The haste with which NVIDIA’s board of directors clamped down on Jensen Huang – with nary a thought for due process – appears to have turned him into a veritable martyr, with his resignation now serving as a clarion call for a considerable proportion of NVIDIA employees, while energizing a significant segment of the tech sphere.
Make no mistake: the exact circumstances under which NVIDIA’s GPUs – in contravention to the sweeping export controls by the United States – have seemingly turned up in China over the past few years remain as murky as ever. And yet, Jensen Huang’s summary dismissal seems to have papered over many of his faults for now, at least among his supporters.
The U.S. does not want to sell advanced chips to China, the CCP does not want them as well, and yet around 1.5 GW of banned NVIDIA chips have reportedly entered China over the past few years
We noted on Friday that the espionage allegations against Alice Huang became increasingly shaky when the U.S. Attorney General, Todd Blanche, declared that the Department of Justice (DOJ) had reached no conclusion to that effect so far.
Today, those allegations received another jolt when Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs formally refuted The Wall Street Journal’s report that had claimed local officials were alarmed by Alice Huang’s close relationship with Jensen Huang and had investigated her as a suspected Chinese spy.
This unraveling of a narrative that was presumably crafted quite shrewdly has just turned NVIDIA’s former CEO into a martyr, especially when broad swathes of the media have been caught red-handed parroting claims that are, prima facie, quite false, likely at the behest of the powers that be.
In fact, Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney took a direct swipe at the Wall Street Journal by alluding that it was fed dirt on Jensen Huang by a lobbyist affiliated with Anthropic:
“You sort of set him up, didn’t you, by creating the impression that senior government officials anonymously provided information about spying, when in fact the info came from a lobbyist at a competing AI company?”
What’s more, Elon Musk, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, the managing partner of Atreides Management, Gavin Baker, and Tim Sweeney have all signed a petition on the ‘I Stand With Jensen’ website, calling on NVIDIA’s board of directors to reinstate Jensen Huang. And, as of the time of publication, the petition has collected 116,514 names, including nearly 6,000 current NVIDIA employees!
To be fair, the fact that bucketloads of restricted NVIDIA chips have entered China over the past few years does merit a thorough investigation, especially as SemiAnalysis has now leveraged its institutional dataset – which tracks AI accelerator production (from foundry wafer starts onward), shipments by SKU and vendor, pricing, specifications, HBM details, and final destinations/installed base across 60+ major customers – to conclude that “more than 1.5 GW of NVIDIA chips, which are restricted, still ultimately ended up in China.”
This is an exceptionally large number, one that paints a worrying picture of compliance controls at NVIDIA. To make matters worse, the Financial Times has just reported that NVIDIA never purchased Directors and Officers (D&O) liability insurance that would have protected its key executives against damages and legal costs stemming from their own conduct.
Even so, the roughshod manner in which NVIDIA’s board compelled Jensen Huang to resign, and without even waiting for their own internal inquiry to reach a definitive conclusion, seems to have neutralized most of the criticism directed towards the former CEO.
It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that David Sacks, a PayPal veteran and a co-host of the popular tech and business podcast ‘All-In,’ has just declared that if Jensen Huang was ousted for wanting to sell chips to China, it was “the stupidest, most moot hill to die on.”
“There’s a big disconnect here, where I think the China hawks in DC think that the Chinese government is begging for their chips, and the truth is that they would love to keep the chips out too, which is why I say, again, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
“The China hawks don’t want the chips sold. The Chinese government doesn’t want the chips sold. So just forget about it. Stop selling them.”
“This is the crazy thing: if Jensen was taken out because he wanted to sell chips to China, it was the stupidest, most moot hill to die on, because China’s not taking those chips anyway.”
It is patently clear that the CCP does not want NVIDIA chips entering China, as demonstrated by the fact that nearly 600,000 H200 GPUs are currently piled up in Hong Kong, and waiting for authorization to enter the mainland.
And yet, China’s AI labs are presumably ravenous for those chips. Are the black market economics so compelling that a whopping 1.5 GW of banned NVIDIA hardware has entered China in recent years, assuming SemiAnalysis is correct on its arithmetic? This is a worthwhile question, one that a meticulous and transparent inquiry should answer.
In the meantime, calls for Jensen Huang’s return grow ever more sonorous. Will he be crowned again, marking a triumphant return on the defeated backs of those who plotted against him? Or will he now fade quietly into the twilight? I have a hunch that the former scenario has higher odds right now.
About the author: Rohail Saleem reports on the business of AI and semiconductors for Wccftech: the chips, data centers and compute deals behind companies such as NVIDIA, AMD, TSMC, OpenAI and Anthropic, and what those deals mean for the hardware people buy. He has written more than 2200 articles for Wccftech since 2019, often reading earnings reports, supply-chain data and analyst notes to explain where the money and the hardware are going. He holds a commerce degree from the University of Toronto’s Rotman Commerce program.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.