CEO said this during the first episode of the “A Bit Personal with Jodi Shelton” podcast, wherein Shelton asked him where he gets his confidence. Shelton is a self-proclaimed "longtime leader in the global semiconductor industry," and is also the CEO and co-founder of the Global Semiconductor Alliance.

“I remember Morris Chang has a similar story when he first met you, that you immediately said, ‘I’m going to be your biggest customer or one of your biggest customers. And he’s like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of gumption.’ So, where did that confidence come from at such an early age?” Shelton asked. “Well, you know, it’s rough to know everything — I’m just kidding,” Jensen said with a laugh. “By the way, Morris will be happy to know Nvidia is TSMC’s largest customer now.”

The AI GPU company was once TSMC’s top customer in the early 2000s. However, it was overtaken during the 2010s by Apple when TSMC took it on as a customer to build the iPhone and iPad processors, after Intel fumbled the potential partnership with Cupertino. This was especially true during recent years when the iPhone overtook Samsung in market share across the globe.

But even if Apple’s smartphones, tablets, and even the legendary Apple silicon on Macs and MacBooks are driving record sales for the company, the AI boom is also pushing demand for Nvidia’s AI GPUs, resulting in skyrocketing revenue for the company. More than that, enterprise customers are willing to pay billions and billions to Team Green to get as many AI processors as they can, whereas many consumers have a price ceiling after which they will go with another brand if a smartphone, tablet, or laptop is priced too high.

Aside from losing its top spot, there are also rumors — reported by WCCFTech from the Apple leaker Fixed Focus Digital — that TSMC is hiking up the prices it’s charging Apple for chips, especially as the AI demand is squeezing capacity for other semiconductors. Furthermore, Cupertino might no longer have production priority. However, this is just speculation, and even if it’s true, the companies will likely keep information like this confidential.

Nvidia’s success is directly tied to the AI hype, with many tech companies pouring money into acquiring thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of GPUs just to get the horsepower to train the most advanced models. And with Team Green cornering the market for AI processors, it’s basically printing cash as long as companies feel that they can make more money by adding more computing power. But if the AI bubble pops and we’re left with a lot of AI data centers with no customers, then we expect Apple to retake its position as TSMC’s number one customer.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went on the No Priors podcast to discuss the current advances in AI technology and to refute claims he believes are wrong about AI. The multi-billionaire made his feelings very clear about the current climate of AI, saying that doom-and-gloom influencers have negatively impacted the AI industry. He also claims that we are far away from "god AI" becoming a reality.

A third of the way into the podcast, Jensen claimed that someday we might have god AI, but clarified that someday will likely be on the level of a biblical or galactic scale. Huang said, "I don't see any researchers having any reasonable ability to create god AI. The ability [for AI] to understand human language, genome language, and molecular language and protein language and amino-acid language and physics language all supremely well. That god AI just doesn't exist."

Huang further clarified that god AI he believes is not coming "next week." But he deems that AI should be used to advance the human population as much as possible in the meantime, before this prophetic god AI shows up. He also does not desire a god-level AI to exist: "I think that the idea of a monolithic, gigantic company/country/nation-state is just.. super unhelpful, it's too extreme. If you want to take it to that level, we should just stop everything..."

Moving on, Jensen fired shots at influencers who paint AI in a negative way: "..extremely hurtful frankly, and I think we've done a lot of damage lately with very well respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative. And I appreciate that most of us grew up enjoying science fiction, but it's not helpful. It's not helpful to people, it's not helpful to the industry, it's not helpful to society, it's not helpful to the governments."

Huang wants AI to succeed as a tool that people can use to make their work more efficient. One use case that Huang addressed last week is the ongoing labor shortage, noting that robots can act as "AI immigrants". However, the real-world effectiveness of AI paints a different picture. Stanford University reported last year that job listings dropped 13% in three years due to AI. Furthermore, Fortune reported that 95% of AI implementations have no impact on P&L.

But that is not stopping the tech industry from increasing AI capacity worldwide. Meta just announced a 6-gigawatt-capable nuclear power plant aimed at powering AI datacenters, following in the footsteps of The Stargate Project from OpenAI.

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang said that he’s uncertain whether Beijing would allow Chinese companies to purchase Nvidia chips if the company were allowed to sell them there. Huang said this in a statement to reporters after meeting U.S. President Donald Trump, where they talked about export control issues, according to Bloomberg. There has been some talk in Washington about the possibility of letting the AI GPU giant export its last-generation H200 chip to China, especially after Congress reportedly rejected the GAIN AI Act, which would have forced Nvidia to prioritize shipments to domestic companies.

