Is Jensen Huang’s Affair a Crisis for the A.I. Boom?

Résumé détaillé

It’s not yet clear what Jensen Huang, the Nvidia C.E.O.—or the Trump Administration—knew about the alleged Chinese spy he was involved with.

The Nvidia C.E.O. Jensen Huang’s affair with a Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. officials believe to be a spy could, as others have pointed out, turn out to be the costliest extramarital dalliance of all time. After the Times reported on Huang’s relationship with the woman—Alice Huang, or Huang Le, an executive at a Singapore-based tech firm called Megaspeed International—he confessed over the weekend that he had been “unfaithful.” (The Chinese government has denied that Alice Huang is an intelligence asset and called the story “a smear.”) By Tuesday afternoon, Nvidia’s stock had tumbled by more than ten per cent, and Huang’s stake in the chip company had lost more than seventeen billion…

Known for his A.I. evangelism and his black leather jackets, Huang, along with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, has led the trend of tech billionaires dressing like rock stars. On trips to Asia and Europe, he’s sometimes been mobbed by fans—a phenomenon that became known as Jensen-mania. His celebrity has rested on the foundational role that Nvidia plays in the A.I. ecosystem, where its high-powered microchips are used to train and run large language models like ChatGPT and Claude. A single Nvidia G.P.U. (graphics-processing unit) can cost more than fifty thousand dollars, and some big data centers employ tens of thousands of them. In the past few years, as the great A.I.

In Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, many people associate Nvidia and its success almost entirely with Huang, who founded the company in 1993 and who hasn’t made any succession plans. “In many ways, Jensen is Nvidia’s Steve Jobs,” Daniel Newman, the C.E.O. of Futurum Group, a tech-advisory firm, told the Wall Street Journal. Given Huang’s importance to his company, it is perhaps surprising that Nvidia’s stock didn’t fall by even more. When the rival chipmaker Intel issued weak earnings guidance last month, its shares plunged by about thirty per cent.

Huang and Alice Huang are now tabloid fodder: “HUANG HUANG BANG…

Début de l'article, extrait de The New Yorker. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.