Everything You Need to Know About the Jensen Huang Spy Story | Hard Fork
Kevin RooseCasey NewtonAna SwansonRyan MacStephen Witt
- The episode says Huang remains Nvidia’s CEO, while Witt sees congressional testimony as the biggest threat to his position. The discussion concerns reported allegations of an affair with an alleged Chinese spy and chip diversions through MegaSpeed. Witt anticipates potential legal exposure and a “massive fine,” but thinks Huang will probably survive. The host also says the Trump administration apparently knew of the allegations for a year without intervening.
- Nvidia’s dependence on Huang makes his position consequential far beyond the scandal. Witt describes more than 30 years of leadership, roughly 60 direct reports and no successor Huang personally designated. That creates a “giant key-person risk,” while giving the board a strong shareholder incentive to retain him.
- The export-control question turns on equipment’s ultimate destination and customers. Witt treats Malaysia accounting for 10 or 15% of Nvidia revenue as evidence of Chinese demand flowing through intermediaries. He describes possible dummy-server substitutions and Alibaba-linked consumption, while acknowledging that MegaSpeed’s details remain “a little fuzzy.”
- Huang’s commercial argument for selling to China now faces a severe credibility problem. Witt says another enormous data-center buildout offers revenue upside, while restrictions encourage China to develop competing hardware. He thinks Huang would hold that position anyway, but says “his credibility is zero” and imagines Nvidia could lose access to China entirely.
- Witt suspects White House China hawks wanted to weaken Huang’s influence over Trump. He says Marco Rubio presented intelligence about the relationship and Trump took no action. His theory is that someone subsequently wanted to “reduce Jensen’s influence over the president,” making export policy central to the leak’s possible motive.
- Witt interprets the muted market reaction through an existing slowdown thesis and gains for competing suppliers. He calls AI infrastructure valuations “very cheap,” reflecting expectations of weaker sales over the next couple of years. Nvidia’s difficulties could benefit AMD, Broadcom and especially Google, whose competitive threat predates the allegations.
- Huang’s diminished credibility could strengthen support for AI regulation, Witt thinks. His engineering-based confidence loses a powerful advocate, although others share it. Witt preserves the geopolitical objection—“If we stop doing this, China wins”—and emphasizes how little AI doomerism he encounters in Asia.
1. The allegations connect personal conduct to chip-export enforcement
- The host presents three linked revelations from the Times’s reporting: Huang’s alleged affair with an alleged Chinese spy, suspected chip diversions through MegaSpeed, and the Trump administration’s knowledge and possible intervention in Commerce investigations. The opening says Huang remains CEO, Nvidia is launching an internal investigation, and the president apparently knew of the allegations for a year without intervening.
- For Witt, the Malaysia workaround was already well known: a country without a large AI development program accounting for 10 or 15% of Nvidia revenue implied Chinese demand behind the purchases. The unresolved distinction was whether equipment physically reached China or Chinese customers accessed computing abroad.
- Witt says the details remain “a little fuzzy”: Nvidia equipment might enter a Malaysian facility, be replaced there by dummy servers, then leave for China. Separately, Alibaba appears to be MegaSpeed’s main customer; whether that violates restrictions “depends on how you read the law.” US investigators have limited visibility after delivery overseas.
- Asked whether MegaSpeed is a real business, Witt answers, “I’m not sure,” before pointing to facilities, power consumption and paying customers. It appears to have formed in 2023, when Nvidia named it a preferred cloud partner. He also stresses that Malaysia has a legitimate data-center industry beyond MegaSpeed.
- Witt says Nvidia is a less valuable target for trade secrets than Anthropic or OpenAI because China cannot manufacture Nvidia’s chips without equipment it cannot obtain. He thinks the effort involving Huang may have been more about influence; after Huang grew close to Trump, the relationship could have become a major win for Chinese spies.
