Nvidia founder Jensen Huang resigned on November 12 as president, CEO, and director, with CFO Colette Kress becoming acting CEO. An investigative report published by The Washington Post on November 13 pointed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the possible flashpoint for this leadership upheaval: after obtaining a CIA assessment of the relationship between Jensen Huang and Chinese-American businessperson Alice Huang, he rewrote it in his own “tougher, more decisive” language into a classified memo and sent it to several senior officials. The memo later leaked to The New York Times, setting off a cascading storm in political and corporate circles that ultimately ended with Jensen Huang’s resignation. The Post described Huang’s departure as “potentially bringing about a dramatic transfer of power,” and said the person who set off the storm was one of Washington’s most influential China hawks.
A memo that may have been altered.
The central document at the heart of the entire storm is a highly classified memo. The Washington Post, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that CIA analysts had initially been uncertain about the relevant intelligence and that the agency had long failed to reach an internal conclusion; some officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) also believed the allegations had been “over-torqued.” After Rubio received the CIA report, he rewrote it in his own words into a more aggressively worded version, sent it to several senior officials this spring, and personally briefed President Trump on it.CNN’s reportAdditional details of the briefing were added: Rubio briefed Trump on the relationship between Jensen Huang and Huang Le in May while aboard Air Force One en route to China; the briefing took place before Jensen Huang joined Trump’s trip to Alaska.
The memo claimed that Huang Le was a Chinese spy, but so far no agency involved in the investigation has produced clear or convincing evidence to support the allegation. After the memo’s contents were leaked to the media, the controversy quickly escalated and ended on November 12 with Jensen Huang’s resignation. The Washington Post report did not conclude that Rubio deliberately distorted intelligence or intended from the outset to remove Jensen Huang. The question is whether intelligence about a “possible Chinese spy” was amplified to clear a major obstacle on the path to strengthening chip controls against China.
The intelligence community isn’t buying any of it.
The memo was unequivocal, but the accounts from intelligence and law enforcement agencies are completely different. When asked at a Nov. 12 press conference whether Huang Le was a Chinese spy, Attorney General Todd Blanche said: “I certainly never said that.” He added: “The Justice Department, I myself, or FBI Director Patel have not reached any conclusion about who she is or who she is not.” When Trump himself was asked on Nov. 12 whether Jensen Huang should step down, he also did not take a firm position: “The point is, is that woman a spy? I don’t know whether that has been determined. If she is a spy, then (stepping down) is fine; if she is not a spy, things might be different.”
CNN, citing multiple sources, reported that the CIA is skeptical about whether the communications intercepts currently available are sufficient to prove that Huang Le “knowingly and deliberately” sent intelligence back to Beijing; inside ODNI, including officials close to Director Jay Clayton, the characterization “Chinese spy” was described as “not entirely accurate and overblown.” House Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat Jim Himes was even more direct after receiving a classified briefing: “What exactly is Huang Le’s relationship with China, and what intelligence or information do we know was exchanged? As of today, at least, I don’t know.” But CNN also wrote that some other Trump administration officials believe that a successful Chinese businessperson who deals with the most influential companies in the United States, even if she did not actually engage in espionage, is by virtue of her ability to access Jensen Huang and, through him, Trump, itself a clear counterintelligence risk.
Why has Jensen Huang become a target?
Another thread in the Washington Post report concerns motive. Jensen Huang has close ties to Trump and once successfully lobbied the president to allow Nvidia to sell some AI chips to China, which put him at odds with national security officials who favored strict controls and with China hawks. Two former administration officials told the Post that some people inside the government were unhappy with Huang’s influence over Trump and had been trying to weaken his position; one of them put it this way: “They want to destroy Huang’s influence with the president.”
Rubio himself has so far avoided this topic. At the G7 meeting in Paris this week, he repeatedly refused to answer what role he played in this storm; when asked whether the espionage allegations had changed his position in negotiations with Beijing on AI issues, he only said: “The Chinese system will always act in the interests of the Chinese system, and the United States will always act in the interests of the United States. I work for the American people.” Putting the two reports by CNN and the Washington Post together, the source of the “espionage” framing is Rubio’s rewritten version, not the CIA’s original assessment.
