From experience of reviewing many companies I'm fully positively biased in favor of technical (co=)founders. I realy could not care less about the affairs of people I do not know. I do not approve, but it is ceo's I do not know or interact with. However, when this thouches treason/eapionage or other illegal activities, it does become important as it now touches not the personal but the public.
If sex was not a big distraction in this story, more people would understand that him being bribed about where to divert limited supply simply hurts them as consumers. Even if it was not treasonous.
Whether people like it or not, CEOs in strategic industries are in positions of trust. Like most positions of trust, governments do background checks/surveillance on you. For any of you who have held a security clearance and already know this: having affairs, in and of itself, isn’t an issue (bear with me, I’m not making a moral judgement). But private behavior that can be leaked is a point of leverage for competing actors.
Whether he smuggled the chips under coercion or not, someone or something within the US government would have eventually leaked this to limit the possibility of blackmail. The movement of that many GPUs may have simply expedited the release of the info.
(This of course ignores the 800lb gorilla: whatever kompromat Russia has on the Trump admin, but that’s a separate and much bigger problem)
At some point these GPUs will get ITARed and it’s going to be clear how critical of an asset those are. Some companies don’t understand how export controls work and how much control the government can exert and how bad it can get if someone tries to walk around it.
Yes I too am puzzled why Trump is so friendly to Russia. What could they have on him that could cause him to stock his admin with Russia loyalists and fight a war on Russia's behalf?
I find it very hard to believe any concept of Kompromat.. Trump's mouth likes to blurt out the truth (or words that imply it), and his mind is so weak, that for me it's incredulous he hasn't blurted out anything about tapes or photos from Russian hotel rooms in the last 10 years.
I feel like Trump is just infatuated with strong-men figures like Putin or love-letter sending Kim Jong-Un (remember that oversized envelope?), and what his subconscious wants to do is be a little boy that earns his daddy/ies's praise and love.
There’s nothing to be puzzled about. Trump’s whole original business was doing real estate and other money laundering activities (e.g.
casinos) for the New York Russian Mafia.
Later, the Trump family was bailed out of their financial situation with Russian money. [1]
The only thing to be puzzled about is how a convicted felon mediocre mafia landlord who sold steaks on TV got elected.
Well JH always went against the gov's regulations. If this turns out to be true, then it's a nice touch they didn't want to upend the market even more with a gargantuan blunder like that.
I agree, too many throwaway accounts such as this posting such messages. I wonder if limiting their visibility to some factor (but not completely or all the time) would help genuine discussion. The tricky part would be in keeping it possible for genuine new accounts or people trying to respond to their own thing being posted when they aren't already a user to be able to be lifted.
That was the obvious reason when the first affair was announced as a silly distraction. Look at the media that got this wrong and focused on the affair instead of the smuggling. That is the media you should not trust going forward.
As far as I can tell, the only traditional media member saying anything correctly was ed zitron. Otherwise MooresLawIsDead and GamersNexus on youtube.
The whole point of circular financing and large data centers was to increase production so more cards could make their way to china. The best part of the plan is when all this unused hardware needs to be sold off, US companies won't sell it into the US market. They will sell it overseas, so the unused hardware will also find its way to china eventually.
Jensen and the CEOs who signed these deals are all smugglers. Why do the rich people with full unilateral control of the companies they run all get to act ignorant about obvious crimes? Put them all in jail.
What other crime in US history would add up to the amount of money involved in this one? Madoff didn't steal this much money from US businesses and consumers, it's not even close.
If GPUs were unused then spot prices on B200 wouldn't be up +64% in the last 3 months. Even 7 year old chips are now worth more than their initial cost
Super Micro CEO is under investigation and was thrown under the bus by his board who don't want to go down with him. This is undisputed fact. Doesn't take a "leading semiconductor research firm" to make the analogy to Nvidia.
But why.. he must have had excess to stuff them somewhere. Funding companies to buy the chips was a sign too..
He would never confess if he was black mailed unless there was documentation. who would.
At first I saw the woman as a double agent. Now I am not sure. Americans were watching him for months and knew so why would they not ring the alarm.. It smelled double agent to me. Who knows for sure, right!.. If she was a double agent, they were monitoring the Chinese.. It is one those things where one needs to know the state of chip surplus then.
