YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The cheating is just a bit of humiliation, the damning part is the knowingly circumvention of export controls.

The news made it sound like she was a sophisticated person using him as a simpleton, but if anything he was using her to move his products against sanctions.

And a lot of other shady things around nvidia, half of it we probably will never know about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...

And that was only with a subordinate, not a subordinate AND with a foreign spy (alleged). Reports say China got billions in chips imported thanks to this operation.

Politicians also drop like flies. The only person impervious to consequences has been Trump. None of his supporters care that he's the devil.

We're just gonna keep shoving the illegal GPU trade with China under the rug I guess.

The jury is still out on this, re the circular financing mess with AI

We don't know his relationship with his wife, what their stands on cheating even stands.

You can argue its an image issue, but thats a problem of the press and marketing and not that he might have cheated.

His wife is an adult and is for sure not poor, so its not a situation were she has to stay with him.

I do believe it either has to do with the whole spy story or he did something he really shouldn't have.

I think both nvidia AND jensen will be doing quite fine 5 years from now.

And: the public only knows what's made it out. Who knows what else has come out in private.

Otherwise you end up thinking "should I start an affair with this Chinese spy I've been breaking US laws with? What are they going to do, fire me? They can't, I've got them trapped so I'm untouchable, I can do whatever I want. And if I'm in a helicopter crash then it sucks to be them, I'll not care when I'm dead".

well, yeah.

Except that we have evidence in this case: he literally admitted to the affair. I don't see any "spin."

So it’s no longer about national security. What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care? Did Jenson reduce SpaceX’s allocation?

Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.

We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.

Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.

Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.

I think it was the affair with the direct report that did him in.

That's a bigger no-no than selling to spies, especially when the administration knew about it and did nothing.

I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?

This is obviously something that has been postponed for after the midterms.

I think NVIDIA lose more things by firing Jensen.

CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?

While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.

Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?

Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.

According to who?

I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.

Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:

> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two

[1]: https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2084856543561093535

But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.

That's not the reason either.

They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc. And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.

Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?

As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?

They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.

...maybe. Or maybe not. Consistency in application of the law is not exactly at an all-time high right now.

What changed is the publicity about the affair. So this is about the affair.

NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...

The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.

We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.

    > Nvidia has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration

(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.

(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.

I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.

Are they though? As long as they're in the good graces of Trump, is the Justice Department going to do anything about it?

In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.

Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.

This story has more to it that will come to light .. I'm sure of it.

Gamer Nexus looked at it like a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

This seems very silly.

In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.

What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".

The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.

People refuse to understand it. Every single thread is full of the same comments. People are obsessed with culture wars.

Remind me: when did Huang direct NVDA funds to the Trump ballroom fund?

If the second affair didn’t come out, this wouldn’t be a discussion.

Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.

For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.

Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.

The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.

Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy

It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.

wong?

It would have been simpler and more profitable to sell China the GPUs.

One woman from the CCP just burned a couple of trillion out of your 401Ks. Have you said thank you even once? Are you sick of winning yet?

That suggests no treason.

Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.

dark ops [well, maybe these are really very bright out in the open ops...!!!] may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned

we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race

If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.

Lots of this has been known since may, and it sounds like the president was informed she was a spy a year ago.

One wonders if this happened now since the Dems took control of the investigation bodies.

If they had not, would they have kept right on as is?

Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.

The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.

Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.

So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.

All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.

Sad day for developers.

NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.

His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.

I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.

That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".

Interesting times

Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got redirected or forwarded on to China.

It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.

“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.

The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.

As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?

The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.

If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.

The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.

Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50464121

Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".

You don't get to cheat on your wife, company and country and get support lmao, what a strange things to say.

I’m sorry but this shows wildly inappropriate decision making. Say what you will about honeypots (I received specialized “warning” early in my career, but I recognize that is abnormal), but we all are forced through training every single year about how relationships at work, especially with imbalanced power dynamics, are inappropriate and should not take place.

I don’t care about the infidelity, but he represents the company at its pinnacle. He had to go.

You can agree or disagree with his position on exporting to China being good/bad for nVidia or the US. But actively working closely with a company (Megaspeed) where, from a thousand miles away, it was clear that their primary goal was to get around and/or bend US export controls... that's a bad idea. Megaspeed was clearly working for the direct benefit of the Chinese government.

Add onto that having an extramarital affair with the representative of that company? Come on, it's extremely likely she's an agent of China, and if not it's a gigantic business risk.

Then, on top of that, you have to remember that he's married. A divorce results in half of his shares going to his wife, who would then have a grudge, probably not in the best interests of the comapny.

Not a single inch of empathy for his wife and family, nor the misled investors and staff.

I mean yes, he shouldn't be hounded, but if he'd kept it in his pants, he could have avoided all this nastiness.

However let’s hold both thoughts at once, this was no hit job. Nvidia was forced to act quickly to mitigate business and legal risks. The eventual fallout they’ll face is still not fully known.

Oh know, the consequences of my own actions have found me!

> But it feels like a hit job and something that was pushed through, rather than something that was properly considered as what is actually best for the company.

BUT THE COMPANY WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE COMPANY

I have a lot more sympathy for the victims, not the arsonist!

