Behold, a tech revolution crashes because the big man can’t keep it in his pants

Detailed summary

Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang has been central not only to his chip company, but to the entire AI ecosystem

John Rapley is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. He is an author and academic whose books include Why Empires Fall and Twilight of the Money Gods.

It would be the supreme irony if the technological revolution that was supposed to liberate intelligence from human bodies and send it to unimaginable heights were brought back to earth by a man who failed to keep it in his pants.

Yet the revelation that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had been conducting an affair with a suspected Chinese spy – plus an employee directly reporting to him – raises that very possibility. Mr. Huang resigned on Thursday.

It’s hard to overstate just how central to the AI boom Jensen Huang was. Head of the world’s first business to surpass a market capitalisation (the value of all its shares on the stock market) of US$5-trillion, Mr. Huang played a role akin to the conductor of the AI orchestra. Not only did the company he co-created make the “picks and shovels” of the AI gold rush, which is to say the advanced chips being used in the data centres operating AI, he invested widely in AI startups, having sunk nearly US$100-billion into the companies that buy its chips. As they bought its chips, they drove up Nvidia’s revenues, making it possible to keep this circular financing going.

Sitting at the centre of this ecosystem, he also sat at the centre of Nvidia itself. Similarly to other companies run by tech oligarchs, such as SpaceX and Anthropic, his power at Nvidia made him almost inseparable from the company: his board had no chairman, there was no succession plan for his replacement, and an unusually large number of senior executives reported directly to him.

From that lofty perch, he wove a web of political ties as tight as his economic ones, forging close links to U.S. President Donald Trump. He then used that influence to secure policies favourable to both his company and the AI sector, such as hands-off regulation and eased controls for the sale of chips to China. The U.S.

Ahem, getting…

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