“We don’t know. We have no clue,” Huang said when asked whether the company would be able to sell the H200 in China. “We can’t degrade chips that we sell to China, they won’t accept that.” The Biden administration has previously banned the export of this AI chip to Beijing, citing security concerns, especially its use in military applications. It was eventually replaced by the H20, which, even though it had limited capabilities versus Nvidia’s then top-of-the-line chip, still offered formidable performance.

However, even this AI GPU was banned in April 2025, resulting in a $5.5 billion write-off for Nvidia, before Washington allowed it to resume shipments some three months later. Things didn’t go well for the AI tech giant for long, though, as Beijing ordered its tech companies to stop purchasing the H20 in August in response to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s “addiction” comments. This has since expanded to a ban on RTX Pro 6000D GPUs as well, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claiming that homegrown AI processors can now match Nvidia’s China-only chips. Because of these moves, Huang said that Nvidia’s market share in China has dropped from 95% to essentially zero in just a few years.

This talk of finally allowing Nvidia to export fully-fledged H200 chips into China legally would be a major win for the company, especially as Huang has been lobbying for this and has been vocal against export controls. Nevertheless, even if the White House finally allows Nvidia to sell the unshackled version of its Hopper GPUs, it still wouldn’t be a full 180 turn for Washington, as administration officials say that its rival can only have AI chips once they’re outdated. And while the H200 is still a relatively powerful AI chip, it has since been supplanted by the arrival of the B200 chips.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang was allegedly recorded telling his people to use more AI while assuring them that they won’t get replaced by the tool. The head of the AI chip giant is reported to have said this during an all-hands meeting after its record-breaking quarter, which was leaked to Business Insider. The statements were reportedly made during the same meeting where he complained about the drop in Nvidia’s stock price despite performing absolutely well, with Huang saying that the market did not appreciate the company’s ‘incredible’ quarter.

“My understanding is Nvidia has some managers who are telling their people to use less AI. Are you insane?” Huang reportedly said in the recording. “I want every task that is possible to be automated with artificial intelligence to be automated with artificial intelligence. I promise you; you will have work to do.”

This push to use more AI tools has been happening across the industry, especially among massive tech companies like Meta and Microsoft. These two giants have been mandating their employees to use AI, with the use of such tools becoming a part of their evaluation. Business Insider also reports that Google has instructed its engineers to use AI for coding, while Amazon employees have requested the company to adopt AI coding tool Cursor.

On the other hand, the widespread adoption of AI has made most employees wary of being replaced by machines. Even experts and industry leaders have been warning about this trend: Ford CEO Jim Farley said that it could wipe out half of white-collar jobs in the U.S., while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that it could cause up to 20% unemployment in the next half-decade. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory study even created a labor simulation tool that estimates that up to 11.7% of workers are in danger of being replaced by AI.

Nevertheless, Jensen Huang has reportedly reassured his employees that they are not in danger of being supplanted by this technology. Despite implementing the use of AI tools, Nvidia has continuously been hiring people, bringing in over 6,000 new faces in its last fiscal year. And amid the increasing tech industry layoffs, Huang says that the company probably needs about 10,000 more staff members.

It makes sense for Huang and Nvidia to push their people into using AI. After all, it’s the reason that the once-gaming GPU maker has become the first company in the world to hit a $5-trillion market capitalization. But it’s just a tool that can enhance the productivity of employees, not something that should replace them entirely.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has reportedly told Nvidia employees in a leaked all-hands meeting that “the market did not appreciate” the AI giant despite the company’s record-breaking quarter, according to Business Insider. The company’s stock price slid from around $195 to a low of $180 just one day after it released its quarterly earnings, which is a surprise given Nvidia’s performance. This meant that its market capitalization dropped from its all-time high of $5.12 trillion to around $4.4 trillion, with the company losing around $365 billion in just one day of trading.

It seems that this movement is driven by fears of an AI bubble, something that many experts and analysts, including former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, have been warning about. “If we delivered a bad quarter, it is evidence there’s an AI bubble. If we delivered a great quarter, we are fueling the AI bubble,” Jensen said during the meeting. He also added, “If we delivered a bad quarter, if we’re off by just a hair, if it just looked a little bit creaky, the whole world would’ve fallen apart.”

