This week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted to an affair with Alice Huang, a businesswoman US intelligence says was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security. On Uncanny Valley, Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger break down what this means for Nvidia, for the AI industry, and for the chip export controls Huang has long pushed back against. Plus, now that the Democrats have swept the midterms, white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and the Proud Boys are declaring the MAGA movement dead and saying the Republican Party is theirs for the taking.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- Jensen Huang Hired a PR Firm Known for Handling Sex Scandals Last Year
- Jensen Huang’s Troubles Leave the AI Industry Reeling
- ‘We Have to Take Over’: Far-Right Extremists Want to Seize Control of the GOP
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Brian Barrett: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Zoë Schiffer: I’m Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.
Leah Feiger: And I’m Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Zoë Schiffer: This week, we’re getting into the scandal that has had everyone talking. On Sunday, Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang admitted to having an affair with a businesswoman who US intelligence says is also a Chinese spy.
Brian Barrett: The affair has brought up all kinds of questions from what information might have been linked to China to why the White House was previously warned about the relationship but didn’t do much about it seemingly. We’re taking a step back and discussing what this whole mess means for the AI industry at large and for the future of the chip export controls that Jensen Huang has pushed back against for so long.
Leah Feiger: And after last week’s democratic sweep in the midterms, you would think that the far-right would be hiding in the corner, licking their wounds. And they did for about a week, but that’s all. Instead, now white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and the Proud Boys have declared that the MAGA movement is dead and the Republican Party is theirs for the taking. We’re going to get into what these groups are saying and why they see the election results as an opportunity.
Zoë Schiffer: OK. So this past weekend, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sent a message to his employees that no CEO ever wants to write. He admitted basically that he has been having an affair with this woman, Alice Huang. Same last name, no relation. I keep laughing at that. I’m like, the only way this scandal could be more insane is if they were second cousins or something, but in fact, no.
Brian Barrett: And this is not something people care about necessarily, but it does make writing these stories a little bit trickier because you have to sort of switch back to first names for a while. Anyway, yes, but not the point.
Zoë Schiffer: I feel like it’s fairly obvious that they’re not related. However, yeah, I guess you do need to say it out loud. The New York Times has been reporting for weeks that US intelligence identified she was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security, basically they’re like CIA, to gather information on him. Nvidia’s board has now opened an investigation into this incident and Huang is absolutely staying in charge, at least for now while this all plays out. But this whole saga has been both a very embarrassing PR nightmare with potential national security consequences, and it has the company on track to lose more than $470 billion in market value over just two days.
Leah Feiger: It’s an unbelievable amount of money for an also unbelievable story. Honeypotting in this day and age, incredible stuff. Zoë, I’m sorry to be this person, but can you take us through year by year what we knew, when we knew it? Because this whole scandal didn’t just break in the last couple of days.
Zoë Schiffer: Let me go back to 2023. This is when Megaspeed, the company that Alice Huang is in charge of, was created and it splits off from a Chinese gaming company just a few months after the US began restricting advanced chip exports to China. And the reason that this is important is a couple things. Number one, Malaysia where this company is operating out of, almost immediately when the export controls become a thing is identified as a very obvious loophole. Malaysia doesn’t have a big AI industry, so if you see big data centers cropping up and they’re full of Nvidia chips, you can be sure that those chips are actually on their way to China. And in fact, it looks like most people in Silicon Valley and in the Trump administration were aware of this and it just wasn’t a huge deal. The other thing that’s worth saying is that Alice Huang was a former TV journalist. This is not someone with a computer science background. It’s not the person you would expect to be in charge of a company that becomes a very big part, a very important part of Nvidia’s business. So in 2024, Jensen begins appearing in public with Alice Huang. Around this time, they’re photographed together multiple times. Their body language is a little bit funny. So there are whispers starting at least inside the company. And again, Megaspeed begins multi-billion dollar purchases of advanced Nvidia chips, which looks a little suss. And I think it’s very, very, very difficult, some might say impossible to imagine that Jensen isn’t fully aware of where the chips are headed.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Well, and he also has been very vocal about saying, “I think China should have chips.” He doesn’t feel any… Yeah.
Leah Feiger: Few AI executives have had as much sway over Trump’s approach to AI and China as Huang, and he’s made his position incredibly clear multiple times.
Jensen Huang, archival audio: I did my best to inform the policymakers in the United States of the importance of engaging the Chinese market and making sure that we serve that market for as long as we can. I’ve been very clear that even though although we compete against China, they’re not our enemies. If we care deeply about the safety of the world with respect to artificial intelligence, then of course we must open dialogues. We must work with them in every possible way.
