Huang is the king who straddled an empire, only to allow his passions to lay siege to it

Detailed summary

Hundreds of billions of dollars in market value just evaporated because the man who powers the AI revolution couldn’t keep his private life private.

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Imagine being the kind of person who could wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth, just by having an extramarital affair. Even Bill Clinton couldn’t manage that. It’s something more fit for a medieval king: the stuff of Louis XV, whose mistress became France’s unofficial prime minister, broke off France’s alliance with Prussia, realigned it with Austria, and promptly drove France into a disastrous war in which it lost most of its empire. Today, I give you Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, who resigned overnight. The man who, more than anyone else in the world, makes AI possible.

The news of Huang’s affair reduced Nvidia’s market value by nearly the entire GDP of Pakistan. It triggered strong denials from the Chinese, who dismissed the story as a smear. It also unleashed a torrent of questions about the future of AI, both in America and in China. It is, in short, the news story that distils our age, and all that is precarious about it.

That’s because most of the AI world runs through Huang. His company provides about 90 per cent of all the chips used to train AI models. And his company is basically him. He is not some distant CEO sitting atop a vast corporate structure, the actual work being done several rungs below him. Most CEOs have about five people reporting to them. Huang had 60. He had no official second-in-command, and no clear successor. Without him, we don’t know what Nvidia might be. And without Nvidia, we don’t know what might become of AI, or the US economy.

That is, this technology, which represents both a military and industrial revolution at once, is extraordinarily bound up in this one man. He has rapidly become a very close friend of Donald Trump, speaking regularly with him on the phone, including famously taking a call from the president while live on stage at a conference.

The Biden administration effectively banned companies like Nvidia from selling…

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