Nvidia has quickly grown from a relatively unknown company familiar only to gamers to becoming the most valuable company in the history of the world. This is largely driven by the massive demand for AI chips, as many companies, even nations, are racing for technological supremacy in this field. Because of this, it has arguably become the cornerstone of advancements in artificial intelligence. “You should’ve seen some of the memes that are on the internet,” the CEO said. “We’re basically holding the planet together — and it’s not untrue.”

Despite its market and technological leadership (or because of it), Huang has admitted that it has been harder for Nvidia to meet expectations. This is seen with the recent changes in the company’s stock price, which has been trending down since it peaked at over $200 in late October and early November. However, this movement is seemingly driven more by investor jitters rather than Nvidia’s performance, especially as it reported that all its data center GPUs were sold out during the quarter. It also expects the sales blitz to continue well into 2026, with the company forecasting its 4Q26 revenue to hit $62 billion.

In a statement of response, an Nvidia spokesperson told Tom's Hardware, "After another quarter of incredible growth and off-the-charts demand, Jensen’s message to the company was to stay focused and let the market take care of itself."

TSMC Chairman and CEO C.C. Wei was joined at the firm’s annual Sports Day event by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang this weekend. However, to our surprise, Wei’s footwear managed to upstage any Jensanity. Wei's custom-made TSMC-branded sneakers were “the focus of the audience” at the event, according to an ‘exclusive’ Mirror News report (associated video in Mandarin Chinese, embedded below).

According to the source, Wei thought these unique running shoes were a gift from the company. However, later in the report, an interview with a shoemaker from Kaohsiung, the biggest city in the south of the island, reveals that the shoes worn by Wei were part of a business pitch made back in 2017.

The Kaohsiung shoemaker was reportedly quite taken aback to see his TSMC sneakers highlighted by the media this weekend. Mirror News says the man felt "shocked" and "super surprised" (machine translation) when the sneakers caught the attention of Sports Day attendees this weekend.

Holding aloft detailed cobbling plans for the sneakers, the shoemaker alleged that he sent the sample, as worn by Wei, to then-Chairman Morris Chang, as part of a business proposal eight years ago. Like TSMC silicon, the maker of the sneakers seems proud that their footwear is still Made in Taiwan (MIT). Many rivals have moved a lot of production to China to reduce costs.

We can’t vouch for the sneaker quality, but we guess they still look like new after eight years in storage. The news video says that they feature special stitching for 10-year sole adhesion durability.

Both TSMC’s Wei and the Kaohsiung shoemaking firm hinted that a closer collaboration may be on the way. The TSMC boss told reporters that sneakers with the company branding may become official merchandise in the future. Meanwhile, the MIT shoemaker says he has plans to put together a new proposal for TSMC’s consideration.

In the footsteps of Microsoft & Adidas, Apple & Nike, Nintendo & Puma, Sony & Nike

We hope the TSMC sneakers collab goes ahead this time. Shoes are super-collectible and sought after. Tech giants and sports brands have had particularly rich partnerships, like Microsoft (Xbox) & Adidas, Apple & Nike, Nintendo & Puma, plus Sony (PlayStation) & Nike.

The footwear would join plenty of other unlikely collaborative products available in the factory shops at TSMC facilities. In recent years, we have reported on TSMC-branded merchandise like snacks, honey, dumb-phones, suitcases, and there are various bags, cups, and more that you can find being sold on online marketplaces like Shopee in Taiwan – useful for those without TSMC employee retail access.

We’d also like to see a TSMC fab toy building set to rival the ASML and Lego collaboration, or the SK hynix and Oxford (a Korean Lego-type product) sets.

The Select Committee on China of the U.S. House of Representatives has called out Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, pointing out on X its claims that Nvidia has been sharing its Santa Clara campus with Futurewei, a subsidiary of blacklisted Huawei. The committee has previously demanded that Futurewei reveal details about its connection with Huawei and its American operations, while also pointing out its close proximity to Nvidia’s offices for years. While not directly accusing Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang or Futurewei, the committee highlighted the strategic implications of this co-location. We have reached out to Nvidia for comment.

“Our Select Committee letter earlier this year documented how Nvidia shared a campus with Futurewei, a blacklisted Huawei affiliate,” the committee said in the post. “China may be ‘nanoseconds behind’ in AI, but for years it was in Nvidia’s backyard.” This was made in response to Huang’s comment that “China is going to win the AI race,” and his following statement saying, “As I have long said, China is nanoseconds behind America in AI. It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide.”

