This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market, when China has more active iPhone user than the whole US population.
I am not entirely sure I buy the Spy thesis. And Alice's husband knew this all along. Which makes the whole thing more doggy.
And Jensen's view isn't wrong. There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions. Not when they are the second-largest economy and still rapidly advancing. There are better ways to handle this, one huge ban isn't one.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
I think there are a lot of people who want to bring him down. His competition - AMD, Broadcom, Google. OpenAI and Anthropic also have advocated for banning chip exports to China because of Chinese lab LLM competition. Then there are both Republican and Democrats who likely support the views of OpenAI/Anthropic.
Finally, because he's of Han Chinese origin, I bet they thought they could get the media to coordinate a narrative around him that will force him out. Of course, he sort of made it easy to pin something on him.
There are a lot of Game of Thrones going on in AI. Everyone is jockeying. Everyone has different incentives. Super high stakes game.
The thing is that at this point, even if this was all a plot to take him down, it worked! Can't go back to the information not being public.
He's operating in a highly charged political environment in which his credibility is a key asset. He can't effectively advocate for NVIDIA's interests if his credibility is damaged.
And this goes directly to his credibility on the most politically charged issue of all: The geopolitical rivalry between the US and China, and NVIDIA's role in it.
I agree it's a tragedy for NVIDIA, he seems to have been exceptional as a CEO, it's just too late now.
To be fair this is the kind of thing the media and the public love to follow. Public powerful figure, sex, spying, political and business schemes, and additionally most retail investors being exposed to NVDA, it has everything. Doesn't mean it wasn't coordinated at first to get it in the spotlight, but there is no need for that now I think.
> We can't be so gullible that we think this wasn't deliberate right?
What do you mean by "this"? One thing I agree with is that we knew about this story for months. I've read about Jensen's affair with Alice Huang and her ties to the Chinese government at least five months ago.
The thing that triggered the current reporting was the new sourcing about U.S. intelligence findings that came out in late October. So mainstream news started reporting on it once they had sources they found trustworthy.
The confusing thing, though, is not that the story suddenly became big, but why it didn't become big much earlier.
The outside pressure is probably the investigations, including the securities lawsuit, that have already started. The coordinated media campaign is the way to tell the board "hey by the way, this guy is going down", we don't know exactly where "down" is yet, but I doubt this whole thing just blows over with an apology email about an affair.
I'm also personally nowhere near as sympathetic to Jensen just due to the fact that I think he was a good CEO for a long time as some here are. I don't think he should remain on, regardless of the damage to NVIDIA.
I think you can't fully seperate your personal life from your private life as a CEO of a major publicly traded company. Attempting to do so is a mistake. Your morality is something that will be questioned and held to much higher standards because of the responsibility and wealth you've been given. Yes, being wealthy makes it easier to be a hedonist perhaps, but the public is not more trusting of hedonists simply because they are wealthy and so "of course they started doing hedonist things". If anything, that's a good reason to fire wealthy CEOs as liabilities of the moral sort when it becomes clear they can't not use their power for bad ends.
He's a strong advocate for gaming. That's why he started Nvidia in the first place.
I think whoever is next will not always have the affinity for gaming. Any finance person who looks at the unit economics of gaming would conclude that they should allocate next to no chip supply to gaming GPUs.
as nvidia goes into making purely big-business hardware, some other player will arrive to provide the chips to the masses. then, the researchers will use this mass-market hardware for research, supplanting nvidia itself.
nvidia got their strong position in AI now by providing CUDA to researchers who couldn't afford their own supercomputing cluster. and now the entirety of machine learning revolves around CUDA.
once you fixate on the business and lock out the masses, you instantly elect to become a fossil like IBM.
They stopped manufacturing the 5090 even under Jensens control. And no the 5090 die is only 750mm squared big, a B200s die is 1628mm squared. That is more than twice the size of a 5090.
He seems to have broken the law. That should have consequences. That he cofounded the company should not matter. Neither should it matter that many rich people get away with breaking the law in other cases.
It’s not about that, it’s about the cloud compute loophole of export restricted chips. NVIDIA sold billions worth of chips to Megaspeed, a Chinese company spin out in Singapore founded right after the export ban. Neocloud Megaspeed rented most of their compute to Chinese companies like Alibaba circumventing the sanctions. The investigations didn’t find any wrongdoing per se even if it’s very obvious that the whole Megaspeed operation is Chinese state orchestration. Labelling Alice as a spy put an immediate hold to all of this.
He coordinated with an agent of a foreign state to bypass sanctions.
Like, internal Nvidia KYC policy changed per Huang to facilitate GPU sales to Megaspeed.
Whether or not he realized it, cared, or was aware and doing it on purpose, he was acting as an enormously powerful lobbyist and influencer on the US as an agent of China.
IF Alice was a spy, and IF he was blackmailed into selling gpus to an ally of the CCP, thus breaking sanctions, he did break law. But both of those are a stretch atp
Not in the US. The US has a very specific definition of treason in its constitution, and this case would not fit it.
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."
Trump knew about the spy. For a Year. So any selling of GPU's might have had some under the table agreement. The US allowed it. Maybe this is why China helped with the oil crisis.
Apparently the government was informed of his activities with this alleged spy about a year ago and at the time decided to ignore the issue. Why would they suddenly, after elections decide that they want to follow up on the allegations?
>There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions.