2. Nvidia’s structure makes removing Huang unusually costly
- Witt’s organizational explanation is stark: “Nvidia is Jensen.” Rather than a conventional second management tier of six to eight executives, roughly 60 people report directly to Huang. His centrality to AI hardware creates “giant key-person risk” for Nvidia and, in Witt’s assessment, part of the US economy.
- Witt would be surprised if the board fired Huang because he expects that decision to drive the stock down substantially. He points to longtime director Tench Coxe’s roughly $2–3 billion stockholding as an incentive to protect the company. Huang is a “knife fighter”; Witt thinks he will probably survive.
- Succession offers little reassurance. Asked about his successor, Huang told Witt, “nobody.” The board said in 2024 that it had considered candidates, including Jay Puri, whom Witt says has since retired and is in his 70s. Huang’s children Madison and Spencer lack the technical backgrounds Witt considers essential to running Nvidia. His son-in-law Nico Caprez, recently promoted within the company, could have a role, but Witt is unsure.
- Congressional testimony is Witt’s bigger concern. Republicans seeking closed-door testimony would spare Huang some embarrassment. Witt thinks Democrats will hold, or try to hold, their own inquiries and hearings after taking control, and imagines those would be public. His argument is that a relationship with the head of the company makes ignorance harder to claim: “he can’t play dumb anymore.” That is Witt’s inference, underpinning his warning about corporate fines and personal legal exposure.
3. China’s commercial upside now collides with political credibility
- Witt sees straightforward commercial logic behind Huang’s China position: another US-scale data-center buildout needs equipment and “presumably would double the value of his company.” Huang also fears that withholding chips forces China to build an independent hardware stack that Nvidia must compete against—and “we might lose.”
- That fear predates the allegations, reaching back to concerns about cheaper Chinese copies of gaming hardware. Witt thinks Huang would advocate sales regardless of the relationship. Nevertheless, “his credibility is zero”; Witt imagines Nvidia will, “in short order,” be unable to sell anything to China again.
- Huang’s political transformation also matters. Witt recalls little political involvement in 2024, followed by growing influence with Trump through flattery and Nvidia’s success. He portrays Huang approaching Trump as an “engineering problem”: understand the inputs and outputs, then supply the president’s “bottomless need for validation.”
- Witt says a wiretap on the woman identified as Alice brought Huang into view; Marco Rubio prepared a memo for Trump, who took no action. Whispers and a May short-seller report had not established an affair. Witt suspects China hawks wanted to “reduce Jensen’s influence over the president,” reclaiming influence over policy.
4. Market calm reflects risks that extend beyond the scandal
- The host asks why the broader market is relatively calm despite Nvidia’s decline and economic importance. Witt’s explanation is that infrastructure stocks already trade at “very cheap valuations”: investors anticipate a sales drawdown over the next couple of years. “Maybe some of this was priced in already.”
- Witt’s second explanation is competitive: bad news for Nvidia can benefit AMD, Broadcom and Google. Google, particularly, has become a major rival. These business risks existed before the scandal, offering another reason the allegations need not produce an equally large market-wide reaction.
5. Huang’s weakening could change the balance of AI policy
- Asked whether losing AI’s least fearful major booster could alter policy, Witt answers, “Yeah, probably.” Huang’s position dates back to 2015 and is shared by David Sacks and Marc Andreessen. But Witt considers him probably its most convincing and powerful advocate: from the microchip upward, lost control is an “engineering failure” that engineers can fix.
- Witt contrasts that with Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and other people who are more worried, looking at a powerful system from the top down: “I don’t know how this thing works.” He has noticed Trump entertaining limited regulation and thinks voters seemed concerned about AI during the Democratic wave, while acknowledging other electoral factors, including oil prices.
- Witt’s strongest counterargument remains geopolitical: “If we stop doing this, China wins.” He says people in China, Japan, Korea and Singapore show little appetite for AI doomerism. AI-risk questions dominate his US appearances, yet he says, “I never get AI risk questions out here.” From that perspective, American fears can resemble a “moral panic.”
