“An Nvidia without its Founder will be like a headless Hydra. The best possible outcome for China’s interests in the future of AI.”1
Good Morning,
The U.S. China hawks got their revenge on Jensen Huang. The downfall of Jensen Huang from Nvidia, after 33 years (He’s 63) isn’t as much a spy story as it is a National security push against China. Jensen Huang is the single person in many ways who is most the architect of the AI boom and circular financing that is now pervasive in Generative AI. He also became a close advisor and friend to the President, Donald Trump in recent quarters.
The downfall of Jensen is truly detrimental for U.S. AI Supremacy. Nvidia is the one of the key benefactors of the entire GPU and large language model movement and the unrivaled focal point of the the AI buildout, a maniacal building of datacenters and a Manhattan project-esque American obsession with compute capacity since 2023. It’s also extremely unpopular with the general population. This is political.
Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and built it into the company that powered the AI boom, doing so with no second-in-command and extremely shaky and unusual corporate governance. By having extramarital affairs he took risks no corporate executive in the history of technology was taking. By being romantically involved with those involved in GPU smuggling he may have committed serious crimes. He may also get away with them for the most part.
Jensen Huang resigned as CEO, president, and board member of Nvidia on November 12, 2026 after the Nvidia board came to the only conclusion it could. It’s a worse moment than Sam Altman getting fired on November 17th, 2023 for both the AI industry's future and the AI bull market in stocks. In its somewhat manufactured rivalry with China, this significantly weakens the U.S.’s ability to keep in the lead in this technology.
It leaves the AI chip monopoly in a huge limbo whereby Nvidia’s board will begin the search for a permanent CEO to replace Huang and will consider both internal and external candidate, even as investigations and congress meetings and hearings pile up. This is political theatre. Jensen Huang as a “visionary of the AI age”, was well liked, made many strategic decisions and overcame many obstacles leading Nvidia shareholders to incredible wealth. Obscene and absurd levels of wealth. He deserves our gratitude, not our mockery. Silicon Valley should stay out of Washington affairs.
It was a grave mistake for Jensen Huang, a Taiwanese-American, to enter politics. No PR firm could save him from the fallout of sleeping with what is believed to be an agent of China. Huang is a victim of the Blue Tsunami wave of the Democratic party at the Midterm elections, and there will be many more. With datacenters incredibly unpopular, Jensen Huang had become the face of the elites imposing their will on American communities, the internet and unsuspecting professions including white collar ones.
Enemies of Jensen Huang in Washington orchestrated his fall. After the China spy story, on November 11, The New York Times reported that Huang had also engaged in a romantic relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s Vice President of Healthcare, who reported directly to him. This is a no-no in Silicon Valley and especially in Nvidia’s own culture. He broke his own rules. Now about America’s own attempt to have rules that benefit itself.
U.S. export controls have not succeeded in doing anything. China has flourished in such an environment with aggressive distillation campaigns, GPU smuggling and with plentiful energy abundance and deep talent in AI researchers, China’s optics are actually fairly bright in the industry, including in robotics - sometimes called Physical AI. The U.S. cannot monopolize or control this technology. In human history the originators of a technology rarely benefit from it alone for long. Diffusion of new technologies is inevitable.
The board said it expects Nvidia’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption. But that’s impossible, this changes everything about Nvidia’s reputation and culture. Yes sure, Nvidia controls nearly 85% of the high-end data center AI GPU market by revenue and 90%+ of the discrete consumer GPU market. But suddenly and irrevocably, its best days are behind it. Jensen was more than the soul of Nvidia, he was its brain, mastermind and key-man catalyst.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was sent a highly classified memo warning about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's relationship with suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang, but failed to impose sanctions on Singapore based Megaspeed. And frankly, who knows how many other organizations like Megaspeed. Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) will continue be a legend of tech immigration stories and transformation stories in technology of how to make a crucial pivot and what led to the rise of the GPU. The most significant hardware innovation of the decade, the spark that made Generative AI LLMs possible.
The U.S. is handicapping itself with all of these probes and bizarre abuses of media manipulation for political reasons. This is so much bigger than sex, spying and smuggling. This is a takedown of historic proportions, with the aura of a witch hunt. This is the United States declawing its own leadership in AI’s most critical supply-chain. The relationship of TSMC with Nvidia. The Taiwan connection. President Trump will be meeting with President Xi, while Jensen will be testifying for lawmakers. This is poetic stupidity on so many levels.