Leaking secrets is a crime, and the tip line points to Anthropic.
This storm has two side branches. The first is the leak itself. David Sacks, former head of White House AI affairs, said on a podcast that someone leaked the contents of a highly classified memo to a newspaper: “You have to understand, this is a crime.” He pointed directly at the media, saying it could not have heard it by accident: “Someone made a deliberate decision and was willing to risk prison for it. Why are they so eager to take Jensen Huang down?”
The second offshoot points to the whistleblower source. Tripp Mickle, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, admitted on a podcast that in August last year he received a message from a “tech industry insider” telling him to drop everything and investigate a company called Megaspeed. Megaspeed is headquartered in Singapore and mainly rents out Nvidia computing power; its former executive is Huang Le. A previous investigation by tech media outlet The Information found that a corporate network linked to Huang Le had sent at least 240,000 H100 and H200 chips into China, worth at least $7.5 billion (about NT$236.3 billion), with one of the core companies located in Shanghai. The whistleblower’s identity has not been made public; online speculation has pointed the finger at Nvidia competitor Anthropic, with some naming CEO Dario Amodei, and some open-source intelligence analyses have directly accused the company’s co-founder of being the whistleblower. These allegations remain speculative and unconfirmed.
Also hasThe report points outThe root of this fight is a dispute over the direction of AI chip controls: Jensen Huang is the tech giant most forcefully opposed to built-in tracking and remote kill-switch features in chips. Nvidia’s CISO once said publicly that GPUs “should not have any remote kill switch or backdoor functionality,” calling such designs “a gift to hackers and hostile forces.” Anthropic, by contrast, is a major driving force behind AI safety regulation and chip export controls, and reportedly donated as much as $40 million (about NT$1.26 billion) to political organizations promoting related initiatives. Business Insider even likened this to the 2003 Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence failure: the intelligence Secretary of State Powell presented at the UN was later found by investigations after the war began not to exist.
After Jensen Huang Steps Down: Congress Calls for Testimony, Stock Price Plunges, 100,000 Sign Petition
Resigning is only the beginning. The chairs of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Select Committee on China, and the Intelligence Committee jointly demanded that Jensen Huang appear for closed-door testimony; the committees proposed December 1 and requested that Nvidia General Counsel Tim Teter testify on December 2. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott set a separate time and demanded that Huang testify on December 3, warning that if he does not appear, he will consider issuing a subpoena.
The market’s reaction was even more direct. After the board decided on November 11 to accept the resignation, NVIDIA fell nearly 10% in after-hours trading at one point. On the 12th, it hit an intraday low of $148.80, down about 13%, before closing at $166.19, down 4.34%. It was about 30% below its record closing high of $239.24 on October 6, and its market value temporarily evaporated by about $300 billion (about NT$9.45 trillion). This week, at least 10 Wall Street analysts cut NVIDIA’s price target or rating. Baird slashed its target from $500 to $200 and downgraded the stock to Neutral. Retail investors were buying the dip: according to statistics, net buying in the first 30 minutes after the open on the 12th reached $111 million (about NT$350 million), the largest opening buying volume on record for that institution. The tech community launched a petition asking the board to bring Jensen Huang back, with Elon Musk, Y Combinator president Garry Tan, and others among the signatories. Business Insider reported that the petition had exceeded 100,000 signatures, including current NVIDIA employees. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney publicly said that if the board really did that, it would be as foolish as Apple firing Steve Jobs.
The intelligence questions remain unanswered: the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the affair has been underway for at least a year, and the interagency review is still ongoing. The Washington Post report adds a perspective the case did not have before: what triggered Jensen Huang’s ouster may have been a memo that the intelligence community itself would not endorse. Nvidia will release quarterly earnings on November 17, which will be the first test for interim CEO Kress; Jensen Huang has agreed to testify behind closed doors before Congress on December 1.
Source:The Washington Post
Source: KOCPC Chinese