Full transcript
In all my years on the computer, I never thought I’d see graphics cards and an international sex scandal in the same story. But this week, The Times broke the news that Jensen Huang, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia and one of the most important figures in AI and tech, has been having an affair with a top executive at a Singaporean data center company who also happens to be an alleged Chinese spy. Her company was reportedly illegally funneling advanced Nvidia chips to Chinese companies. Huang remains in place at the top of Nvidia, which is launching its own internal investigation, and the new Democratic Congress could follow with one of its own, especially since President Trump has apparently known about the allegations and been unwilling to intervene for a year.
Look, I love a spy story, and I won’t pretend the sex scandal part isn’t a huge draw for me. But I’m also fascinated that this lurid tale of international intrigue is all about graphics card trade policy. This is the quintessential 21st-century spy story. We’re not talking about troop movements or anyone stealing top-secret microfilm. Jensen Huang wears a leather jacket, not a tuxedo. What we have instead is a tale of executive hubris, Chinese holding companies, export controls, and, of course, a race to create the world’s most powerful and important technology.
Because this is such a rich and fascinating intersection of our interests, we had to talk about it as soon as possible. Today, on what we’re calling an emergency episode, I’m joined by technology journalist Stephen Witt, who literally wrote the book on Jensen Huang and Nvidia, to talk about these revelations. How did someone so powerful become an international espionage target and fall for it? Why did it take so long for this story to come out, and who leaked it? How much of what Huang has been saying as a leader of the tech industry is now going to be called into question? And is it possible that this story is dramatic enough that it could pop the bubble we’re also worried about?
I’m Max Read. This is Hard Fork.
Joining me from a hotel room is Stephen Witt, author of last year’s book, *The Thinking Machine*, a biography of Jensen Huang and Nvidia. He’s going to help me try to wrap my head around this. Welcome to Hard Fork, Stephen.
Thanks for having me.
Of course. What have your last 24 or 48 hours been like as this story has been breaking?
I’ve been on every news network, I think, in the world. They’ve invited me on, and I’m having to decline invitations that, at any other time, I would have been overjoyed to get. It’s 3:30 in the morning where I am, and I’m still reporting. I’m still working. It’s nuts. What a story.
It seems to me that there are 3 big revelations in this unfolding story, or at least things that were revelations to me. One is that Jensen Huang was having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
Mm-hmm.
Two, that his affair partner’s company, Megaspeed, is suspected of funneling Nvidia chips to China in contravention of U.S. export bans. And, third, a series of things we’ve now learned about the Trump administration’s knowledge of this and possible intervention in Commerce Department investigations. How much of this was revelatory to you? You’ve spent a lot of time reporting on, talking to, and thinking about Jensen Huang. How much of it was surprising?
Everyone knew that the Malaysia data center thing was a cutout to smuggle chips to China. That had been reported by The Times over a year ago. Even before that, people understood that Malaysia didn’t have a big AI development program. If 10 or 15 percent of Nvidia’s revenue was coming from Malaysia, that really meant those chips were being distributed to China in one way or another.
Some people think the chips were brought to the data center, had their labels removed and replaced, and were then sent directly into mainland China as part of a real smuggling operation. Others thought maybe the data center was being used by Chinese assets in some way. But that was pretty well known.
There were whispers about the affair. I had heard stuff about it going into this summer and had been trying to find out more, but I didn’t have access to the thing that I guess really broke the story, which was White House intelligence. That was the surprising thing.
Although this is a story about Nvidia, smuggling, and affairs, I think Jensen found himself on the wrong side of the China hawks here. I think that’s where a lot of the reporting on this went: to the China hawks, who had an axe to grind with Jensen.
