Jensen Huang’s Troubles Leave the AI Industry Reeling

No executive has pulled the strings in the artificial intelligence era quite like Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang. He parlayed the boom into incredible wealth, became a close confidant of President Donald Trump, and emerged as a prominent voice in US-China relations. That now all stands in the balance.Over the last few days, Huang’s status as an AI titan has come under scrutiny amid an admission that he had an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at a Singapore-based company whom US intelligence services concluded was a Chinese intelligence asset.Nvidia’s board of directors said that the company would launch an investigation into the incident. Huang, the company said, “fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.” Huang earned $36 million last year, owned about 3.5 percent of Nvidia as of March, according to a corporate filing—which also noted that Huang is an at-will employee who can be let go anytime without severance.How exactly the investigation shakes out, and what it means for Huang’s future at the company, remains to be seen. But the incident at least puts his position at risk, and raises questions about how the industry will respond.“He’s the person who decides who gets the chips and who doesn't,” says David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who tracks the chip industry.Nvidia, which Huang cofounded in 1993, controls 90 percent of the market for chips used in training frontier AI models. With those chips in short supply, Huang has the power to determine which areas of AI get a boost next. Nvidia has also bankrolled much of the AI buildout, investing billions in the very companies buying its chips, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. When Elon Musk wants to build a new data center, Yoffie says, he can put in a call to Huang.Internally, Huang closely manages even small details at Nvidia, responds to emails from any one of its roughly 60,000 staffers, and raises his voice to get points across, according to current and former employees. He’s a regular on cable TV and at tech conferences, where he’s been trying to deflate concerns about an AI market bubble and boost the positioning of his company.But Nvidia has no other executive anywhere close to Huang’s prominence, and no apparent potential successor. “We have no idea who would replace him,” Yoffie says. “You put someone new into that position, if you're a customer, who knows what that's going to mean.”Ryan Fedasiuk, a senior fellow at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation, says that Huang has played such an important role—and become so close to the president—that he has become load-bearing for the entire US AI industry.“On the one hand, Huang is irreplaceable. He built Nvidia into the juggernaut it is today, and he was the visionary behind the GPU, which has sustained the intelligence revolution,” Fedasiuk says. But he says that the company, which is indispensable to the AI industry, has to come first.“He has to be replaceable as the CEO of the world's largest company, at $4 trillion in capex.”Nvidia shares fell more than 4 percent on Monday, even as broader stock market indices rose.The board’s investigation will most likely focus on whether Huang violated any company policies, Yoffie says. But the FBI could also investigate whether laws were broken, and Congress may decide to look into whether Huang’s affair influenced the US government’s policy on selling chips to China.Nvidia didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.The scandal also raises serious questions about whether China may have gained sensitive information about US AI companies and the government’s strategy on China, Fedasiuk says.Huang’s affair appears especially damning given how outspoken he has been in recent years against calls for more aggressive technology export controls on China. His credibility on the topic could be permanently in doubt.Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration imposed export controls designed to limit China’s access to Nvidia’s chips, as well as technology required to mint advanced semiconductors. In his second term, however, Trump loosened these controls, giving China access to older generations of Nvidia chips; it was better to make China reliant on US technology, the argument went.Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, says the Huang scandal is likely to accelerate efforts to crack down on chip exports.“There was going to be more of an impetus to control what chips are getting sent to China anyway,” he says. “I expect there to be more scrutiny on what's going on, what's getting sent to China. I think there's also going to be more scrutiny from the Commerce Department.”