On Sunday, Nvidia announced that it was opening an investigation into CEO Jensen Huang after he admitted to an affair with a Singapore-based data-center company executive named Alice Huang (no relation), whom U.S. officials say is also working as a spy for Chinese state intelligence. Given the size of Nvidia, as well as its strategic centrality to the intense AI buildout competition between the U.S. and China, Huang might be the single most desirable person in the tech industry, if not the whole world, for Beijing to honeypot. According to reporting around the matter, it seems like they got what they came for.
We must begin with the crux of the issue, which is the matter of why Nvidia is in such a central position. AI software companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have gotten significantly more media attention because they make consumer products and engage in marketing rhetoric about their potential to create the machine god, but Nvidia is the company that has made the most actual money during the ongoing AI boom. Nvidia makes chips, supposedly the best of all the chips, on which every big-time software company built its flagship platforms a few years ago. This has made Nvidia the second-biggest publicly traded company in the world, and has made its founder Jensen Huang fabulously wealthy and quite the influential figure.
It’s also made the Santa Clara–based Nvidia the most critical part of the U.S. strategic plan to assert global AI dominance, by which I mean dominance over China, its principal competitor in the field. American trade policy forbids Nvidia from selling its best stuff to Chinese companies: U.S. policymakers want American companies to build the biggest and best data centers and create AI software that can most effectively and profitably book a flight for you, tell you some stuff you love about your kid, or conduct microtargeted drone assassinations of restive labor organizers.