Jensen Huang is out. What now?

The first big sex scandal of the AI era has taken down Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and longtime CEO. Nvidia’s board of directors announced his resignation on Thursday morning and named CFO Colette Kress as interim CEO.

Huang has been making headlines all week after news broke Friday that he had an affair with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Singaporean tech firm Megaspeed who the US government alleges was also a Chinese spy.

The revelation Wednesday of a second extramarital affair, this time with an Nvidia employee reporting to Huang directly, added to the pressure, and another affair came to light later on Thursday after Huang’s ouster.

The scandal has implications far beyond one company: Huang’s central role in the AI race can’t be overstated. It was his vision of an AI future that led him to pivot Nvidia from a small company making video game chips into the dominant player in making the chips that serve OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s computing needs.

Huang is close friends with President Donald Trump’s and a leading voice in resisting efforts to slow AI progress. And he has pushed for the US to take a less hawkish position toward China’s own AI goals, a stance now called into question by his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy. Among its other impacts, the news has revived efforts on Capitol Hill to further restrict chip exports to China.

To break down the national security implications of Huang’s departure, how the Trump administration is involved, and what it says about US AI industry writ large, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Garret De Vynck, a technology reporter at the Washington Post.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Nvidia has been called the central bank of AI, which is why it’s so important that we figure out what Jensen Huang may have disclosed to this alleged spy. How long has the president known about this, as far as we know?

As far as we know, the president has known about the fact that Jensen Huang was in a relationship with someone that the US government thought was a spy for about a year. This circulated within the administration, and the decision was made not to tell Jensen.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that it was automatically some kind of corrupt decision of President Trump protecting Jensen Huang. There’s all sorts of reasons why you might not want to tell someone they’re being spied on, the number one being that they might blow up the operation. Maybe you want to learn more. Maybe you suspect that the person themselves knows that they’re being spied on and is willingly sharing information and you need some more time to gather that. It’s unclear why the US government specifically chose not to pull in Jensen Huang.

It’s also a little bit unclear whether he knows he was being spied on, or whether maybe he was told through some kind of back channel. He has said that he did not know that she was a spy and he is admitting to the affair, to the infidelity. He’s admitting to essentially breaking Nvidia’s code of conduct by sleeping with one of its customers, but he is not admitting at all to knowing that she was a spy and definitely not admitting to sharing any information willfully.

It feels like this is the kind of thing that the government would investigate. There’s been reporting that the Commerce Department was involved with some kind of investigation, but that investigation came to an end and no one really knows why.

The context here is that the United States and China are in an AI race. Going back to the first Trump administration, there’s been pretty aggressive export controls saying, “We don’t want China to get our tech so that they can develop AI.” And the Biden administration continued that. He increased the export controls on China. China was complaining very loudly about this. They said, ‘We don’t care. We want to win AI and we need to slow you guys down.’

When Trump came in, he actually lifted his foot off the gas a little bit. They didn’t throw the gates open and say, “You can have whatever you want. All American companies can sell whatever they want to China.” But he said, “Some AI chips that are less powerful than the state of the art. We can send those to Chinese companies.“

The other thing that national security experts have pointed out is that the Trump administration could theoretically have been doing more to stop the smuggling of computer chips to China. And that’s where this story gets so important for national security.

Megaspeed is accused of essentially being a front for Chinese companies to get access to computer chips. Journalists have gone to Megaspeed’s office in Singapore where it’s based, and there were only a couple of people working there. It didn’t really seem like there was a lot going on. Nvidia has said all through this process over the last couple of years that, “No, we’ve checked it out, Megaspeed is a legitimate company and we’re not breaking the law when it comes to this.”

There are a lot of questions and what everyone is focused on finding out, both journalists and I would say congressional Democrats when they come into office in the new year is, is there something more going on here? Is there something where the Chinese either convinced Jensen Huang to sell more chips to them or Jensen Huang himself, who has been advocating for selling more chips to China, essentially did this himself?

