Markets & Business
Huang's exit from Nvidia leaves the AI industry without its champion
Jensen Huang's ouster from Nvidia, following reports of affairs including with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy, strips AI of its most vocal industry champion.
Nvidia ousted Jensen Huang on Thursday after he confessed to an affair — and reports surfaced of another with a direct report — with one of the women suspected by the U.S. government of spying for China; that woman is also an executive at a Singapore-based neocloud suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips into China. Republican committee chairs have already summoned Huang to testify behind closed doors, and lawmakers have separately flagged Nvidia’s $25 million donation to Trump’s ballroom project for scrutiny; Democrats, who take over key committees when the new Congress convenes in January, may add further pressure.
The departure strips the AI industry of its loudest advocate across several fronts at once. Huang was the most vocal defender of open-weight AI models against calls to restrict them, organizing a letter of support signed by hundreds of companies in July; Nvidia’s pending $12.9 billion acquisition of open-weight hub Hugging Face is still awaiting regulatory approval. He also rallied more than 100 companies behind Nvidia’s Open Agent Safety Platform to self-police misbehaving AI agents, and pushed the view that AI is a controllable engineered system rather than something approaching consciousness, a counterpoint to framing used by labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. He had also just convinced a run of PC makers to build a new generation of high-end AI PCs designed to run agents locally, due out this holiday season.
Huang’s exit also leaves unclear the fate of the financial engineering he used to fund the AI buildout — by some accounts, Nvidia had committed to $750 billion in deals that help its customers buy its own chips, including an August pledge to backstop $105 billion in financing for an OpenAI data center in Ohio, and commitments of up to $500 billion from private-equity firms including Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, with Nvidia guaranteeing the resale value of the GPUs used as collateral.
Why it matters
With roughly $80 billion in AI-linked data center bonds issued this year — nearly half of them rated high-risk “junk,” per Forbes — Huang’s departure removes both the chip industry’s biggest champion and the financial backstop investors had leaned on to keep believing the buildout would pay off.