Yeah, and I want to talk about that in a moment. But before we get there, one of the big reasons this is a big story is that we don’t have many examples of CEOs who are as powerful as Jensen Huang. Can you briefly describe his role at Nvidia and in the greater AI ecosystem, and explain why it’s uniquely damaging for him to be involved in a scandal like this?
Jensen is the founder, CEO, and basically king of Nvidia. He’s been in that role for 30-plus years. Nvidia is an unusual organization. Typically, in a corporate org chart, you’ll have the CEO and then a second layer of management, maybe 6 to 8 people, who assist the CEO in various roles. That doesn’t exist at Nvidia. There’s Jensen, there’s nobody in the second tier, and then there are 60 people who report directly to him.
It’s a very unusual arrangement. Nvidia is Jensen to a degree I’ve almost never seen at any other corporation, except maybe some of Elon Musk’s companies. It’s really just this one guy in control, managing and running everything.
If he is compromised, if he has to step down, or if he can’t do his job in some way, that’s uniquely damaging for Nvidia. Nvidia has grown so large selling AI hardware, and microchips in particular, into data centers that it’s now a linchpin of the American economy. There’s a giant key-person risk, not just for Nvidia, but to some extent for the entire U.S. economy, around this guy.
This is painful for U.S. markets and very painful for Nvidia. Jensen’s judgment has to be called into question. This guy was bulletproof for the last decade. His stock did nothing but go up, and every call he made was right. Now it doesn’t look that way.
I understand this is going to take a little while to play out, but given his importance as you’ve described it, would you be surprised if he were ousted?
I’d be surprised if the board fired him. I don’t think that would be in the best interest of Nvidia shareholders, and that’s their job, right? I think it would make Nvidia’s stock go down a lot, so I don’t think the board will do that.
The real risk to Jensen, to me, comes from what Democrats and Republicans are both asking for: congressional hearings and congressional testimony. There are a number of ways this can go wrong, but probably the most important is that it’s so obvious to anyone looking at it for one second that these data centers in Malaysia were not for Malaysian people. They were for Chinese AI developers to get around these export restrictions.
Jensen could maybe play dumb and not understand that in the abstract, but if he’s sleeping with the head of the company, he can’t play dumb anymore, right? He must have known what was going on. And that’s against the law, right? So this creates enormous legal liability for Nvidia. They might have to pay a massive fine, and it could even create liability for Jensen himself.
The Republicans are asking him to testify behind closed doors. That’s actually positive for Jensen because it’s less embarrassing. I think the Democrats are going to hold, or attempt to hold, their own inquiries and hearings once they take control. I imagine those will be public, and it’s going to be a tricky situation for him. I just don’t know how he can say, “I didn’t know Malaysia was a cutout. I didn’t know about this woman.”
This is the thing that shocks me. It’s terrible that Jensen had an affair, but these things do happen in the course of human life. I’m so shocked that Jensen had an affair with this specific woman, who is just a walking red flag. She had no background in computer science, as far as anyone could tell, and suddenly she’s running this data center operation that’s a front. This woman is a smuggler. To begin a romantic relationship with someone like that just shows an almost self-destructive amount of poor judgment.
I can’t believe nobody warned him, but the thing about Jensen is he’s very headstrong and doesn’t listen to any advice. So, you know, he—
Yeah. You wrote the book on Jensen. You’ve spent a lot of time in his head. What do you think was going on there? Was it just a total lapse in judgment?
Yeah, pure hubris. I don’t think there was some strategic thing he was doing. I don’t really know what was going on in his head. He fell for it. He got played. That’s all you can say.
Yeah. To return to the question of Jensen’s role at Nvidia, if he does end up having to leave the company down the road, is there a succession plan in place?
Like, who’s the heir?
I asked him, “Who’s your successor?” He said, “Nobody.” He didn’t have any kind of plan personally. He never personally selected or named a successor. You know, again, hubris. Maybe he thought he was immortal.