Zoë Schiffer: He was vocal about this before he and Alice knew each other.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, absolutely.
Zoë Schiffer: This is a core part of his belief system. The two theories are either you sell advanced chips to China and thus China becomes reliant on US chips and maybe they don’t build their own industry or you don’t and you hope that you kneecap them in the short term and your AI industry is able to stay far enough ahead that it’s not a huge problem. But Jensen had a very legitimate, I think, argument here. Obviously now he’s never allowed to talk about export controls ever again because he’s going to look-
Brian Barrett: I bet he will though. I bet he will.
Zoë Schiffer: I mean, maybe. Yeah. But it’s like China does do this. They make competitive hardware all the time and then underprice it, and so it harms US industry. And I think that in addition to this being a very good business play, Nvidia could have doubled its business because China is going through the same data center build out that the US is. He also had a national security argument that wasn’t totally farfetched.
Brian Barrett: I think too, and I think he also, I’ve heard him argue, it’s a related point, but I think if China builds their own competitive chips, then they’ll build their own whole tech stack and you’ll have this entire world of AI that is largely open source, open weight, broadly accessible that the US is totally shut out of because it’s not just Nvidia chips, it’s everything around them. Setting the merits of it aside, the point is it’s not like Alice Huang said, “Hey Jensen, have you heard about China?” That’s not what this is.
Zoë Schiffer: Certainly not. And I think there’s a lot of different facets of these arguments, but one that you hear with the open source angle a lot is China will be able to spread its Chinese AI around the world and gain influence by making a bunch of other countries dependent on their technology instead of US technology. And that in and of itself would be a big threat.
Brian Barrett: I think you really can’t overstate the importance of Jensen Huang with the China conversation in the US. He is not only the leading voice, I think he’s one of the only prominent voices among Silicon Valley CEOs who has taken this stance of, “We should work closely with them.” Everybody else is running the other direction as fast as they can. Between that and the Democrats coming in, I really do wonder what this is going to mean for our relationship with China. I assume nothing great. I assume when you lose a voice like that … Trump is still swayable probably, but who’s there to sway him?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. And to be clear, China has already come out and said that Alice is not a Chinese spy, and how dare anyone suggest otherwise.
Leah Feiger: Can we talk about the Marco Rubio thing of it all?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, so this is the question. So during Trump’s latest return to the White House, he and Jensen become quite close. And this is a switch for Jensen who previously wasn’t political. You had other CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, who were known liberals, Democrats, and then made a big switch with Trump’s return to the White House. Jensen wasn’t like that. He was apolitical and then decided to go all in on Trump and they seemingly became quite close. And behind the scenes, Jensen is advocating for his point of view. He wants special exemptions so that he can sell chips to China. He certainly doesn’t want Trump cracking down on the Malaysia of it all, this obvious loophole in the export controls. And this makes people like Marco Rubio and other China hawks not so happy with Jensen, to say the very least. And so at some point the government becomes aware that there is this affair going on and Marco Rubio drafts a memo that starts circulating around the White House basically saying, “Hey, this is happening and we think that it’s a problem.” We don’t know who, but someone takes that opportunity to leak the memo to the press and make Jensen look really bad. And the timing of this is crucial because Jensen is more vulnerable in this moment, I think, than he has been in recent past because Democrats just took the House. And so while previously Elizabeth Warren asked him to come testify before the Senate Banking Committee and he essentially said, “No, thank you.” I think it’s fair to imagine that he’s not going to have that option again.
Brian Barrett: And in fact, he’s been invited to a closed door briefing by three Republican house committee chairs on November 18th, so that may be coming sooner than later.
Leah Feiger: Let’s talk next CEO. Have there been any rumors or conversations about who would take over?
Brian Barrett: I don’t think so.
Zoë Schiffer: No, I don’t think there’s an obvious name. I mean, I’ve been talking to a lot of people in Silicon Valley about this this week, and I have yet to find a CEO who’s like, “They should get rid of Jensen.” But, almost everyone has been like, “It is such a red flag that he didn’t see the obvious red flags of this random TV journalist who’s in charge of this seemingly shell company that is obviously selling chips to China.” The whole thing is just incredibly irresponsible at the very, very least. And I think that that’s going to continue to come up.
Brian Barrett: I think one thing I keep going back to, which is maybe slightly related, is that Nvidia, it is such a different company than it was five years ago, four years ago. For almost 30 of the years he’s talking about, he was building a really great GPUs for gaming laptops business. And it’s only in the last three years that he has ascended to the top of the mountain because those chips happen to also be very good for AI.
Zoë Schiffer: Well, yes. And he did make a bet that that was going to be a really important business and that bet enormously paid off.