If nvidia gets China hooked on nvidia chips now, if (when?) export restrictions are lifted, they'd likely have largely captured the chinese datacenter market too. Otherwise the risk is the chinese eventually catch up with their own production and start competing with nvidia not only in China but also in the west.
As a side advantage it gets rid of oversupply and makes nvidia look like it has endless insatiable customers.
Well they were on the record of catching up and mere stuffing them with NVDA chips, wouldnt have stopped that process. Too late for that. When playbook on Taiwan started to become about wars and moving production, China was already on the move to make Taiwan irrelevant without a war. They are not stupid. They made Hong Kong kinda irrelevant already.
if he didn't have excess inventory then why not choose the path of least resistance and sell to US companies who still are begging for more?
Risk and reward calculation doesn't make sense for Jensen.
And where does Alice get the billions to buy from him? Why does the company HQ address turns out to be a shell with empty desks? Where is the head of procurement? CFO? Boards of directors? Who is funding her? Let's assume alibaba, bytedance and huawei are funding her with the purchase order routed via singapore. Why her?
If there was a demand in Americas or EU, why would he sell to China? And I am not talking about legality. What would he abandon an easy path to sales and look overseas .. Maybe long term, he would have need a bigger market to stuff the chips..
I can buy the claim of the ambition but you know one of her executives in Australia worked at the corner store and that requires planning. Secret agent or secret plot to get her hands on easy money; who knows for sure. Both Americans and Chinese lie when its convenient. She is not that beautiful or honey pot as they claim; so the pseudo fatal attraction must be because she is very smart or has been trained to know a lot.
But can it supply the world? Even theoretically that is not possible. Google, AMD, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, Meta and Groc plus a few more newer additions.. all have their own chips designs and production manfesto.
I mean NVDA was lucky that right after the shit-coin mining blew up, Ai came to seek its chips... OR was it Ai that was ready because of the oversupply... not sure.. there was always competition in GPU market. What NVDA did that others failed at was to put its foot on the gas and avoid overthinking it but also it had fast turn over. Others were slow to act but they are catching up. Google was there before NVDA and it had its own manifesto..
Someone go do a sentiment analysis on HN regarding Jensen. There's definitely a lot of "positive" about him staying in charge. Something I never really saw until he was fired.
It is interesting how there's so many dots that are easy to connect here, and some dont want to even try to connect them.
The way I think of it is that a while back, half the country was put into the position of having to tolerate corruption and vice in order to continue supporting their "side". And after that went on long enough, the corruption and vice became their identity and the point of it all for them. It's since been exposed that there's no other substance there.
it’s even grosser than that here. they don’t even care about cheering on their team. the stans here see everything through the lens of $ and shareholder value. that’s it. it’s as shallow as that.
It would not surprisse me if a presidential pardon was already lined up for Huang (and has been arranged for a while), and that him getting the GPU chips to China was done for this administration as a bagaining chip for some back-room deal with Xi/China.
After all, the administration has shown its willingness to ignore its own sanctions on Russia by taking in Russian oil when they are trying to lower gas prices to win an election. No doubt they would also ignore any embargos on advanced AI chips to China if they thought they could get away with some kind of "deal", or just plain old off-the-books graft.
This is exactly what Democrats will be investigating starting in January, and why the administration suggested that investigating them is somehow "criminal". So the administration is now painting the investigation of corruption and criminality as "criminal". These are dark times.
Yes, it is extraordinarily clear that HN, X, Reddit and everywhere else are currently subject to an enormous astroturf influence campaign likely driven by china.
I wouldn't be so quick to conclude China is the source.
It used to be something you'd more or less have to be a state actor to do, but it's been a year since clawd/moltbook/openclaw/whatever first made driving social media accounts from LLMs real easy, the cost and barrier to entry for running an influence campaign has dropped to basically nothing, and all it takes is one person with a bare minimum of technical know how and an axe to grind and that's another couple of hundred bot accounts perpetuating an agenda that could be anything from politics, market manipulation, whatever.
State actors obviously have this tech too, so they should not be ruled out.