According to the letter (PDF) the House Committee sent, Futurewei remains closely linked to Huawei despite distancing itself from the embargoed company on paper. Although it presents itself as an independent U.S. entity, its actions on the global stage allegedly point toward giving its former parent company and Beijing an advantage in global technological standards.

There were also concerns that the company was being used for or directly conducting industrial espionage, with the letter citing a civil case alleging that its employees “register using fake U.S. company names to infiltrate into the meeting, then compiled reports that were transferred to product development, strategies teams, and executives in China” after Huawei was banned from a private telecoms summit hosted by Facebook.

The lawmakers were probably pointing out that Nvidia has been taking advantage of the massive AI demand on both sides of the race, which has helped it become the world's most valuable company by market cap. Members of the federal government want to limit China’s access to American hardware, especially as they think that Beijing uses it for its own technological advancements in both civilian and military applications. On the other hand, Huang thinks the U.S. should let the entire world use its technology — that way, the backbone of global AI infrastructure will be built on American hardware, specifically Nvidia hardware.

There might be some truth to both sides of the argument, but Jensen’s take also benefits his company. After all, if Nvidia supplies most of the data center infrastructure on both sides of the AI race, then it’s a definite win for the AI giant and its investors.

Even as the head of the world's first five trillion dollar company, this week hasn't been great for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Despite all his efforts, President Trump did not discuss the sale of advanced Nvidia GPUs with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping this week, nor did he give the official go-ahead for Nvidia to develop and sell a cut-down version of its flagship Blackwell GPUs.

The ongoing trade war between the two world's largest economies has Nvidia stuck in the middle, with the U.S. looking to maintain its technological lead, while Nvidia seeks to maintain its strong software and hardware position in Southeast Asia to fight off a growing domestic chip industry in China.

For most of this year, the goals of the U.S. government and Nvidia have been mostly aligned, leading to enormous deals for the GPU manufacturer, including government contracts and stakes in government-owned businesses. But as China and America have become more entrenched in their trading positions, both have begun to move towards domestically controlled supply chains of the latest chip designs, leaving Nvidia facing a waning Chinese market share.

From diffusion to dissilution

Nvidia has been selling GPUs to China for a long time, but while it was previously mostly related to gaming and cryptocurrency mining, the growth of the AI industry has made these sales more crucial and the fallout more dramatic. Export controls put in place in 2022 curtailed its sales of its latest GPUs to China, but Nvidia has made bespoke models like the H20 and 5090D that offer reduced performance compared to the flagship models it sells in Western markets.

That continued in 2025 with the introduction of the AI Diffusion rule, which was designed to restrict Nvidia's sale of its top chips to China and other blacklisted countries around the world. This was ultimately pulled by the Trump administration mere days before it was set to become enforceable, but since then, it has swung back and forth, allowing sales, then disallowing them. Right now, Blackwell GPUs remain off the table for China, at least for now.

Even with Nvidia praising the administration for its stance on AI and global sales, the U.S. has maintained an antagonistic stance towards China on trade with various tariffs and policies, often brandishing access to Nvidia GPUs as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

China's response has been strong, cutting international companies' access to its domestic manufacturing facilities, and pushing for its own firms and government offices to utilize as many domestically produced chips as possible. Huawei has developed a rack-scale CloudMatrix 384, which is being pushed by the Chinese government, though it is not as efficient as Nvidia's latest offerings.

Both China and the U.S. are driving toward chipmaking self-sufficiency, or at least more self-controlled supply chains. For Nvidia, this has led to a waning of the company's influence in China. Access to its hardware is simply unreliable, so countries and companies are looking for alternatives, and the Chinese government is pushing companies toward homegrown chips.

The CUDA stronghold is under siege

CUDA has Nvidia's proverbial moat, shielding it from attack, and welcoming users into its castle gates. The software stack has become so ubiquitous in various industries that Nvidia GPUs are all but required for everyday use. Although competitors do exist, and AMD's hardware is by many measures, almost as capable as Nvidia's. But, without CUDA support, it's a major headache for companies to move to a new standard.

That's the business approach that Nvidia has taken globally, too. As hyperscalers deploy huge AI data centers to AI workloads, it wants their GPUs at the heart, supported by other crucial technologies like NVLink Fusion and ConnectX, just to name a few. This is to ensure Nvidia's long-term dominance in the data center segment.