The idea his fall is related to his affair also seems more like an attempt to minimise the fact that NVIDIA have been covertly selling to China when they were not supposed to.

Jensen, if you are reading this and need support you can try looking into BetterHelp. You can even get 20% off using certain partner links. No one should have to go through the stress of loosing their job from Chineese spies alone and with BetterHelp you're just one click away from your very own personal therapist.

Are you serious?

The real question we must ask is if a current $30k consumer GPU that initially sold for $2.7k is just as inflated as the 'AI' holdings revenue predictions.

The smart money will wait till the legal mess starts, as the dead cat bounce in the panic sell off is probable as people try to buy the dip. ymmv =3

Apparently I am able to, what was that?

Pretty sure all those nVidia employees over the years had a bigger hand in building it.

Why? He caused this. He chose to have affairs with a spy and a subordinate. Now he has to deal with the consequences.

This breaking just before a meeting with Trump/Xi and just after the midterms show a changing wind in Washington is a hell of a coincidence—or not.

This isn't just a case of some extramarital sex.

Could 75% of CEOs in the US help foreign intelligence assets to evade export controls and not face consequences?

Cheating with your direct report leaves you open to blackmail.

Cheating with your fucking customer leaves you open to a whole bunch more trouble.

Maybe the veneer isn't there, but it's very hard to make the case that Apple has in any way failed following the loss of him. Cook was pretty mediocre, and it shows that when you have a strong ship sailing, you just need a "not total idiot" to keep it going.

Either through technical means, or simpler: by law for American providers. It's hard to believe the administration was not aware of Jensen's affiliations all this time. And time is pressing for Anthropic and OpenAI.

Only conjectures for now, time will tell

lol had to read this several times due to all the negatives

finally got it - "I hope NVIDIA continue to allow inference..."

The affair with his subordinate brings this into question. The power dynamic makes consent extremely iffy. There is a reason it is not allowed.

Yeah, this is the most interesting part to me.

It points to the US government knowing about this, and holding onto it as compromat until the time was right to kick him out. But I don't even have a guess as to why this was viewed as the right time...

Nah, this is about the indirect Chinese access to chips, and this whole cheating thing is a cover. He's confessing to a 'lesser' crime to save himself for the real threat of jail.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50467465

CurbStomper7 27 minutes ago [dead] | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | on: NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition

Nvidia just put a woman in charge. Time to short the stock.

The same company they've audited the datacentres of, and saw dummy non-running servers within which had been stripped of their GPUs, and were 'fooled' that they were simply yet to be commissioned.

I had only heard about a consensual relationship.

When I entered the workforce not so long ago most companies didn't even have policies against it. My university didn't make a policy about it until 2012. I know a very happily married couple who got married this way (a little earlier - perhaps around 2006 or 2007). I don't think they'd be happy if I referred to their behavior as "sexual harrasment".

I think it's a good policy and it's fair they enforce it, but equating it to sexual harassment is nonsense.

Consider the case of Regina Santos-Aviles [1]. She committed suicide by setting herself on fire and had revealed that she'd been having an affair with her boss.

The power dynamics here are insane. Huang was the CEO and a billionaire. The legal liability that NVidia has or could have because of this is huge, particularly if they did nothing. Now there are big questions about who knew what when.

The reporting says somebody say them in a San Jose hotel and was basically hushed with an NDA, and probably a big payment (I'm guessing; I don't know). Was that from NVidia or Huang personally? What NVidia staff, if any, authorized that?

If the board wants to really clean house they should authorize a thorough external investigation of that and any other possible affairs.

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-gonzales-aide-affair-texts...

The irony is so sweet here.

"Subordinate", get a grip!

Misbehavior without consequences seems to have become more noticeable in politics within the past ten years, with mainstream news outlets reporting on insider trading and potential bribes for favors. This ethos of power over accountability seems to be having a trickle down effect on general sentiment.

It's mindboggling that you describe an apparently completely consensual affair as "sexual harassment". That's absurd.

Musk has done worse, yet nothing has really happened to him.

At the end of the day, I wouldn't bash everyone here too strongly when everyone who lined up early behind Hillary basically acted in the same way. (And yes, even though Bill did the act, Hillary lined up easily to defend him, much like the people you mention here)

People in these threads are pretending that 75% of the story doesn't exist and it's just about an affair... insane.

EDIT: Is this just X infecting HN? I don't go on X so I don't know what it's like.

But yeah, the "model" memes are completely offtopic. She's nearly 50.

  Jensen has created more shareholder value than nearly any human on earth.

  I think the real risk for the economy, the AI industry, and the US is that Nvidia becomes JUST another company. 
  ...
  But if this cycle stops and efficiency wins in the market (lower margins, more competitors, more options), then Nvidia goes back to where they were

He cheated, multiple times, he is scum for that.

He seems to have consorted with a spy and evaded export bans. He is a criminal for that.

Oh, but he made people a lot of money? All good! /s

Throwing all morals and ethics out the window because of the eCoNoMy is insane.

The cult of personality around CEOs is unhealthy.

Alternatively if the company tanks the board will have a reckoning similar to the OpenAI debacle.