I put this question to the board back in 2024. They said, “Oh, well, we’ve looked at some candidates.” One of those candidates was a guy named Jay Puri. He just retired, and he’s in his 70s, so I don’t think it’s going to be him.
I think Jensen’s going to fight this one as hard as he can. Jensen is a fighter. He’s a knife fighter. I actually think he will probably survive this, believe it or not. The thing that would bring him down, as I say, is congressional hearings. Never say never, but I don’t think the board will get rid of him.
The board is comprised of some of the original founders of NVIDIA, guys like Tench Coxe, who has been there since day one, since 1993. Tench Coxe has, I think, something like $2 billion to $3 billion worth of NVIDIA stock. He’s not going to do anything to damage the company.
Yeah. I know that 2 of Jensen’s kids and a son-in-law work at NVIDIA. As far as you know, are they being groomed to take over his position at some point?
Yeah, this is an interesting question. Jensen always presented to me and to others this total family man image. He talked a lot about his wife and how much he loved her. They’ve been together since he was 17 years old. They got married in their early 20s. If they get divorced, she may become one of the wealthiest women in America independently, sort of like MacKenzie Scott Bezos.
His kids are close. He keeps them at the company: Madison and Spencer. But they don’t have technical backgrounds. Spencer studied photography, and Madison went to culinary school. Whoever runs NVIDIA, whoever’s the CEO, has to be, in addition to being a businessperson, a world-class computer scientist. They have to be one of the best computer scientists alive, which is what Jensen is. He’s in the National Academy of Engineering. He has a master’s in electrical engineering. His computer science skills are excellent.
They can be present for the transition. They will inherit a large number of shares, but I don’t think they can run the company. Madison married this guy, Nico Caprez, earlier this year, I think just about a month ago, in Hawaii. So now Jensen has him as a son-in-law as well. He’s been promoted rapidly within the company. We’ll see if he actually has a role to play.
Yeah. Let’s turn to the political question here. I think it’s fair to say that Jensen is Trump’s favorite CEO, or certainly one of his favorite CEOs.
I think he was.
The president says he will take him on his upcoming trip to China. Here’s the Trump quote: “I haven’t heard he’s done anything wrong. He dealt with somebody, but so does everybody else. I think he’s an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it. You have to hear it. No, you can’t do that with people. He has done an amazing job for our country.” That’s the president of the United States on the man who is having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
How did Jensen get into this position in the Trump administration? And, furthermore, how did he become such an important figure in the AI sector in general?
This is the amazing thing. When I was talking to Jensen in 2024, he had no interest in politics. He had never made a political donation, and he had never endorsed a political candidate or indeed any policy. There were a couple of things related to exports, but very little. He was not a political guy, and he didn’t even attend Trump’s inauguration. He was in Taiwan while Sam and all the rest of them were kind of behind Trump in that show of power at the inauguration.
But he got Trump’s ear, and my impression is that he kind of became Trump’s friend through this really shameless approach of flattery. Jensen is an engineer, and what he told me is that he thinks about everything as an engineering problem, meaning you’re going to study the inputs, look at the outputs, and then modify the inputs to control the system until you get the outcome that you want.
Trump has a bottomless need for validation, and Jensen supplies that to him. He shamelessly kisses his butt, and I think this makes Trump like him. The other thing is that Jensen’s a winner, right? Trump always wants to be around winners, and for most of this year, NVIDIA was the single most valuable company in the world, maybe in human history. That made Trump and Jensen want to be close to each other.
I think Jensen understands Trump at a certain level, how to program him. His ego isn’t going to get in Jensen’s way the way it might for another tech executive.
Right. Let’s talk about Jensen’s stance on China, because that’s important to the story on a couple of different levels. He’s been a pretty outspoken advocate for selling his own chips directly to China, in contravention of U.S. export restrictions on those chips, which have been put into place to try to slow down China’s own AI development. Tell me a little bit about his stance, how he came to it, and how he’s advocated for it.