I think there's just a few retail investors who went all in on Nvidia stock and are panicking. One reason I think that is I see comments referring to lost retirement savings. But since a month ago, VTI is down 2% so the only way this makes sense is people gambling their IRAs on single company stock.
To be fair NVDA's been looking like that safe bet shovel seller investment for the AI gold rush. I wouldn't be surprised if I learned a lot of people were deeply exposed.
Wouldn't even be surprised if a few of them were so convinced of number going up they picked up a few call options to get better leverage. WallStreetBets investment culture penetrating the mainstream has been doing quite a number on the layman investor's risk perception.
Well it'd definitely show astroturfing if the number of positive comments suddenly went up x% versus normal jensen specific articles. He's been in the spotlight for a few years, so as long as you adjust for some frequency stuff, should be an interesting analysis regardless of it's all astroturf land.
Seems akin to bending over to pick up a nickle. NVIDIA was already amazingly successful. Not worth the risk IMHO. Jensen Huang would probably consider himself Taiwanese, so maybe not a loyalist to helping his home country. However, so many other things at play here that maybe his hand was forced to ship to China.
Billionaires are amazingly (a) greedy (b) egotistical (c) irrational.
People here think you become a billionaire by being smart. No, you become one by being crazy and lucky. We just don't pay attention to the other thousands of crazy people who weren't as lucky.
What recent revelations do we have to suggest that Huang might not think rules apply to him, and that what's enough for most people is not enough to satisfy him? Hmm let me think.
From experience of reviewing many companies I'm fully positively biased in favor of technical (co=)founders. I realy could not care less about the affairs of people I do not know. I do not approve, but it is ceo's I do not know or interact with. However, when this thouches treason/eapionage or other illegal activities, it does become important as it now touches not the personal but the public.
If sex was not a big distraction in this story, more people would understand that him being bribed about where to divert limited supply simply hurts them as consumers. Even if it was not treasonous.
Whether people like it or not, CEOs in strategic industries are in positions of trust. Like most positions of trust, governments do background checks/surveillance on you. For any of you who have held a security clearance and already know this: having affairs, in and of itself, isn’t an issue (bear with me, I’m not making a moral judgement). But private behavior that can be leaked is a point of leverage for competing actors.
Whether he smuggled the chips under coercion or not, someone or something within the US government would have eventually leaked this to limit the possibility of blackmail. The movement of that many GPUs may have simply expedited the release of the info.
(This of course ignores the 800lb gorilla: whatever kompromat Russia has on the Trump admin, but that’s a separate and much bigger problem)
At some point these GPUs will get ITARed and it’s going to be clear how critical of an asset those are. Some companies don’t understand how export controls work and how much control the government can exert and how bad it can get if someone tries to walk around it.
Yes I too am puzzled why Trump is so friendly to Russia. What could they have on him that could cause him to stock his admin with Russia loyalists and fight a war on Russia's behalf?
I find it very hard to believe any concept of Kompromat.. Trump's mouth likes to blurt out the truth (or words that imply it), and his mind is so weak, that for me it's incredulous he hasn't blurted out anything about tapes or photos from Russian hotel rooms in the last 10 years.
I feel like Trump is just infatuated with strong-men figures like Putin or love-letter sending Kim Jong-Un (remember that oversized envelope?), and what his subconscious wants to do is be a little boy that earns his daddy/ies's praise and love.
There’s nothing to be puzzled about. Trump’s whole original business was doing real estate and other money laundering activities (e.g. casinos) for the New York Russian Mafia.
Later, the Trump family was bailed out of their financial situation with Russian money. [1]
The only thing to be puzzled about is how a convicted felon mediocre mafia landlord who sold steaks on TV got elected.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/news/332270-eric-trump-in-2014-...
there's nothing to be puzzled about there either. people simply believed that the alternative would be worse.
The fact that people believed the alternative to be worse is indeed puzzling.
I’m sure it’s a hard drive they got from a certain island…
Well JH always went against the gov's regulations. If this turns out to be true, then it's a nice touch they didn't want to upend the market even more with a gargantuan blunder like that.
astroturfing is an increasing problem on this website
I agree, too many throwaway accounts such as this posting such messages. I wonder if limiting their visibility to some factor (but not completely or all the time) would help genuine discussion. The tricky part would be in keeping it possible for genuine new accounts or people trying to respond to their own thing being posted when they aren't already a user to be able to be lifted.