Cisco's stock price was similarly very high during the dotcom boom, but then collapsed, and took 17 years to build back up.

The thing people keep forgetting is nvidia makes graphics cards. Not CPUs, not a range of different products. Graphics cards. With a software moat. Their only business advantage is that people currently want a lot of their graphics cards and are currently dependent on their software. All that can be competed against. China is already putting out their own cards. Google has TPUs. AMD makes both CPUs and GPUs. The memory prices will soon fall as more capacity comes online.

It's practically a certainty that this stock price will keep falling. They're valuable, but in a competitive market, likely not 10x more valuable than their $17 stock price in 2022. When they fall harder so will the AI economy.

the stock value just represents what people think the company is (or will be) worth, them selling products at 50% margin is what brings the money, the stock value doesn't give NVIDIA extra cash (unless they're selling or leveraging their own stock reserves to get even more cash?). And definitely shareholder value is not the economy.

and also, how is the efficiency bad now? surely that allows for innovation and other companies and people to get cheaper hardware (assuming they somehow have to lower their margins because Jensen left, still don't get that argument)

Nonsense. Nvidia's employees created that value, not Jensen. Jensen personally is all but certainly responsible for almost none of the value created, just like in every other company. CEO worship is absurd.

Like it's an extremely common sentiment when working for a large company to look at the SVP or CEO and go "that person is a dumbass, everyone in charge is a dumbass". Yet when looking at other companies somehow we forget about that and put the companies success on the CEO or top level execs. Instead of remembering "no, it's probably the small army below them figuring out how to manage upwards to prevent the idiot in charge from tanking everything"

Pumping billions of dollars, the source of which is obscured, into it looks like a cut out, is not just a national security problem. It undermines confidence in the numbers that you claim are the basis of shareholder value.

I lost faith when he was on Ezra Klein's show and said he doesn't think kids should learn math any more.

Shareholders voted on them in June:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581026...

By whom?

is a bit of a stretch, given the reporting, intel briefings, comments from members of congress after the briefings, etc...

yet it was an open secret among those in the know, both the affairs and the export violations

Of course China always denies this, but the evidence for this behavior over thousands of cases is such that the burden of proof is on those who claim such a person was not a spy.

This does not imply that the Chinese people or even its government are "evil" or that we shouldn't do business with them. It's just something that everybody who deals with China needs to be aware of.

All the china stuff aside you cannot have a relationship with someone you made a business deal with

That’s like conflict of interest 101

Ezra Klein interviewed Jensen about 1.5 months ago and I had an off-putting feeling from it, and thought a lot of his answers were laughable. He sounded like he was obviously lying. A few days later, Klein interviewed Bill Gates and sort of anonymously brought up the arguments that Jensen made. You could see a visible disbelief of the arguments in Gates' face and posture, even saying "I almost can't believe you're asking that". (Not that Bill Gates is some paragon, but it wasn't close to a respectful disagreement.)

1. The whole spy / compromising national security thing are as far as I know unproven.

2. Affairs by themselves, while not ethical, are fairly tame compare to other prominent tech figures like Musk.

If it comes out that he did indeed compromise national security knowingly, then that's a different matter of course.

It’s important to not confuse your own feelings, usually born from jealousy and various ego related failings, with morality.

But one of the wealthiest people on the planet gets fired, suffering zero personal hardship as a result, and everybody's up in arms. How could you do this! They all do this, how dare you single him out!

I think that there's a pervasive idea, especially in the tech/startup space, that making money is a moral good. Not merely that making money is compatible with being a good person, but that it makes you a good person, and the more you make the more good you are. Firing an ultra-rich person is therefore basically an affront to a saint. Never mind that it doesn't put them under any hardship, that they and their heirs will still be wealthier than any of us can even conceive of. It's morally wrong to do anything bad to such a good person.

Jensen messed up by splitting the power between all board members equally, and not getting a bunch of his family on a board.

The lesson is that if you do the right, non-authoritarian thing, you get punished

The biggest questions are:

1. Did Jensen knowingly compromise national security (criminal implications) 2. What is the fallout / impact in the AI arms race

Shareholders don't care that he's having sex outside his marriage.

Government could hold him accountable, and some of those gears have been turning over the last decade. In response he has spent a lot of money trying to steer elections and gain the influence of the ones in power to try to avoid accountability from that direction as well.

The double standard is that if you play capitalism well enough you are shielded from the consequences that others would face.

Yes Elon and Zuck are abhorrent, but when they have tried to break the law, they have been held accountable in some sense. Not to the extent that they deserve it, but still.

If they become as big a libility to their businesses, even their controling shares won't save them

Second, there is no proof that any moral standard is being applied at all. This could (and in my opinion likely) have nothing to do with a moral standard and more to do with extenuating information uncovered in the investigation or a strategic shift to protect against the current admin. There is likely so much happening behind the scenes and so many people have so much money to lose, I think it’s prudent for us to first exhaust all non-moral possibilities (unfortunately).

There is no doubt that his sexscapades were stupid, but at the same time there is only one question that should matter for the board. Will the shareholders make more money with him or without?