I was always a little surprised by it myself, but there’s certainly a great business case for it, right? China is going to have a massive data center build-out that looks just like the U.S.’s. When they do, they’re going to fill all of that with computing equipment. So that’s another entire data center build-out that he can supply, which presumably would double the value of his company.
It’s a very straightforward P&L, profit reason that Jensen wants this. I think the justification for it is: If we don’t sell this to them, they will build their own AI hardware stack, and then we’ll have to compete against that. That will be very challenging for us, and we might lose.
Jensen is genuinely very afraid of that. It’s a theme that has gone all the way back to the beginning of his career: the fear that his equipment, even in the video game days, would get cloned by Chinese competitors and sold at a fraction of the cost, and he would go out of business. That’s certainly the history of hardware. It’s normal that he would be afraid of that and would be looking to prevent it.
What poisons the discourse now is this romantic relationship. Are you saying this because you believe it, or are you saying it because you’re entangled with a foreign intelligence asset who was manipulating you? I think that narrative is probably not true. I think Jensen would say this anyway, but his credibility is zero. He can never talk about China or export restrictions again without sounding like a fool, like an intelligence play has happened.
Like a patsy, basically.
Yeah, precisely. Like a stooge. So I think that argument has gone out the window. I imagine NVIDIA will, in short order, not be able to sell anything to China ever again.
Yeah. You brought up before the possibility that what’s happened here is that Jensen’s enemies within the Trump administration had gotten their knives out for him. Tell me why you think that, and who those enemies would be.
There were people on the right who didn’t like this. It’s not that they didn’t like Jensen; they didn’t like his soft take on China. They didn’t like that he was pro-free trade with China. These are the China hawks on the right: guys like Peter Thiel and Paul Lucky, and in particular Marco Rubio, who is a longtime China hawk and also Trump’s Secretary of State. Rubio actually wasn’t permitted inside China for a while because his statements were so hawkish.
The U.S. intelligence community got to this story because they had some kind of wiretap on the woman, on Alice, and Jensen showed up in that wiretap. Marco Rubio prepared a memo showing that it was Jensen and shared that with Trump. Then Trump took no action.
I imagine at least part of the reason we in the press are now hearing that is because someone in the White House wanted to reduce Jensen’s influence over the president. I think there was an element here of the China hawks taking back control of the narrative and taking back control of power within the White House.
Yeah. Let’s talk about the chips and the supply chain. The details are complicated in exactly what is happening in the MegaSpeed case, but it’s something like NVIDIA is selling chips to the U.S. arm of a Chinese company, which then sells them on to MegaSpeed.
Yes.
Is this a sort of normal—I think you sort of answered this question before—
This is how you smuggle something, right? You establish a dummy corporation in a different country, and then you reroute it. That’s why import-export can be a shady business sometimes, right? There was a case earlier this year where guys at Supermicro were taking these boxes for NVIDIA equipment. They would take a hair dryer and blow the packaging label off, peel it off, and then replace it with a fake packaging label.
In MegaSpeed, the details are still a little fuzzy. One thing that may have happened is that they were using the data centers with dummy servers. The NVIDIA equipment would show up, and they would install it, quote unquote, but actually install other nonfunctional equipment in the data center to make it look like a functional data center. Then you wheel the NVIDIA equipment out the back door and cart it off to China, to some secret location.
That seems to have been one thing happening. Even without that, MegaSpeed seems to be downstream of Alibaba, which is kind of the Chinese eBay, and Alibaba seems to have been the main customer for MegaSpeed’s products. Again, that depends on how you read the law, but I think that’s in violation of the export restriction as well, because you can’t use these fronts. The lawmakers are aware that this sort of thing exists.
There are a couple of ways to get around it. This year, I’ve heard that NVIDIA has cracked down on this a lot, perhaps recognizing the political liability of many of these sales. It’s really forcing the data centers to make sure they have legitimate customers who are not in China.