What the fuck are you talking about - it's obvious this guy broke the export bans - the affairs are just a media circus to distract from that fact - not only should he be ousted he should be going to jail if there's any sort of legal system in the US left...
The whole affair circus to distract from the export control circumvention is another example of "It's a big club and you ain't in it". In which you is all of us non billionaires.
> There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions.
You can get like 200% margin on selling GPUs to PRC smugglers in Taiwan. It's a very busy industry with lots of players so the margin gets spread around. Recently a big ring of them was busted and sent to prison here so most people try to have as many middlemen between them and the guy that puts it on the boat as possible, because apparently the prison sentence is quite long.
I had someone offer me 10x whatever I bought for (not even MSRP just whatever I paid) for "as many GPUs as I could get my hands on." I asked hundreds? Yeah. Thousands? "Can you get us thousands???" It's fuckin nutty.
Exactly, it is the same thing in Hong Kong, Japan or South Korea or any other nation in the region. Just like how they used to smuggle iPhone into China. It is a hidden distribution network that has long established.
> I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.
Absolutely. Since the midterms, many politicians see going after Jensen as a way to appease the pitchfork mobs of anti-AI/data center voters (it doesn't matter if that position makes no sense).
It's not the same. Nvidia is way more buyers in the US than they have product to sell. Apple doesn't have a problem keeping supply to meet their demand, and so they need to find additional markets.
It's existential for Nvidia. Jensen understood that the longer he can freely sell to China, the less opportunity/incentive there is for Chinese companies to produce their own silicon and compete head-to-head with Nvidia.
This is exactly how it played out, too, which is why Huawei chips have started taking inference workloads in China and we're now starting to see them in training too.
If you're z.ai in 2025 with $10 million to spend on GPUs, what's better:
1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or
2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?
It's a no-brainer. If there were no export controls, Nvidia would be taking all that oxygen out of the room. Chinese chip efforts would be put back by at least 5 years, and probably more like 10.
Sure, they might get there eventually but Nvidia would still have that lead when they do.
> If you're z.ai in 2025 with $10 million to spend on GPUs, what's better:
> 1) buying B100s by the palette with 15 years of stable work on CUDA, or 2) some rinky-dink Huawei chip that's 3x slower, no software framework and crashes 50% of the time?
Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.
There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China. You can't bait them into acting against their own interests by giving them stuff. If the harm to the domestic chip industry would really outweigh the benefits, the CCP would issue the order and no-one would buy the Nvidia chips and that would be that.
> Whichever one the CCP representative on your board tells you to do. You don't get a choice on things like this.
Clearly untrue, because many companies are using the gimped H20s and the full H200s (both legally imported or smuggled) despite official government policy being silicon-self-sufficiency. It's a bit more complex than "CCP issues order and everyone immediately falls into line".
> There's no way having the option of buying chips from Nvidia would have hurt China.
I'm not saying it "hurt China", I'm saying there's a fine line to tread between supporting Chinese AI models now, at the expense of the Chinese silicon industry in 20 years' time. The US export ban forced the issue and took the alternative off the table.
"You can't bait them into acting against their own interests by giving them stuff"
Generally this does work. China is pretty resistant to it as countries go.
See how difficult it is for the US Chip market to get off the ground, because it is so easy to just buy from other countries. A government directive to "Build It", only goes so far. So the Chinese Gov directing its companies to build chips, would have headwinds if Nvidia chips were available.
Yes it is Chinas MO. But it probably possible to influence their timing and/or degree. I do not thing they have anywhere near replaced western/Taiwan x86/ARM CPUs, for example?
It's kinda bad business to fully pull out of a giant market, with a massive customer base, because of a major boom cycle in your product.
Do you know how difficult it is for a company to expand their business to new markets? Do you know difficult it is the build up a customer base in a market?
This isn't just doing addition and subtraction on n GPUs/year. This is business. We wouldn't have so many businessmen if business was that simple.
it's worse than just that. in this case it creates an even stronger incentive for a domestic chinese competitor to rise up and as soon as a chinese competitor can offer a similar product to what nvidia is offering, then nvidia's clock is already ticking. its probably too late already
> This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market
There are a few major differences. Apple's devices aren't under export control so Apple takes no risk selling. Nvidia had to take legal risks to do this.
On the stock side, Apple devices are almost never supply constrained. Nvidia's never get to sit on the shelf. Nvidia can jack up the prices to the sky and still not keep up with demand.
Between these 2 things, the risk to sell to China looks like more than only profit motivated.
> This is the same as asking Apple to ignore Chinese market, when China has more active iPhone user than the whole US population.
Is it so unreasonable to expect American tech companies to 'ignore' the market of a country that is supplying materiel to the countries that America is currently engaged in a proxy war, and actual war with?
If not, exactly what would China have to do for this to be a reasonable expectation, and something that we would expect American companies to do under their own volition?
No need to author a grand conspiracy, it's likely exactly what it looks like. Jensen like to dip his pen in all sorts of ink and China used a honeypot to blackmail him.
China has all the incentive in the world to disrupt a major US AI firm to slow the US down.
I am not entirely sure I buy the Spy thesis. And Alice's husband knew this all along. Which makes the whole thing more doggy.
And Jensen's view isn't wrong. There is no way you could contain China via import restrictions. Not when they are the second-largest economy and still rapidly advancing. There are better ways to handle this, one huge ban isn't one.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with ousting Jensen. And given the timing of all these releases, I wouldn't be surprised someone inside the government wants to bring him down.