Brian Barrett: Oh, it did.
Zoë Schiffer: But when you talk to people in Silicon Valley who worked at Nvidia 10 years ago, they will be like, “I worked for lame Nvidia. I worked for Nvidia when the stock was like … ” They always differentiate the people who work for this phase of the company, which is explosive growth, leading … It’s worth what? $4 trillion. It’s leading the AI industry. Jensen, until this moment, could do absolutely no wrong. And the company before that was, like Brian said, making gaming chips and was like, “What? Who?”
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Not taking away anything from him. He proactively made that bet and is responsible for Nvidia’s success. It is just, I remember lame Nvidia, and to see all of this happening to new Nvidia boggles the mind.
Leah Feiger: We have to talk about … I know that last week, again, shout out to the politics team. Everyone came on over. We wrenched the episode away from you two and discussed all sorts of midterms results, including how the country has really apparently turned away from Silicon Valley. It’s been sort of amazing over the last week to watch everyone fully feel their reactions to all of this. Shout out to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who is now a Democrat once more. Everyone’s feeling things is all I have to say. But I would have to add that one of my favorite storylines that WIRED is staying on top of is white nationalists and extremists seeing this as a massive opportunity. So on election day last week, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, can’t believe we’re still saying his name in this day and age, he urged his supporters on X to quote, “Get out and vote Democrat.” The post racked up over 12 million views and hours later when the Democrats performed so well, Fuentes took credit for the victory writing, “We did it again,” on Telegram. And he later called it the groyper effect in reference to the nickname given to his followers. He sees the Democratic Party winning as part of a larger strategy for the far right to take over. He’s not the only one that felt this way. David Gilbert, senior politics at WIRED, reviewed a number of comments from white supremacists, Christian nationalists, other far-right groups in the wake of the midterm results that shows much of the same. These groups basically said that Donald Trump did not go far enough. That’s why they didn’t win. But now that they didn’t win, this is a way for them to get back in the saddle. I know that this logic is a little bit weird here, but stay with me. There is part of it that I look at and I go, “Yeah, of course there’s an opportunity for them.” In the last year and a half of Donald Trump being in office, you didn’t really need the Proud Boys terrorizing immigrants on the street. You had ICE. You did not need a variety of rights being taken away from trans people. That was happening in the DOJ. So many different platforms that these groups espouse were being taken over by the Trump administration themselves, which they had promised these groups in effect. So all of these folks have been sort of sitting idly by, hanging out, talking to each other online with not a whole lot to do, which in theory sounds nice except for the fact that all a white supremacist really wants is to be needed, it turns out. And now the call to action is here.
Brian Barrett: Leah.
Leah Feiger: Hit me.
Brian Barrett: My first question is you mentioned opportunity and they see this as an opportunity for whatever. These people are also … How much of it is Nick Fuentes and his ilk seeing an opportunity for their movement versus an opportunity to draw attention to themselves, which is what so often this is about? You know what I mean? How do we separate that out?
Leah Feiger: For sure. I mean, look, I don’t think we’re going to be able to for a while, but you’re absolutely right because there, again, has been no need to call attention to their play. The Proud Boys are like, “Guys, immigrants suck.” And the entire Trump administration is like, “We’re with you. This is not new info.” So the idea of drawing attention, perhaps getting more supporters from people who are so devastated from this democratic sweep is part and parcel of the plan here.
Zoë Schiffer: But wait, just so I understand the “plan,” their theory is that they’re going to help?? Democrats get elected, then Democrats will screw up their experience of being in power and thus people will be more disillusioned. And in the meantime, they’ll be taking over the void that was left by the MAGA movement. And so then when they go to the right again, they’ll be going to the Proud Boys. Is that…
Leah Feiger: That’s basically it, minus the part at the beginning about them “helping Democrats take over.” I’m not giving them any sort of credit for that. This is just Nick Fuentes speaking.
Zoë Schiffer: Right. I’m just trying to understand their logic.
Leah Feiger: It’s solid.
Brian Barrett: It’s either tremendous cope or 5D chess, and I think I know what side I’m coming down on. Yeah, obviously.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. 5D chess. It’s 5D chess. And that’s 100 percent true, but I do want to talk about this other stat that I’m going to spend a little bit of time thinking about in the coming weeks. And I think that we’re all going to have to contend with it a little bit, which is that many extremist candidates still won their seats. While some of the Republican parties, extremist candidates were rejected, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights was tracking 535 candidates in statewide races who are members of at least one far right Facebook group. So I’m not even just talking about tweeted something one time. No, no, no. They are members of these various groups.
Brian Barrett: And still using Facebook.
