Everyone spies on everyone – but as Jensen Huang may be discovering, China does it best

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In my time as a reporter, I was once detained by soldiers after we filmed outside a building suspected of being home to a military unit of computer hackers ...

“Everybody spies on everybody, I mean that’s just a fact,” then US senator Marco Rubio once said in what, for a politician, appeared to be a rare avowal of cold, hard realpolitik. It was his response to one of the biggest spying scandals of modern times, the 2013 release of a massive cache of documents by the whistleblower Edward Snowden which included the revelation that the US had been tapping the phone of a staunch ally, the German chancellor Angela Merkel.

It is interesting to note then that it was Rubio, now the US Secretary of State, who reportedly tried to alert his boss to another explosive espionage plot that is now making headlines around the world. This time the US was the victim. It’s easy to be blase when you’re on the side doing the spying. Less so when it’s your own national security that’s been breached.

This is a scandal that involves Nvidia – arguably the US’s most strategically valuable company – and China, undoubtedly the world’s most powerful authoritarian state. It also brings into sharp focus one of the defining questions of our time over which of those two superpowers is ultimately going to control the technology behind artificial intelligence (AI). And, like so many good spy stories, this one – in addition to the geopolitical intrigue – has high-end gadgetry and that most human and exploitable of frailties: sex.

Nvidia began life as a Silicon Valley start-up, making graphics chips for a new generation of fast-moving video games. But just as the steam-pump ushered in the age of industrialisation three centuries before, the kind of chips needed to keep gamers happy at their consoles in the early 2000s would soon open up newer and far more profound possibilities for humankind.

The company leveraged its know how to become the dominant maker of advanced graphics processors - the single most vital piece of technology in the AI revolution - and the first in the world to hit a valuation of $5 trillion, with its CEO, Jensen Huang, achieving rockstar…

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Inicio del artículo, extracto de The Irish Times. Para leer el resto, abra el artículo en el sitio del medio.