With around half of the world's leading AI developers living and working in China, Nvidia wants those users working with its GPUs, harnessing the CUDA platform. But if those developers can't get Nvidia GPUs, they can't use CUDA, meaning that they'll use something else. We saw the first examples of how quickly this can happen at the end of September, when the latest DeepSeek model included support for China-native chips and the CANN platform, developed by Huawei.

CANN is also open source, which will aid in its adoption in China and elsewhere, and industry alliances of Chinese AI firms may help to consolidate their efforts in pushing away from Nvidia's near-monopoly.

Though DeepSeek still supports CUDA, its developers are encouraging users to leverage the TileLang kernel for prototyping instead. Although these models and the associated domestic hardware may not be as capable as Nvidia's platforms yet, China has a number of levers it can pull to make them more competitive.

Long-term investments from China make it clear that it wants to control its own destiny when it comes to the latest hardware. Its domestic chip suppliers are ramping up, and the investment is there to help that continue. But it will take time, and until that inflection point happens, Nvidia wants to have enough of a foot in the door that its relevance will never evaporate completely. Unfortunately for Nvidia, the U.S. government is loosening the company's control.

China is still behind

China purchased most of the million-plus Nvidia HGX H20 GPUs that were produced last year, and GPUs were also smuggled into the country. DeepSeek R2 was trained using Nvidia chips, despite a push by the authorities to use domestic chips instead. China's chips cannot compete when it comes to training workloads quite yet.

If Nvidia has one saving grace, it is that the chip industry is enormous, expensive, and takes time to change. China may want its own domestic chip supply, and it may have a decent AI development framework, and its hardware may even be pretty good for inference, even if it's not quite as efficient. But there's no denying that Nvidia and other Western companies are years ahead of even China's best, likely due to the lack of advanced EUV lithography machines, which are required to develop the latest cutting-edge nodes.

There are plenty of reasons that China views Taiwan through such hungry eyes, and access to tools which can produce the most cutting-edge process technologies is undoubtedly one of them. Even if China can convert a huge portion of its AI industry to using domestic chips and push for the development of its own domestic supply chains, those are going to take years to build up, and without ASML's advanced tools, they may be on the back foot. But, how long that will hold up for remains to be seen.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says Washington has lost its edge in artificial intelligence and warns that China will win the AI race. He cited the West's cynicism, export controls, and favorable energy circumstances in China as the reason, claiming it is much easier for companies to access energy in the country.

The chief of the most valuable company in the world by market cap has long been saying that the U.S. ban on chip exports is a failure, and that the spread of its advanced semiconductors is vital for it to retain its competitive advantage globally. However, the ongoing trade war between the two powers has resulted in export bans of Blackwell chips from the White House on the one hand, and the CCP banning foreign AI chips from state-funded data centers on the other. Because of this, Nvidia’s market share in China has since dropped to basically zero, which probably led to Huang’s statement to the Financial Times.

“China is going to win the AI race,” Jensen commented. He also added that “we need more optimism,” saying that the West’s cynicism is holding it back. Huang released a statement on Nvidia’s X account a few hours after FT published his words. “As I have long said, China is nanoseconds behind America in AI. It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide.” The Nvidia CEO previously mentioned this in late September on a podcast, leaning on his stance that he’s been preaching for over a year that export restrictions on his company’s AI chips are detrimental to the U.S.’s long-term interests.

Huang argues that if China loses access to Nvidia’s latest AI GPUs, its tech companies will be forced to purchase homegrown alternatives, which will pour money into its chip makers and further drive research, development, and innovations in the local semiconductor industry. Aside from that, it will also reduce these companies’ dependence on Nvidia’s software ecosystem, making it easier for them to migrate to a Chinese AI processor. On the other hand, other industry leaders contend that the U.S. is heavily dependent on China and that it’s only using Nvidia’s products as a stopgap until it builds a credible competitor to the AI chip powerhouse. The comments come just days after the administration hinted that China could have access to Nvidia Blackwell chips, but only once they are out of date.