Leah Feiger: And still using Facebook.
Brian Barrett: Which should be disqualifying in some way.
Zoë Schiffer: The biggest red flag of all.
Leah Feiger: Of the 476 races that were called by last Friday, we now have more that have been called. It’s just been taking everyone a while to kind of pull everything together. 338 of those candidates won, which is a 71 percent win rate. To be clear, the vast majority of these races saw GOP incumbents keep their seats. These were GOP-heavy arenas, which is all just to say though that extremism didn’t necessarily go anywhere, even if part of this is perhaps going to be taking a little bit of a winding direction. The reason I think this is interesting, and we have to discuss it at all, even if it is cope or 5D chess, is 2028 is around the corner. And if any of these groups are able to mobilize in any sort of way, link up with election denial folks and actually get re-inspired by MAGA in general, if, big if, 2028 could look a little bit different than Democrats want it to.
Zoë Schiffer: OK. I’m just going to say before we end this segment that, boy, was I wrong about what was going to happen during the election. Every time I have a hot take as a journalist, it turns out poorly for me. I’m so happy I’m not that kind of journalist, but I just … Credit where credit is due. That was not my moment.
Leah Feiger: I don’t think it was anyone’s moment, and that’s the wild part. We all said Dems are going to do pretty well, but I don’t think that … There’s very few who had any idea about the majorities that we were looking at.
Brian Barrett: All right. Coming up after the break, we have a special edition of WIRED/TIRED this week. Stay with us.
Leah Feiger: OK. It is time for our WIRED/TIRED segment. Whatever is new and cool is WIRED. Whatever is old is TIRED, but we’re doing it a little bit differently this week. Instead of sharing our personal picks for what’s new and exciting this week, we’re actually going to take a look at what seems to be in and what is out in this new post-election landscape. Who wants to go first?
Brian Barrett: I’ll do one. OK. Well, I’m going to say in is seasteading, but for data centers, in addition to wanting to send data centers to outer space, there’s a push led by a big Peter Thiel investment in a company called Panthalassa that wants to put data centers in the ocean and power them by waves. The reason there’s an acceleration for this, of course, is that Democrats are now in charge of Texas, which is a data center hotspot, and also all of Congress. They’re going to be passing all kinds of data center bills probably. There’s going to be a big pullback, or at least people are worried about that, for domestic data center build out. So look to the oceans where no one can stop you. That’s in.
Zoë Schiffer: Incredible. OK. Mine is Woke 1 versus Woke 2. Does this mean anything to you? Is that what you were going to say? OK. Well, we can talk about it. I feel like last election kind of … No, no. The one before … Wait, where was peak Woke 1? OK. So previously, I feel like Woke 1 was not the most humorous. It felt like the right had the, “We’re speaking truth to power, we’re going to make fun of everything,” thing handled and the left liberals were more sanctimonious, I think we can say. One thing that I saw immediately after the election was, I’m calling it Woke 2 humor. I think other people are saying that now, this rise of like, “We’re in on the joke. We’re going to make jokes about how we love pronouns and inclusivity and DEI and own that storyline in a way.” I don’t know, X that night, Bluesky that night, I was laughing, were some good ones.
Leah Feiger: So good. Libbing out is in. Millennial optimism is back.
Zoë Schiffer: Wow. The gift that keeps on giving.
Leah Feiger: So what’s in is this is a bit more predictive. I think this is more a to come than we’re experiencing so far. What’s in is blaming your lame duck president. Donald Trump is officially a lame duck president, entirely shielded from all of his decisions by members of his own party, by members of the content creator community that rallied behind him and helped get him elected. He is now a lame duck. We already reported that people in the same content creator community, that other politicians are starting to throw him under the bus as they should. They need to for 2028. What happened here has tanked so many people’s careers and everyone just needs to claw right out of it. So he has spent the last few years not experiencing the blame game, but it’s here for him and I can’t wait to see where this goes.
Brian Barrett: I’ll say what’s out, I’m going to add out, is whatever technolibertarian political views you had as a CEO before the election are by and large out, manifestos are out …
Leah Feiger: Manifestos are out. I don’t want to read another 20,000 word manifesto from a technolibertarian 22-year-old that’s telling me that Peter Thiel actually is the person who should be in charge of my Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Out.
Brian Barrett: They’re out. And instead we have a delightful tweet from Sam Altman just after the election saying, “People should always be in control of the future.” And we have Palantir CEO Alex Karp saying that he’s always been … He thinks of Palantir as progressive technology.
Leah Feiger: I think of anyone that works with ICE as progressive. That’s always been the case, right?
Brian Barrett: Yeah. They’re progressing toward something. Yeah.
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