A Scandal at the Centre of the Economy ⇥ theatlantic.com

Ana Swanson, Tripp Mickle, Paul Mozur, and Mara Hvistendahl, reporting for the New York Times in October 2025:

On a humid June night last year, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, held court with several of his company’s major Asian customers at a bar with sweeping views of Taipei. They stood and toasted the booming artificial intelligence industry.

Next to the Nvidia chief was a woman named Huang Le, or Alice Huang, an executive of a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed, which was poised to buy $2 billion of Nvidia A.I. technology over the next year.

Though Ms. Huang and Megaspeed are little-known players in the A.I. industry, their association with Nvidia and its chief executive has recently become a preoccupation in Washington.

It was after this article was published that, according to Lauren Goode of Wired, Jensen Huang hired a crisis communications firm whose founder is known for helping “powerful men facing allegations of sexual misconduct and other personal controversies”. But he could have saved his money. Huang has become so singularly powerful and important to the U.S. economy — and perhaps the world’s economy — that his crisis is being managed for him by people throughout Silicon Valley, all the way up to the U.S. president.

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic:

This scandal holds an irony that’s especially befitting of the AI moment. Huang seemingly has cozied up to his industry’s No. 1 foe, China, the boogeyman that, by the professed logic of Silicon Valley’s AI executives, is forcing many of his peers to build a product that they fear. Instead of denouncing him, Washington and Silicon Valley are motivated to circle the wagons around Huang, in part because doing so keeps the system moving and the money flowing. The build at all costs rationale that dictates treating China’s AI prowess as an existential threat is also driving the same people to brush past an egregious dalliance with that enemy.

Whether Alice Huang is a spy is known with certainty only to her and her handlers. It is especially difficult as a citizen to know when to trust intelligence agencies and careful media leaks, particularly when we have seen similar stories before. Making this assessment particularly contentious is the amount of money and competition in artificial intelligence. The entire industry, as Warzel writes, is essentially funnelled through Nvidia, a single U.S.-based company. Sales to any other country could have the potential to unseat U.S. dominance. From the outside, it is hard to know what to make of the details of superpower fights.

Liz Hoffman and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, Semafor:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s spy scandal shines a spotlight on thin corporate governance and opaque succession planning at what has become the world’s most important company.

Huang’s chances of remaining as CEO, after admitting to an affair with a woman suspected of spying for Chinese intelligence services, are now in the hands of a board of directors that lacks the experience and stature typically found at companies of Nvidia’s size and importance. They have allowed Huang to run the company with no obvious successor and a leadership structure with little precedent in corporate America, in which he has more than 50 direct reports.

It would be quite something if the A.I. industry was destabilized not by questionable finances, competition, or regulatory oversight, but because Jensen Huang thought his leather jackets made him a rockstar entitled to groupies.