A tech writer’s view from China on the biggest business scandal of the year, and why most coverage is reading it wrong
I don’t usually write about politics, and this isn’t a political post. I write about AI and blockchain. Like everyone in tech, though, I spent the past two weeks watching the Jensen Huang story. I’ve watched the podcasts and read the analyst notes and the hot takes. Most of them treat it as a nuclear event for AI. It isn’t, and I think the more interesting story is somewhere else.
What happened
On October 29, the New York Times reported that US officials had concluded Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, was a Chinese intelligence asset. Megaspeed was suspected of steering Nvidia chips to China. The report said she had a close relationship with Jensen Huang, and that the President had been briefed about a year earlier and took no action Source. After the November 3 election, things moved fast. Republican lawmakers demanded a briefing on November 4 Source. On November 8, Huang admitted to being unfaithful and the board opened an investigation. The President said the FBI was looking into it Source. On November 11, a second relationship came out, with a senior Nvidia executive who reported to him. The next day he resigned, and CFO Colette Kress became interim CEO Source.
That’s sex, money, spies and a $4 trillion company. Nothing else in the news stood a chance.
The right questions, the wrong answers
On Prof G Markets, Ed Elson asked the right questions. Is Nvidia too big to fire its CEO? Who is profiting? I think the answers most commentators reached are wrong, because they stay focused on Jensen the man: his personal life, his relationships in Washington, his supposed irreplaceability. To answer those questions properly, you have to step back from the person and look at the company and the moment.
Why only Nvidia could carry this story
No other company holds Nvidia’s position. Market cap is only part of it. Nvidia is supplier, investor, financier and partner to almost the entire AI industry. It is also the company at the center of US-China export policy, which turns a corporate story into a national security one.
Run the thought experiment with anyone else. A scandal at Meta or Google would make headlines, but it wouldn’t involve geopolitics, chip policy and every American retirement account all at once. Oracle and Palantir are hugely important, but they stay behind the scenes and are firmly aligned with Washington. Elon Musk can command this much attention, but nothing he does surprises anyone anymore. Only Nvidia could take over the global news cycle like this.
The business hasn’t changed
Look past the stock chart. Nvidia has guided to at least $1 trillion in Blackwell and Vera Rubin sales through 2027 Source. Demand still exceeds supply. Google, AMD and the custom-silicon players are real competitors, but none of them is in a position to take over in the next three to five years. If anyone in AI is making real money, it’s still Nvidia.
Yes, the stock lost about $1.4 trillion in value in two weeks Source. That’s a lot of money, but it’s sentiment and governance risk being priced in, and the company didn’t have that value a couple of years ago anyway. Even the analyst who downgraded the stock expects core fundamentals “to remain strong for the foreseeable future” Source. Semiconductors run on years, not news cycles. Roadmaps, foundry agreements with TSMC and yield improvements are all multi-year commitments, and none of them depend on one person.
“There’s no succession plan.” There is.
The most repeated line of the week is that Nvidia has no succession plan. The governance criticism is fair, but the operating reality is simple: the succession plan is the organization. While Jensen was flying between capitals and sitting in political meetings, other people were shipping product and closing deals. This is a machine that keeps turning out chips and cash.
Founders matter, as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk show. But Apple went from Jobs to Tim Cook and now to John Ternus Source, and it kept going.
It’s also worth being clear about what made this case serious. An affair on its own wouldn’t have brought down Nvidia’s CEO. The alleged spy link is what did, because it brings in Congress, federal agencies and possible scrutiny of how Nvidia’s chips reached China. If any senior Nvidia executive had been caught up in an investigation like that, the questions would still have gone straight to the top, and Jensen would still have taken the hit. This time it just happened to be about him directly. That’s why “is it Jensen specifically?” matters far less than people think.
This is not an AI problem
To be clear: this is not an AI story. AI’s real bottlenecks this year are memory, especially the shortage of high-bandwidth memory Source, along with power, data center construction and financing. Nvidia’s leadership crisis doesn’t change any of them. Nvidia is even still a cornerstone investor in Anthropic’s IPO Source.