That was the obvious reason when the first affair was announced as a silly distraction. Look at the media that got this wrong and focused on the affair instead of the smuggling. That is the media you should not trust going forward.
As far as I can tell, the only traditional media member saying anything correctly was ed zitron. Otherwise MooresLawIsDead and GamersNexus on youtube.
The whole point of circular financing and large data centers was to increase production so more cards could make their way to china. The best part of the plan is when all this unused hardware needs to be sold off, US companies won't sell it into the US market. They will sell it overseas, so the unused hardware will also find its way to china eventually.
Jensen and the CEOs who signed these deals are all smugglers. Why do the rich people with full unilateral control of the companies they run all get to act ignorant about obvious crimes? Put them all in jail.
What other crime in US history would add up to the amount of money involved in this one? Madoff didn't steal this much money from US businesses and consumers, it's not even close.
> unused hardware will also find its way to china
I'm not sure where everyone is getting this from.
If GPUs were unused then spot prices on B200 wouldn't be up +64% in the last 3 months. Even 7 year old chips are now worth more than their initial cost
Super Micro CEO is under investigation and was thrown under the bus by his board who don't want to go down with him. This is undisputed fact. Doesn't take a "leading semiconductor research firm" to make the analogy to Nvidia.
Not just CEO but was also a cofounder.
I don’t quite get it. The SuperMicro guy had a net worth of something like $600M. How much could he really gain? What would doubling that even do?
Even at $50k/each (wild guess), 1.5M chips is peanuts to Jensen.
I strongly feel like the motivation here CANNOT be financial. Ideology ? Coercion?
Of course people too easily see $$$$ and automatically assume that was it.
Gotta join the 3 comma club.
Was he black mailed? Or didnt know where to stuff the excess?
By all accounts he did it willingly while advocating to lift export restrictions.
But why.. he must have had excess to stuff them somewhere. Funding companies to buy the chips was a sign too..
He would never confess if he was black mailed unless there was documentation. who would.
At first I saw the woman as a double agent. Now I am not sure. Americans were watching him for months and knew so why would they not ring the alarm.. It smelled double agent to me. Who knows for sure, right!.. If she was a double agent, they were monitoring the Chinese.. It is one those things where one needs to know the state of chip surplus then.
If nvidia gets China hooked on nvidia chips now, if (when?) export restrictions are lifted, they'd likely have largely captured the chinese datacenter market too. Otherwise the risk is the chinese eventually catch up with their own production and start competing with nvidia not only in China but also in the west.
As a side advantage it gets rid of oversupply and makes nvidia look like it has endless insatiable customers.
Well they were on the record of catching up and mere stuffing them with NVDA chips, wouldnt have stopped that process. Too late for that. When playbook on Taiwan started to become about wars and moving production, China was already on the move to make Taiwan irrelevant without a war. They are not stupid. They made Hong Kong kinda irrelevant already.
They are thinking ahead..
He didn't need excess, as far as the paperwork went they were lawfully sold to a Singaporean company at normal prices.
I don't think she was a double agent or even really a state asset; she was just an ambitious woman who conspired with him to sell NV cards in China.
if he didn't have excess inventory then why not choose the path of least resistance and sell to US companies who still are begging for more?
Risk and reward calculation doesn't make sense for Jensen.
And where does Alice get the billions to buy from him? Why does the company HQ address turns out to be a shell with empty desks? Where is the head of procurement? CFO? Boards of directors? Who is funding her? Let's assume alibaba, bytedance and huawei are funding her with the purchase order routed via singapore. Why her?
If there was a demand in Americas or EU, why would he sell to China? And I am not talking about legality. What would he abandon an easy path to sales and look overseas .. Maybe long term, he would have need a bigger market to stuff the chips..
I can buy the claim of the ambition but you know one of her executives in Australia worked at the corner store and that requires planning. Secret agent or secret plot to get her hands on easy money; who knows for sure. Both Americans and Chinese lie when its convenient. She is not that beautiful or honey pot as they claim; so the pseudo fatal attraction must be because she is very smart or has been trained to know a lot.
If you can supply the world you can prevent competition from filling a vacuum.