Aside from export controls, Nvidia’s top executive also highlighted China’s approach to energy subsidies that make it easier for companies to put up power-hungry data centers, versus the hodgepodge of rules the different States in the U.S. are pushing on AI, potentially resulting in “50 new regulations.” Experts have been saying that electricity generation is the next bottleneck that the AI industry must solve, and it seems that Beijing is miles ahead, as it has already addressed the energy problem for its AI infrastructure. On the other hand, American tech companies are still investing in alternative power sources like small modular reactors and space-based data centers, which will take years to materialize, if at all. Recently, Microsoft revealed it has GPUs it simply can't plug in because it doesn't have the energy required.

The status of the AI race between the two global rivals isn’t clear, especially as politics and protectionism are muddying the waters. Aside from that, both sides' arguments for and against China getting access to Nvidia’s AI GPUs have merit, meaning we will probably only truly see who is right years down the line. But one thing is clear in all of this — Nvidia will get a massive advantage if it supplies the chips that both sides use in the AI race.

Korean fried chicken stocks were given a significant boost today by a new not-so-secret ingredient – a sprinkling of Jensanity. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in Seoul meeting top execs at firms such as Samsung and Hyundai, reports Bloomberg. That’s big news on its own, but photos and videos of Huang enjoying the local fast food staple of spicy chicken, with a few beers, went viral, and KOSDAQ-listed Korean fried chicken brands saw their shares rise by as much as 20% or 30% this morning.

A different kind of ‘KFC’

Jensen Huang was pictured alongside Samsung’s Jay Y. Lee and Hyundai’s Chung Euisun at Kkanbu Chicken, in what has become a signature style of outing for the Green Team chief, appealing to the common man. Huang reportedly joked, “This is very good for your health, right?” with reporters outside the restaurant.

But what makes Korean fried chicken worth a taste test, or even preferable versus rival styles like the iconic American KFC?

As someone who enjoys an occasional piece of Korean fried chicken, I’d explain it to the uninitiated as a more crunchy than usual fried chicken style, with an intense spicy kick, sticky, sweet and sour tastes, and umami sauciness. The nearest Western-known sauces that may contribute to the signature flavor (but not the spice) would be Worcestershire sauce and/or OK sauce.

Jensanity - Huang’s Midas touch reaches beyond silicon

While Kkanbu Chicken isn’t publicly traded, peers like Kyochon F&B surged on the stock market by up to 20% in the day’s trading. Jensanity is infectious, and Bloomberg noted that related industry players like Cherrybro Co., a poultry processor, saw shares climb up to the daily limit of 30%. Another beneficiary of the viral fast food meeting was Neuromeka, a chicken-frying robot maker.

It is noted that Korean investors are characteristically easily influenced by risky trades, chasing short-term gains on the back of cultural, political, and meme-worthy events. Bloomberg cites U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent visit to South Korea, where he praised the host’s pen, sparking local pen maker MonAmi Co’s share to surge, as evidence of this phenomenon.

What was the Nvidia CEO even doing in S. Korea?

Huang was in South Korea to attend the APEC CEO Summit. During the important industry event, the Nvidia CEO unveiled new contracts to supply AI chips to major South Korean companies, says Bloomberg. He will have also been in the country to solidify agreements with AI and semiconductor players to counter the unpredictable China sanctions situation.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said that the U.S. should end its dependence on China, and that the first thing it should do is to recognize its dependence is a problem. According to his opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. and China are already engaged in an economic war with each other, and other people should wake up to this reality. However, Sankar says that many business leaders still refuse to see this, and still wholeheartedly believe in the Chinese message of its "peaceful rise."

The opinion piece points out that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently expressed his opinion that the label 'China hawk' is not a badge of honor Americans should wear, it is really 'a badge of shame.' Huang also said it "doesn’t have to be all us or them. It could be us and them."

Mulling over the Nvidia CEO's philosophy, the Palantir CTO wrote, "The first step to ending our dependence on China is admitting we have a problem." Sankar continued, "We can continue as useful idiots, decrying ‘China hawks’ who point out that we’re funding our own demise. Or we can wake up to the reality that we’re already in an economic war in which every purchase and investment will help determine which system survives."

While Sankar does not directly call out Huang as a “useful idiot,” the implication is certainly there, given his reference to the Nvidia CEO's comments. The Nvidia CEO has always been against export controls on the most powerful chips, saying that such a move could backfire against the U.S., as it would allow Chinese companies like Huawei to define global standards.

Instead, Huang wants his chips to be readily available in China, so that American technology can become the backbone of global AI technology. We should note, though, that China used to be Nvidia’s biggest export market, where it once had 95% market share — it has since dropped to zero because of export controls and the ongoing trade war between the two global rivals.