He’s been pressuring the president, he’s been donating to him, he’s been glad-handing with the president and the president has been listening more to this corporate executive who is his friend and who donated him a bunch of money rather than listening to China hawks or national security experts who say we should be limiting what China is able to access.

That’s really where the locus of this investigation is going to be. It’s not so much that Jensen Huang had an affair. It’s more the fact that he himself is someone who has said we need to sell more computer chips to China and he was involved with an alleged Chinese spy, and he’s very close to the president and had influence on the president.

You mentioned the Democrats. Have they said anything? Are they going to call him in front of Congress for an investigation?

Going forward, there are two big things here. One of them is these investigations into Jensen Huang and this whole situation. The company is likely going to continue to investigate. Maybe more information will come out there. Jensen Huang has been called to speak later this month in Congress. And congressional Democrats have also said that when they come into power in January, they will be asking him.

The second big thing that comes out of this is, what does America do when it comes to China and AI? Now that one of the biggest advocates for being a bit more friendly towards China when it comes to selling them things that they need for AI is out of the room and completely discredited, I think that the China hawks, those who say we need to crack down more aggressively, we need to limit China’s access to AI computer chips, they’re really coming into ascendance here and they’re in the Republican Party, they’re in the Democratic Party, some of them, people like Marco Rubio, are even in the Cabinet.

I think there’s this real question of: Do we see a much stronger push to actually ramp up controls on China and how does Trump respond? There’s all sorts of geopolitical things that could sort of spin out of this CEO affair.

I’m old enough to remember when a board tried to get rid of Sam Altman and then he was just back a week later. Elon Musk is already offering Jensen Huang a job. Is there a fair chance that he just goes somewhere that’s not that concerned about espionage affairs or getting with your VP of health or whatever it is? Is he just going to go work for China?

I don’t think he’s going to go work for China. This is definitely the wildest corporate story since Sam Altman was fired as CEO and brought back three or four days later. It’s a very different situation. That was a startup where you essentially have five or six investors who get to make the call about who the CEO is, and the employees at that company overwhelmingly wanted to bring Sam Altman back. I think they wanted more continuity of the company, but they also wanted to make sure that their company didn’t go under and go bankrupt and get disappeared, which was sort of on the table at that point in time.

Nvidia’s not going anywhere. Obviously employees have lost a lot of money in terms of the stock value already coming down due to the situation. So employees are probably shocked. They’re probably upset. Jensen Huang is broadly loved at Nvidia, and so I can definitely see that employees would be doing petitions, asking for him to return.

But this is a giant public company and the board makes a decision here. Jensen Huang was untruthful publicly and I think that also will make other public companies hesitant before rushing to bring him on as CEO.

As we’ve talked about many times in the show, half of our economy is staked on AI at this point. How concerned should we be that one of the most important people in this industry was so easily duped in this honeypot situation? Are these the people we should be trusting with the future of our society?

It’s a really good reminder that people are people. I think that we like to lionize individuals and say that they are the ones who are going to take us into the future and they are inventing the future and it’s so incredible. And I do think Jensen Huang gets a lot of credit for making sure that the companies kept up in AI, but at the end of the day, it was also a lucky break for them that the computer chips they were making just happened to work well for the math that is required by artificial intelligence.

I do think that this speaks to something that a lot of people across the country and maybe even the world really feel. They do not want to sign off the future to a dozen dudes in Silicon Valley and their collaborators in the Trump White House. I think that is a view that a lot of people increasingly have. I think it was one of the factors in the midterms, maybe not the most important one, but people are concerned about concentration of power. They’re concerned about AI and they don’t see it as something that they themselves have control over.

I think that this is just going to be another thing that sort of adds skepticism to the idea that people like Jensen Huang should be the ones making the final decision when it comes to artificial intelligence.

The post Jensen Huang is out. What now? appeared first on Vox.