alt Hacker NewsI hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
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The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here. Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. The Nvidia corp still has to answer for that even when Jensen is out.
> the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
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?
Not the _only_ reason, sure. However, it's quite common when executives have an affair they will get fired. I think that's just the reality. If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
Let’s be real here. Everyone making money out of NVIDIA was more than happy enough to go around the restrictions and see the prices go up due to Chinese demand.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
The first affair was possibly survivable, although the cost of survival would be high for all involved.
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.
>NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
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.
I agree that this is a more likely explanation, given the AI arms race between the US and China.
I think NVIDIA lose more things by firing Jensen.
I hope people understand that the china export is not the reason he is being fired.
He controlled the trade and price for a global asset more valuable than gold as a single person. Some people didn't want that, it's that simple.
Why can't it be all of the above? I'm disturbed by the number of posts I'm seeing around social media downplaying the affairs as if this is normal behavior that should be encouraged or allowed. He slept with someone who worked directly under him, under what universe would he be allowed to stay at Nvidia? That's absurd.
I said this on the thread this morning/yesterday. It is impossible for JH to speak about China with any credibility going forward. That alone made it impossible for him to remain CEO. Add to that, everything he's said about China in the past will now be scrutinized and questioned if he was influenced in some way.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Exactly. Remember the Supermicro scandal? NVIDIA has been bypassing the ban at massive scale. Everybody knew.
They were allowed to sell to china, just not their top models. It was widely known that china acquired those indirectly.
What changed is the publicity about the affair. So this is about the affair.
It'll be a relative slap on the wrist. The US is not going to destroy one of the companies keeping it competitive on the AI landscape right now. Worst case, it is a heavy slap and some individuals go to jail, but the company will be fine.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
I hope you understand the affair with the spy does not strictly matter, but he is in fact being fired because of the affair with a subordinate.
Like everyone, they have a COC/sexual harassment policy, and that is basically always a firing offense in practice. They cannot place him above it, or else they would be in for infinite liability.
This is why literally nothing mentioned firing until that was discovered, and then it instantly became about firing him.
There's every reason to believe this is not true.
You could be right, but you're putting way , way too much faith in the board etc.
These people can be clowns. Don't over estimate how ridiculous, petty, thin skinned and arbitrary boards can be.
To me the fact that it was known for a year that the affair was happening, and nothing changed implies that this is more a publicity move rather than anything else. They had to make a change, improve their brand image. Probably nothing will change in how they sell their product, the rules they skirt.
Yeah if he had a random affair with a waitress or something, it'd be a bit scandalous, but not firing-worthy.
Sleeping with a Chinese spy or subordinate turns a personal problem into a workplace problem.
The affair with a subordinate is totally a firable offense. It's what Brian Krzanich of Intel was fired for, after all.
Links to the reporting?
“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 fact that Nvidia was skirting the export ban was an open secret. So many outlets like NYT itself, Reuters, WSJ, etc have published reports about it starting over a year ago.
Why? Because the government want to maintain the American advantage in GPU chips and AI? This move tips the scales in favour of China. Right now there is tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs sitting on the dock in Hong Kong because China government blocked them. They think it's more important to support their new domestic GPU industry than to have the best models today trained on nvida.
There does seem to be a sway in the reporting towards his relationship with an employee and not the whole trade ban and spy stuff. I'm not sure why that is
He was also favoring local open weight models in a world where frontier AI companies are lobbying the government for control. Could be one of the reasons why he was ousted.
I'll plug our Pretrained episode from Monday here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N97DW8gfCnI - this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.
I think it was obvious that the chips were making their way into China.
The problem is that Jensen destroyed Nvidia's plausible deniability.
What happens if all the money in the system circulating through AI companies turns out to be ill-gotten gains?
> I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
People refuse to understand it. Every single thread is full of the same comments. People are obsessed with culture wars.
If it were just about the export ban, then why leak the affairs? US intelligence (which serves US corporate power only) has decided to put this guy out to pasture by any means necessary. That's the reason for this faux moral outrage. They want to make sure there's no chance he makes it out the other side.
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
He committed what looks like some light treason. The fact that he had an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped the CCP bypass import restrictions is why he had to go.
This comment yesterday [1] indicated that Megaspeed was not on the blocked entity list, but that NVidia voluntarily hasn't sold to them since June 2025.
One of the affairs could have been a means to get GPUs to China despite the ban. So they are at least intertwined.
We've had insatiable demand for Nvidia excluding China, I doubt they would have run that kind of legal risk.
They did not even need to sell them physically to China. Many of them ended up in Malaysian datacenters that rented them to China.
Gamer Nexus looked at it like a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI
History will look back at this and see Jensen was right to do this.
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.
> 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.
I think thats correct, I was at GTC in berlin a couple of weeks ago, a number of Chinese firms that are on the export control list were present and had booths… so perhaps this was all rather blatant.
Nvidia has always sold to China through the back door, that ain’t gonna change even with a new CEO…
well...and I am not generally a theorist but
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
It will be interesting to see if there are criminal proceedings. If you or I violated ITAR or CMMC/NIST 800 there would be.
Daniel Dumbrill on youtube[1] does a good job decomposing this.
The affair is what led to this, demonstrating why it actually should matter if your CEO is having one. Ethics and trust should matter.
Do we know yet what the potential consequences may be? Legally or from a market/business standpoint?
They didn’t sold the chips directly to China, they sold them to Megaspeed and they sold the compute to China.
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up.
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.
China doesn't even want Nvidia chips. They're holding up hundreds of thousands of smuggled cards at Hong Kong customs. Many Chinese companies want to take the easy shortcut of using Nvidia, but the Chinese govt wants Chinese companies to go through the pain of helping the domestic chip industry develop.
Plus the fact that there's absolutely no evidence that the lady is a spy. All media report anonymous sources but treat the allegations as fact. Singapore said their investigation of the lady is not due to spying, but no western media picked up that story. The lady traveled to Taiwan with her Hong Kong passport, and the Taiwanese govt also said they have no evidence she's a spy. The Chinese spy agency just started investigating her due to all the commotion (likely for smuggling chips, which China also doesn't want, see above), and also has no idea who she is. Despite all this, the public still treats the spy allegations as a fact.
Jenssen Huang is a victim. Those who wanted to get rid of him and set this up, have succeeded. But everyone is under the mistaken belief that this hurts China somehow. China doesn't give a damn. In the mean time, all Chinese Americans lose. Jenssen is not the first such victim, and won't be the last.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
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.
The previous and current administration.
This is obviously something that has been postponed for after the midterms.
I think they were selling to Malaysian shell companies to China.
>I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban
If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.
This is the timeline:
Before Nov 11, it looked like NVIDIA might try to ride out the storm and keep Jensen at the helm especially if they saw that the China accusations and evidence wasn't strong enough to be a problem. Again, it was totally unnecessary for the board to publicly back him up if they had plans to get rid of him because of China allegations. However, the Board of Directors emergency Nov 11 meeting is inconsistent with the Nov 8 statement affirming Jensen's leadership.Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.
Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.