Sankar’s take on this is that China is just using foreign companies to support its goals until it can develop a credible home-grown challenger. These companies would then flood the global market with cheaper goods, while, at the same time, Beijing is taking steps to limit the access of the original foreign business to the Chinese market. He does not lay the blame on China alone, though.

American companies complicit

American companies have been an undeniable part of China's growth, with juggernauts like Apple, Tesla, Intel, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and Coca-Cola, among others, investing heavily in the country. This massive inflow of cash, technology, and know-how has allowed it to rise and become the leading global manufacturer. In fact, some experts say that companies stay in China not because of cheap labor, but because it’s the only country that already has the necessary supply chain in place to build the latest technology.

Sankar argues that the U.S. should face this development head-on by rebuilding the industrial base it has let slide. While Washington does not have to completely stop trade with China, it does have to take steps to build alternative markets and supply chains to avoid so that it has alternatives and not be left with no choice but to comply with Beijing’s demands.

The Palantir CTO argues that the current situation will only get worse if the U.S. does not take action today, but there are still quite a few who refuse to see this. On this point, he quoted Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

This will be a long and arduous road, though, especially as many are already used to cheap goods coming from China. But it’s only with that realization that the United States can take the painful but necessary steps to ensure that it remains sovereign in the face of Beijing’s goal to overtake the US in global supremacy.

Earlier this week, Nvidia’s DGX Spark AI mini-PCs were released to the masses. Symbolic of the splintered state of the AI industry, though, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang hand-delivered DGX Spark systems to Elon Musk and Sam Altman — separately. Altman and Musk once worked closely together, for a common cause, as co-founders of OpenAI, where Jensen once hand-delivered the original DGX-1 nine years ago, long before the AI boom began.

The last time we saw such a star-studded DGX photo-op was when Huang hand-delivered the original DGX-1 to Elon Musk, in his role as co-founder of non-profit OpenAI. Once partners seeking to further the development of safe AI for the benefit of humankind, Musk and Altman have become the fiercest of rivals. The rivalry isn’t very sportsmanlike, either, with the pair now regularly trading barbs and public insults, and even engaging in some acrimonious legal tussles. Since 2023, we have also had two distinct competitive AI products addressing the same market, albeit from different angles: ChatGPT and Grok.

Musk received his DGX Spark while wearing his ‘Chief Engineer at SpaceX’ hat. Huang quipped that he was “delivering the smallest supercomputer next to the biggest rocket,” at the Starbase, Texas facility.

We are reminded by the Nvidia blog that the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip-powered DGX Spark packs 128GB of unified memory and delivers a petaflop of AI performance. It is claimed to have enough resources and muscle to run models with 200 billion parameters locally. Moreover, the Green Team’s blog highlights that it has been nine years since Huang personally delivered the DGX-1 to Musk at OpenAI.

Sam Altman also reminisced about Huang’s previous little parcel. “Things have come a long way since the delivery of the DGX-1 9 years ago; amazing to see...” mused the OpenAI boss. Altman was commenting on the President and co-founder (another one) of OpenAI, Greg Brockman's, shared photo. The picture shows Huang nestled between Brockman and Altman.

The Jensen-powered delivery service

Huang famously started his career washing dishes, bussing, and waiting at Denny’s. Now he’s back as a server, but on the menu are slices of AI-accelerating silicon, delivered in person to a select few fellow tech industry giants.

Nvidia’s Jensen-powered delivery service isn’t standard, even though the DGX Spark has gotten a third more expensive since it was first announced. The Nvidia first-party DGX Spark MSRP is now $3,999, and it is shipping direct from Nvidia, Micro Center, and a number of partners.

The first batch of DGX Spark systems was also put into the hands of researchers at AI-processing hungry companies like Anaconda, Cadence, ComfyUI, Docker, Google, Hugging Face, JetBrains, LM Studio, Meta, Microsoft, Ollama, and Roboflow.

If you are interested in the DGX Spark, and its integrated Nvidia AI stack with full CUDA library support, the firm’s partners are also cooking up systems, featuring their own special saucy tech - but they all look fairly similar. DGX Spark systems are being made and marketed by Acer, Asus, Dell Technologies, Gigabyte, HPI, Lenovo, and MSI. You definitely won’t get Jensen-powered delivery with these, though, you’d be lucky to get a free MSI dragon plush toy.