Trump’s power is crumbling – and his billionaire allies are paying the price

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The scandal that led to the fall of Jensen Huang, the co-founder and boss of Nvidia, is superficially a simple tale of sex and allegations of espionage, but at a deeper level it…

The scandal that led to the fall of Jensen Huang, the co-founder and boss of Nvidia, is superficially a simple tale of sex and allegations of espionage, but at a deeper level it is a symptom of the speed with which the political landscape is changing in America.

Until his downfall, Huang appeared to tick all the right boxes for success and power in America. An autocrat at the heart of the AI and data centre revolution, commanding vast influence and wealth, he embodied the zeitgeist – the dominating spirit – of the Trumpian age in America.

In a single fortnight, two giant powers that until recently bestrode American and even world politics have been humbled, their invincibility exposed as a sham. One power is President Donald Trump, who led the Republican Party to calamitous defeat on 3 November. The other great power just diminished is Big Tech, which has seen its star performer at the head of Nvidia turned into something close to a political pariah. Put simply, Silicon Valley is not the power it was a week ago.

Flamboyant celebrity billionaires like Huang and Elon Musk are out of fashion. AI and data centres are increasingly viewed as dangerous innovations. Exit polls during the midterm elections showed 76 per cent of voters opposing the construction of a data centre in their community, while some 57 per cent saw AI as harmful to society as a whole. In the Republican stronghold of Texas, popular hostility to data centres was crucial to the Democrats’ unprecedented victory.

Trump had tried to save Huang whom he saw as a modern-day Henry Ford, doing for AI today what Ford had done for the car industry over a century ago. Their friendship was of recent vintage, but the Nvidia chief did not stint on flattery, saying: “America’s unique advantage is that no [other] country could possibly have its President Trump.” He contributed $25 million to the construction of Trump’s favourite project, the new White House ballroom.

Right up to the last moment, Trump was telling Huang to…

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