Nvidia shares fell as much as 13% after news of Huang's resignation Thursday November 12th, after the stock NVDA 0.00%↑ is already down nearly 27% in the last month. But in the macro picture, this is a total disaster for U.S. leadership in the domain. This helps Alphabet’s entry into the TPU market as a serious player in 2027, along with rivals like AMD and gives Chinese AI chip makers a time to consolidate their efforts. China has made and is making rapid progress in both models, token share and in their own very nascent semiconductor and memory industries.
While Silicon Valley has hacked a corrupt Trump Administration, making Jensen the fall-guy is a huge mistake. With AI sentiment plummeting during 2025 and even more so in 2026, Jensen Huang will be now remembered by non-techies as a cheater. When in reality Nvidia’s rise to become the most valuable company in the world for a time is one of the biggest success stories of public markets and technological history. Only a unique leader with incredible tenacity could have achieved this. A uniquely Taiwanese work ethic. Remember that as the U.S. goes on to continue to exploit TSMC and Taiwanese companies for its own profit, corrupt self-interest and national interests.
“This is a man more important to Nvidia, than Steve jobs was to Apple.”
Export controls were never going to be effective against a technology as important as Generative AI in slowing down China. China’s open-weight models (by fair means or foul) are easily six months ahead of Western open-source models. Their AI Labs are world class. Firing (forcing him to resign due a scandal fabricated by media leaks) Jensen Huang decapitates Silicon Valley in a way that changes the future of AI. This is a man more important to Nvidia, than Steve jobs was to Apple.
I don’t personally care how many girlfriends he had, and while his relationship with Donald Trump was clearly a huge mistake, this weakens the U.S. ability to keep ahead in AI in such fundamental ways that this could have been China’s spying goal all along. Not to influence AI policy in Washington, but to discredit the Taiwan born corporate Genius. This wasn’t a sex scandal, this was a political assassination. I’ve read a lot of analysis on this story and media reports that miss the key points. The U.S. has played right into China’s hands. The lady in the pink dress, whoever she is, managed to do that. Jensen Huang’s mistake wasn’t to abuse his position in affairs of opportunism, it was to think influencing Washington was safe and justified. U.S. corporations should not have the right to lobby and become central consultants to Presidents. The alliance between Jensen Huang and Donald Trump was never going to end well.
Nvidia without Jensen Huang is easily worth 25% less, or more. It will be handicapped for months and likely will never be the same again. This is how monopolies crumble. This is infinitely more damaging than China evading Chip sanctions, sanctions that historically have been shown not to work. If anything, China’s intensity in trying to catch up in semiconductors and GPUs and memory chips and open models has never been stronger. Meanwhile the Trump Administration created toxic conditions where Jensen could be ensnared and scapegoated so easily. 33 years in engineering and entrepreneurship and founding his own company couldn't prepare him for the world of Donald Trump (and his enemies).
Jensen Huang had become a celebrity or rock-star of technology and AI culture. He was literally the face of AI for a good four years there. He was the ultimate ambassador and evangelist for U.S. American AI Supremacy. He built significant relationships and was the man at the center of the AI boom. It’s impossible for Nvidia to thrive in the same way, ever again. Since 2017, Jensen Huang’s career flourished in the next 9 years like few ever in American and human corporate history.
By losing Jensen, American loses its spark and purity in the AI race. History will show this to be a colossal mistake. Jensen Huang has been more important than Elon Musk to provide America with structural advantages in AI. This isn’t about Nvidia succession, but about an AI industry with a crisis of leadership. Jensen Huang will be bogged down in investigations and mired in family obligations and enormous stress. At 63, it’s somewhat doubtful he can rebound from this professionally in any meaningful way. Even if he returns to Nvidia one day, he won’t be the same.
Today and this week, Jensen Huang becomes a martyr. Misunderstood and twisted by China hawks and National security narratives that miss the key point. Entrepreneurs of Jensen’s calibre are generational. Sidelining him allows China to take the upper hand. Nvidia is that important. America’s attempt to hoard the technology for themselves is grossly mistaken. One nation cannot leverage a technology like Generative AI for itself, just as the internet couldn’t be controlled. It’s so ridiculous. The U.S. is destined to lose, not because it doesn’t have the biggest companies or the most aggressive compute strategy, or the most capital, but precisely because it does. And it abuses that privilege. In a mockery to the rest of the world. That’s how Empires crumble.
Jensen Huang being pushed out of Silicon Valley, is a victory for China.