The Jensen Huang scandal is hardly over | The Verge

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
A second affair has hit the news cycle, but that’s not what matters here.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
See All by Elizabeth Lopatto
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
A second affair has hit the news cycle, but that’s not what matters here.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
See All by Elizabeth Lopatto
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
See All by Elizabeth Lopatto
I was certain, until the story of Jensen Huang’s second affair hit, that Huang was bulletproof. After all, why wouldn’t he be? He’s placed himself indispensably at the center of the AI industry and famously had no succession plan at Nvidia. In fact, he’s the only CEO Nvidia has ever had. L’état c’est moi.
Then two stories were published nearly back to back on Wednesday: one alleging Huang had an affair with his subordinate Kimberly Powell, another that the board was meeting to consider his ouster. First thing Thursday morning, Nvidia announced Huang had resigned. One of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley was out.
Why throw Huang under the bus for getting his nuts drained?
Fascinating. First of all, when I asked on Monday “Who else is Jensen Huang fucking?” I did not expect to get answers this fast — somebody, potentially somebody on the board (as we’ve seen in other incidents), wanted the story out there. Second, why throw Huang under the bus for getting his nuts drained? This is not an industry that cares about that kind of thing — just ask Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates. My guess is that the second affair is a pretext for action, and this all goes back to the original story from last week: that Huang was honeypotted by an alleged Chinese spy. Whatever was going on with neocloud Megaspeed might be much, much worse than we know, and what we know is pretty bad: business listings that led to “a Malaysian data center and shopping mall, a near-empty office in Singapore and a dilapidated storefront outside Kuala Lumpur.”
Do you have information about Nvidia? Contact Elizabeth Lopatto securely on Signal at lopatto.46.
Even months before the report that Alice “No Relation” Huang, an exec at Megaspeed, was having an affair with Huang, there were questions about Nvidia’s business in China. The US government has placed strict export controls on Nvidia’s high-end chips. Huang claimed in May that as a result, Nvidia has zero percent market share in China. But also in May, short sellers Culper Research published a report in which they wrote, “We believe that in reality, over 20% of Nvidia’s FY 2026 compute revenues remained driven by China – supported both by illegal GPU diversion and Southeast Asian intermediaries.”
Megaspeed was Nvidia’s largest Southeast Asian buyer, but Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times visited Megaspeed’s Singapore office a month ago to find “no signs of activity.” Another building tenant told the reporters, “It is always dark for as long as it has been here. I hardly see anyone visiting or in the office.” The sole director of Megaspeed, Tan Yong Pong, appears to have vanished. The Singaporean company that owns Megaspeed, Swiftdata, has listed an office that belongs to an interior design firm as its business address.
Megaspeed is only part of the story
Incidentally, Alice Huang has surfaced in Beijing. The Financial Times says she’s barred from Singapore for giving police “inaccurate information.” Oh, and reportedly her companies invested in Chinese AI company DeepSeek and promised them Nvidia’s Blackwell chips? Fun!
Megaspeed is only part of the story, I think. There are two Chinese chip-related scandals that could cause serious problems for Nvidia, and both feature people with close ties to Huang. One is Megaspeed, which involves Huang’s maybe-spy affair partner. The other centers on Super Micro (which, horribly, does business as Supermicro), a partner of Nvidia run by one of Huang’s old friends, Charles Liang. Super Micro’s cofounder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, along with Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang and Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, allegedly defrauded the US by serving as a passthrough for a front company to buy $2.5 billion of Nvidia chips for Alibaba. The front company, not named in the indictment, is Thailand-based OBON, according to Bloomberg. Liang and Super Micro have not been charged.
But these incidents may not be the end of Nvidia’s problems. Take for instance, more recently, New Matrix — another company that barely exists, and yet is an approved buyer of Nvidia chips. It is, in fact, one of several approved companies that “have ties to firms that have been blacklisted by the U.S. government, or that work as military contractors in China,” according to The New York Times.
The question, of course, is how high this all goes
Huang has insisted that Nvidia has seen “no evidence of any AI chip diversion.” He’s been pretty emphatic on that point, actually. I am now wondering if that is even a little bit true. If the board is cutting Huang loose, there’s probably more on chip smuggling allegations coming.
More substantively, Nvidia reportedly intervened in a 2025 Commerce Department investigation of Megaspeed, which was suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips — halting the investigation. Since the scandal broke, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appears to have become the fall guy for this, with Axios reporting that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “confronted” him about failing t