A note from the ground in China
Western media frames almost everything about Nvidia as a US-China fight. From where I sit, that doesn’t match daily life. Nobody here is hostile to American tech. We would happily use American AI and buy American chips. We just can’t.
The two cases are different, and the difference is worth knowing. Chips are restricted by US government export controls. AI models are mostly restricted by the companies themselves. OpenAI cut off API access for mainland China and Hong Kong in 2024 by its own choice Source. Anthropic’s terms of service exclude China, and it has extended that to any company majority-owned by a firm headquartered there, wherever it operates Source. When you can’t buy something, you build it. That isn’t a fight. It’s forced pragmatism, and describing a chip-starved market as a combatant against the big boys is a little odd.
The scandal also shows what scarcity produces. Black-market traders in Shenzhen reportedly paused business this week, and a set of eight B300 GPUs now goes for almost six times the official US price Source. Scarcity creates grey markets, and grey markets create exactly this kind of intrigue.
The timing question
This isn’t a conspiracy piece. But some facts are worth putting side by side.
Before the vote, forecasters already expected Republicans to lose the House and probably the Senate Source. The result was worse than expected, a landslide that beat the polls by around four points nationally Source. The affairs reportedly happened long before, and intelligence agencies had the findings for about a year. The story surfaced days before the election, but the political machinery only got going afterwards: congressional letters, the FBI, the board’s emergency meetings.
Is that a distraction? Looking back, it clearly worked as one, whoever was behind it. A cynic would point out that the playbook of the past decade has been to dominate the news cycle at all costs, because for some players no news is the only bad news. It’s also hard to see what Democrats would gain from the timing, since the story could have come out at any point.
To be fair, the other side of the ledger matters too. The scandal raises hard questions for the administration about why the intelligence was sat on, and the President reportedly urged Jensen to fight to keep his job Source.
I don’t know who played this card, or whether anyone did. What I can see is the effect, and it’s more striking than a single distraction. The scandal didn’t just bury one story. It buried two.
Caught between two stories
Look at the calendar. On November 3, Democrats won one of the biggest midterm victories in decades. On November 19, Anthropic is expected to start trading on Nasdaq in the largest AI listing ever. One is the biggest political story of the year and the other is the biggest market story. The Nvidia scandal peaked in the two weeks between them: the board investigation, the FBI, the second affair and the resignation.
The election should have dominated the conversation in the days after. Instead, the post-election analysis, the questions about what a Democratic Congress means and the debate over what voters were saying all competed with Jensen Huang’s private life, and mostly lost.
The IPO is the next casualty. Anthropic is set to list at a valuation of up to about $1.4 trillion fully diluted, with run-rate revenue reportedly around $81 billion against nearly $900 billion in compute commitments Source. The prospectus shows a first-half net loss of $80.7 billion, mostly from an accounting remeasurement of convertible bonds, alongside a much smaller operating loss of $693 million Source. Numbers like these should be getting intense scrutiny the week before pricing. Is the valuation justified? Can revenue growth keep pace with the compute bill? What does this listing mean for every AI company that follows? Instead, the market seems content to assume it will all be fine, and the attention has gone elsewhere.
That’s what makes the timing so remarkable. Pulling attention away from one major story is a news cycle. Pulling it away from the story before and the story after, while leaving the underlying business mostly intact, is a perfect storm. Every element landed at once: the most watched company in the world, the most compelling combination of sex, money and spies, and a two-week window between two events that each deserved the spotlight.
Call it coincidence, call it strategy, or call it the way the news works now. From where I sit, it’s one of the most impressive examples of attention economics I’ve seen, and it has very little to do with AI.
Bottom line
Nvidia will be fine, and AI’s real problems are elsewhere. The lesson of these two weeks isn’t about chips. It’s about attention: the right company, the right scandal and the right timing were enough to pull a whole country’s focus away from both the biggest political story and the biggest market story of the year. Whoever’s hand was on the deck, if anyone’s was, it was a remarkable play to watch.
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