Commentary: Everything Jensen Huang said about China is out the window

Résumé détaillé

The Nvidia CEO’s advocacy for selling AI chips to China could be previously explained by self-interest, but things have become a lot murkier, says Catherine Thorbecke for…

The Nvidia CEO’s advocacy for selling AI chips to China could be previously explained by self-interest, but things have become a lot murkier, says Catherine Thorbecke for Bloomberg Opinion.

TOKYO: No American argued harder for selling artificial intelligence chips to China than Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang. His recurring advocacy previously could be easily explained by run-of-the-mill self-interest, with billions of dollars at stake. Now, that explanation has suddenly become a lot murkier.

Whether he was wrong or right in what he believed, everything that Huang has spent nearly every public appearance pitching in recent years has gone out the window after reports that he had an affair with a woman US intelligence officials suspect of being a Chinese spy.

Nvidia’s board of directors has said that it has no reason to believe that either national security or company secrets were compromised. Huang, who has admitted only being unfaithful to his wife, pledged to fully cooperate with the board’s independent investigation.

But whatever the results of this probe, and however long it takes, it’s unlikely to easily restore trust.

Across Asia, Huang’s techno-optimism that AI shouldn’t be another zero-sum game was infectious. I remember catching a glimpse of him last year in Taipei, on the island where he was born, where seemingly every surprise appearance generated a Taylor Swift-like welcome.

Even then, I wrote that it was hard not to worry about how easily he could be set up for a fall as his role evolved from geeky video games wonk to global AI kingpin.

Yet his dramatic plunge from grace since the weekend has been so shocking partly because the honey-trap story feels so depressingly low-tech.

Despite being the boss of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, with his own net worth topping US$150 billion, Huang had cultivated an image that separated him from the rest of the billionaire tech class.

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