I’m in Singapore right now. This is just across the bridge, about 30 minutes away from me. But, as is typical with these facilities, you can’t access them at all. They’re surrounded by gates and security. No one’s allowed in or out, so it’s really hard to know what’s going on in there. As I say, I think it defies imagination that Jensen wouldn’t understand what was going on here. It just isn’t plausible.
Yeah. Let me ask: it’s the Commerce Department that is, for the most part, investigating this? If you’re installing dummy servers in your fake data center, are Commerce Department investigators stopping by to check on those? How is the U.S. involved?
Right. They have limited ability to do anything outside the United States. I think they’re probably guaranteeing that the original point of sale, or the original destination where the thing is delivered, is this data center in Malaysia. They’re real; they exist. There’s something there. But once it goes in, the U.S. has very limited authority and insight into what might happen in Malaysia. From there, there’s not much they can do.
I’m not quite sure how to ask this, but is Megaspeed a real company? It’s not a fake company or a cutout or anything?
It appears to be. It’s a great question. I’m not sure, but it appears to have been formed in 2023. That year, Nvidia announced that they were a preferred cloud partner, meaning, “We’re going to prefer selling our equipment to this company in Malaysia.”
They have facilities. They have big data centers that seem to use a lot of power. They built something here, so it’s not completely phony. It seems like people use their computing resources and pay them for it. It is a real company in that sense. It’s just an open question who’s using it, who’s paying for it, and how legitimate any of it is.
Well, that’s a good place to take a break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about what’s going on in Singapore, where you are right now.
Welcome back to Hard Fork. I’m talking with Stephen Witt. You are in fact in Singapore. What’s the reaction been like on the ground? Is everybody in Singapore talking about this?
1. Singapore’s View of the Scandal
Oh, yeah. I think the reaction in Singapore is, “What took you guys so long?” Singapore’s authorities had been busting smuggling rings going back to 2024. They were aware that at least some of this was happening.
Johor is just across the way, and a lot of people who live in Singapore work in Malaysia. Malaysia has become a data center hub beyond Megaspeed. There’s legitimately a big industry there. It employs a lot of people, and they’re very proud of it. I don’t want to smear them all as some kind of criminal conspiracy. It’s a real thing.
But I think the impression they got was, “What is going on here?” There were a lot of whispers about Jensen and this woman, both inside Nvidia and among people working around there. I think people got the impression there was more to their relationship than simply business. But it’s hard to prove. Without a wiretap, which is ultimately what brought him down, how are you going to demonstrate this?
Right. There was a short-seller report back in May that has now been recirculating. It seems to have put some of the pieces together, but it was unable to specifically describe an affair, as you say, because they didn’t have a wiretap themselves.
It’s very hard. I think people knew, or at least suspected, that something was going on. You see videos of the two of them together; there’s a kind of awkward body language when they’re together. There are more photographs and videos leaking out. So I imagine if you were part of Jensen’s immediate entourage, you probably had a fairly good idea of what was going on.
I had heard stray whispers from within Nvidia earlier this year, but I just wasn’t able to find it or track it down. It was a hard story to get. Credit to the Times for getting it.
I’ll take that credit. I’m happy to take that credit as a podcast host. I can’t imagine that trying to honeypot the CEO is the first line of attack for Chinese intelligence services, or the Chinese government in general, trying to accomplish whatever they’re trying to accomplish. I presume that Nvidia has been a target of infiltration attempts, signal capture, and whatever else you might do. Is that true?
Oh, they all have. Nvidia is, in some ways, the least valuable target. They’re really going after Anthropic and OpenAI. Trade secrets from Nvidia are pretty valuable, but China can’t actually manufacture what Nvidia manufactures because they can’t get the equipment. So I think with Jensen, it probably is more about an influence campaign.
