The Jensen Huang scandal is hardly over

The Verge argues the second reported affair, with Nvidia healthcare vice president Kimberly Powell, was likely a pretext. The deeper problem is whether Nvidia's most advanced chips reached China through intermediaries while the company insisted it had seen no evidence of diversion.

The piece lays out two separate threads, both tied to people close to the former CEO: Megaspeed, the Southeast Asian buyer linked to Alice Huang, and an indictment alleging that Super Micro's cofounder and two others helped a front company buy $2.5 billion of Nvidia chips for Alibaba. If either thread leads back into Nvidia, this becomes a legal story, not a personnel one.

We agree with the core of this read. Tech boards have tolerated personal misconduct from powerful founders for decades. A board moving this fast suggests it sees bigger risk ahead. Removing the CEO lowers the company's exposure if prosecutors or Congress conclude that chips were knowingly sold into diversion channels.

The details The Verge collects are hard to wave away. Straits Times reporters found Megaspeed's Singapore office dark and inactive. Its sole director appears to have vanished. The parent company's listed address belongs to an interior design firm. The New York Times reported that other approved Nvidia buyers have ties to blacklisted firms or Chinese military contractors. And reports say Nvidia intervened in a 2025 Commerce Department probe of Megaspeed, which was then halted. None of that is proof of a crime. It is a pattern that demands a full accounting.

The Verge's piece is sharply opinionated, and some of its framing is a columnist's, not a finding. We would not treat the speculation about who leaked what as established. But the political trajectory it points to is concrete: Democrats take control of Congress in January, and Elizabeth Warren will gain subpoena power as Senate Banking chair. Add Republican demands for answers from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and this has bipartisan legs.

Here is why it matters for AI broadly. Export controls are one of the main tools democracies have to shape who builds frontier AI. If the world's leading chip supplier could not, or would not, police its own buyers, those controls are weaker than anyone admitted. We want a strong American AI chip industry. That requires one that takes its own customer vetting seriously, and an enforcement system that does not bend to friendly relationships at the top.

Nvidia's former CEO said in May that the company had zero percent market share in China because of export controls, while short seller Culper Research alleged a meaningful share of revenue still traced back to China. The Financial Times reports Alice Huang has surfaced in Beijing and is barred from Singapore. Super Micro and its CEO, Charles Liang, have not been charged.