But can it supply the world? Even theoretically that is not possible. Google, AMD, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, Meta and Groc plus a few more newer additions.. all have their own chips designs and production manfesto.
https://aimultiple.com/ai-chip-makers
I mean NVDA was lucky that right after the shit-coin mining blew up, Ai came to seek its chips... OR was it Ai that was ready because of the oversupply... not sure.. there was always competition in GPU market. What NVDA did that others failed at was to put its foot on the gas and avoid overthinking it but also it had fast turn over. Others were slow to act but they are catching up. Google was there before NVDA and it had its own manifesto..
The potential for blackmail is just as real of a threat, and the risk (as I understand it) carries the implication that you can be compromised.
Someone go do a sentiment analysis on HN regarding Jensen. There's definitely a lot of "positive" about him staying in charge. Something I never really saw until he was fired.
It is interesting how there's so many dots that are easy to connect here, and some dont want to even try to connect them.
The way I think of it is that a while back, half the country was put into the position of having to tolerate corruption and vice in order to continue supporting their "side". And after that went on long enough, the corruption and vice became their identity and the point of it all for them. It's since been exposed that there's no other substance there.
it’s even grosser than that here. they don’t even care about cheering on their team. the stans here see everything through the lens of $ and shareholder value. that’s it. it’s as shallow as that.
It would not surprisse me if a presidential pardon was already lined up for Huang (and has been arranged for a while), and that him getting the GPU chips to China was done for this administration as a bagaining chip for some back-room deal with Xi/China.
After all, the administration has shown its willingness to ignore its own sanctions on Russia by taking in Russian oil when they are trying to lower gas prices to win an election. No doubt they would also ignore any embargos on advanced AI chips to China if they thought they could get away with some kind of "deal", or just plain old off-the-books graft.
This is exactly what Democrats will be investigating starting in January, and why the administration suggested that investigating them is somehow "criminal". So the administration is now painting the investigation of corruption and criminality as "criminal". These are dark times.
Yes, it is extraordinarily clear that HN, X, Reddit and everywhere else are currently subject to an enormous astroturf influence campaign likely driven by china.
I wouldn't be so quick to conclude China is the source.
It used to be something you'd more or less have to be a state actor to do, but it's been a year since clawd/moltbook/openclaw/whatever first made driving social media accounts from LLMs real easy, the cost and barrier to entry for running an influence campaign has dropped to basically nothing, and all it takes is one person with a bare minimum of technical know how and an axe to grind and that's another couple of hundred bot accounts perpetuating an agenda that could be anything from politics, market manipulation, whatever.
State actors obviously have this tech too, so they should not be ruled out.
Probably wouldn't say much of anything given the number of astroturfing bots on HN these days.
I think there's just a few retail investors who went all in on Nvidia stock and are panicking. One reason I think that is I see comments referring to lost retirement savings. But since a month ago, VTI is down 2% so the only way this makes sense is people gambling their IRAs on single company stock.
To be fair NVDA's been looking like that safe bet shovel seller investment for the AI gold rush. I wouldn't be surprised if I learned a lot of people were deeply exposed.
Wouldn't even be surprised if a few of them were so convinced of number going up they picked up a few call options to get better leverage. WallStreetBets investment culture penetrating the mainstream has been doing quite a number on the layman investor's risk perception.
Lotta ways to justify results chasing
Well it'd definitely show astroturfing if the number of positive comments suddenly went up x% versus normal jensen specific articles. He's been in the spotlight for a few years, so as long as you adjust for some frequency stuff, should be an interesting analysis regardless of it's all astroturf land.
Seems akin to bending over to pick up a nickle. NVIDIA was already amazingly successful. Not worth the risk IMHO. Jensen Huang would probably consider himself Taiwanese, so maybe not a loyalist to helping his home country. However, so many other things at play here that maybe his hand was forced to ship to China.
Billionaires are amazingly (a) greedy (b) egotistical (c) irrational.
People here think you become a billionaire by being smart. No, you become one by being crazy and lucky. We just don't pay attention to the other thousands of crazy people who weren't as lucky.
What recent revelations do we have to suggest that Huang might not think rules apply to him, and that what's enough for most people is not enough to satisfy him? Hmm let me think.
[dead]