At the time this relationship started, Jensen wasn’t close to Trump. That’s the other thing. They probably had some other motive for going after Jensen at first. Then suddenly they were like, “Oh my God, we’ve got—we were literally in bed with the president’s top tech adviser. This is awesome.” This was a big win for the Chinese spies. It was like Christmas morning for them, probably.
Yeah, I bet. At the time we’re recording this, Nvidia stock is down, but the market overall is relatively calm. This is despite the importance and power of the companies we’ve been talking about. Why do you think there isn’t a bigger reaction in the markets over this?
It’s funny: all of the AI infrastructure stocks that make up so much of the market now are actually trading at very cheap valuations. The market thinks the AI infrastructure play is coming to an end, or that there’s going to be a drawdown in sales in the next couple of years. That’s how the stocks are priced, so maybe some of this was priced in already.
The other thing is that what’s bad for Nvidia is actually good for Nvidia’s competitors, specifically AMD, Broadcom, and Google, which are all manufacturing rival microchips. Google in particular has really started to become one of Nvidia’s top rivals. Nvidia has a number of significant business risks outside of this spy scandal that it already faced, and I think some of that was priced into the stock as well.
Let me ask you one final question along these lines. Jensen is unique in this moment as a tech CEO, especially as an AI CEO, in that he’s maybe the least safety-focused, or the least afraid of AI as a technology.
Yeah.
It’s almost the opposite of somebody like Dario Amodei, who’s constantly warning of possible catastrophe. Jensen gave a big interview to my colleague Ezra Klein earlier this year where he makes the case that it’s just a tool and we shouldn’t be worrying about it like this. You wrote about this for the opinion section recently. There’s a scene at the end of your book where he yells at you for even pressing him on this belief.
So my question is: what happens if AI’s biggest, least afraid booster loses power and loses credibility, like we’ve been saying? Do policymakers change their sense of what AI is? Does this change the direction of AI development in the future?
Yeah, probably. Jensen’s not the only person who feels this way. Most of Trump’s advisers feel this way. David Sacks certainly feels this way. Mark Andreessen certainly feels this way, same as Jensen.
They all think AI is completely safe and that all this doomerist discourse is disconnected from reality. That has been a long debate. Jensen believed that long before he ever hooked up with a Chinese spy. This goes back to 2015.
I do think he was probably the most convincing and powerful advocate for that point of view. His point of view is that he’s looking at it from the microchip up. He’s saying, “I have complete control over each individual component here, and if I’m losing control somewhere along the system, that just means it’s an engineering failure, and we know how to fix engineering failures.” So I’m sort of parroting his point of view.
From Dario and Sam and the other people who are more worried, they’re looking at it from the top down, and they’re saying, “I don’t know how this thing works. It’s extremely powerful, and I might lose control of it.” That’s a really different point of view.
I think Jensen has lost this one. I’ve noticed even Trump has started to talk a little bit more about, “Well, maybe we’ll regulate it a little bit.” I think the Democratic wave that was just put into power had a number of reasons, including oil prices, but it seems like voters were very concerned about AI.
I think Trump’s point of view and Jensen’s point of view is, “No, you don’t understand. If we stop doing this, China wins. China takes control of this technology. They are not afraid, and they are not slowing down.” I think that’s actually the strongest argument against the AI doomer narrative: people out here in Asia—not just China, but Japan and Korea and Singapore—they don’t believe this at all.
Yeah.
They just do not believe this, and you don’t hear a lot of doomerism. I never get AI risk questions out here. In the U.S., it’s the most common thing that I’m asked. So to some people, it looks like a cultural hysteria, almost like a moral panic.
Yeah. All right, Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really enlightening and elucidating conversation. I really appreciate you making the time at 3:30 in the morning in Singapore, from your hotel room. The book is The Thinking Machine. It’s a great read if you’re at all interested in one of the most important, and now most talked-about, figures in the AI era. I look forward to reading more of your reporting on this.
Thank you so much.