ジェンスン・フアン・スキャンダル：NVIDIA CEOと中国スパイ疑惑の女性幹部

In all my years on the computer, I never thought I'd see graphics cards and international sex scandal in the same story. But this week, the Times broke the news that Jensen Wong, the CEO of the chipmaker NVIDIA, and one of the most important figures in AI and tech, has been having an affair with a top executive at a Singaporean data center company, who also happens to be an alleged Chinese spy, and whose company was reportedly illegally funneling advanced NVIDIA chips to Chinese companies. Wong remains in place atop NVIDIA, which is launching its own internal investigation, and the new Democratic Congress could follow with one of their own, especially since President Trump has apparently been aware of the allegations and unwilling to intervene for a year. Look, I love a spy story, and I won't pretend that the sex scandal part of the story isn't a huge draw for me here. But I'm also fascinated that this lurid tale of international intrigue is all about graphics card trade policy. The fact is, this is the quintessential 21st century spy story.

We're not talking about troop movements, no one's stealing top-secret microfilm, Jensen Wang wears a leather jacket, not a tuxedo. What we have instead is a tale of executive hubris, Chinese holding companies, export controls, and of course a race to create the world's most powerful and important technology. And because this is such a rich and fascinating intersection of our interests, we had to talk about it as soon as possible. Today, on what we're calling an emergency episode, I'm joined by technology journalist Stephen Witt, who literally wrote the book on Jensen, Wong, and NVIDIA to talk about these revelations. How did someone so powerful become an international espionage target and fall for it? Why did it take so long for this story to come out, and who leaked it? How much of what Wong has been saying as a leader of the tech industry is now going to be called into question, And is it possible that this story is dramatic enough that it could pop the bubble we're all so worried about? I'm Max Reed. This is Hard Fork.

Joining me from a hotel room in Singapore is Stephen Witt, author of last year's book, The Thinking Machine, a biography of Jensen Wong in NVIDIA. And he's going to help me try to wrap my head around this. Welcome to Hard Fork, Stephen. Thanks for having me. Of course. What have your last 24 or 48 hours been like as this story has been breaking? I've been on every news network I think in the world has invited me on. I'm having to decline invitations that at any other time I would have been enjoyed, you know, overjoyed to get. It's 3.30 in the morning, and I'm just reporting. I'm still working. It's nuts. What a story. So it seems to me that there are sort of three big revelations in this unfolding story, at least things that were revelations to me. One is that Jensen Wong was having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Two, that his affair partner's company, Megaspeed, is suspected to have been fuddling NVIDIA chips to China in contravention of U.S. export bans. And then three, a sort of series of things we've now learned about the Trump administration's knowledge of this and possible intervention into Commerce Department investigations.

What I want to ask is how much of this was revelatory to you? You know, you spent a lot of time reporting on, talking to, thinking about Jensen Wong. How much of it was surprising? Well, everyone knew that the Malaysia data center thing was a cutout to smuggle China. That had been reported actually by the Times over a year ago. And even before that, people understood that, you know, Malaysia didn't have a big AI development program. If 10 or 15 percent of NVIDIA's revenue was coming from Malaysia, really that meant that those chips were being kind of distributed to China in one way or another. Now, some people think they were actually just kind of like brought to the data center, had the labels removed and replaced and just sent directly into mainland China as a real smuggling operation. Others were maybe like, well, maybe the data center is being used by Chinese assets in some way. But that was pretty well known. The affair thing, there were whispers.

It wasn't a complete stutter. I had heard stuff about this going into the summer particularly and had been trying to find this. But, you know, I didn't have access to the thing that I guess really broke the story, which was actually White House intelligence. And this was the kind of surprising thing getting to the third part. Although this is a story about NVIDIA and all this is a story about kind of smuggling and affairs and stuff, I think Jensen found himself on the wrong side of the China hawks here. And I think that's where a lot of kind of the reporting on this went. It went to the China Hawks who had an accident ride with Jensen. Yeah, and I want to talk about that in a moment. But before we get there, I think one of the big reasons this is a big story is we don't have that many examples of CEOs who are as powerful as Jensen Wong. So can you just briefly for our listeners, describe his role at NVIDIA in the greater AI ecosystem and explain maybe, you know, why it's sort of uniquely damaging for him to be involved in a scandal like this?

Jensen is the founder, CEO, and basically king of NVIDIA. He's been in that role for 30 plus years. You know, NVIDIA is an unusual organization. typically you'll have in a corporate org chart like the CEO and then like kind of, you know, a second layer of management of maybe six to eight people who assist the CEO in various roles. That doesn't exist in NVIDIA. There's Jetson, there's nobody in the second tier, and then there's 60 people who report directly to him. So it's a very unusual arrangement. NVIDIA is Jetson to a degree that I've almost never seen it any other corporation, except maybe some of Elon Musk's stuff. It's really just this one guy in control managing and running everything. So if he is compromised, if he has to step down, if in some way he can't do his job, that's uniquely damaging for NVIDIA. NVIDIA has grown so large selling AI hardware, selling microchips in particular, into data centers that it's now like a linchpin of the American economy.

So there's this giant key man risk, not just for NVIDIA, but actually to some extent for the entire U.S. economy around this guy. So this is a painful one for U.S. markets. It's very painful for NVIDIA. You know, Jensen's judgment has to be called into question. This guy was bulletproof for the last decade. His stock did nothing but go up, and every call he made was right. Now it doesn't look that way. I understand this is going to take a little while to play out, but given his importance as you've described it, I mean, would you be surprised if he was ousted? I would be surprised if the board fired him. I don't think that would be in the best interest of NVIDIA shareholders, and that's their job, right? I think that would make NVIDIA's stock go down a lot, so I don't think the board will do that. The real risk to me to Jensen comes from what Democrats and Republicans are both acting for, which is congressional hearings and congressional testimony. And there's a number of ways that this can go wrong, but probably the most important one is the fact that it is so obvious to anyone looking at it for one second

that these data centers in Malaysia were not for Malaysian people. They were for Chinese AI developers to get around these export restrictions. And Jensen could maybe play dumb and not understand that in an abstract way, but if he's sleeping with the head of the company, he can't play dumb anymore, right? Like he must have known what was going on. And that against the law right So this creates an enormous I think legal liability both for NVIDIA they might have to pay a massive fine and even for Jensen himself you know the Republicans are asking him to testify behind closed doors That's actually positive for Jensen, because it's less embarrassing. I think the Democrats are going to hold their own, or attempt to hold their own inquiries and hearings once they take control, and I imagine those will be public. I mean, it's going to be a tricky situation for him. I just don't know how he can say, oh, I didn't know that Malaysia was a cutout. I didn't know about this woman. And this is the thing that shocks me, okay?

Like, you know, it's terrible that Jensen had an affair, but these things do happen, right, in the course of kind of, like, human life. I'm so shocked that Jensen had an affair with this specific woman, who is just a walking red flag. Like, she had no background in computer science, as far as anyone can tell, and suddenly she's running this kind of data center operation that's a front. This woman is a smuggler. And, like, to begin a romantic relationship with someone like that just shows an almost, like, self-destructive amount of poor judgment. I can't believe nobody warned him, but, you know, the thing about Jensen is he's very headstrong and doesn't listen to any advice. I mean, so, you know, he... Yeah, I mean, let me ask. You wrote, you have sort of literally written the book on Jensen. You spent a lot of time sort of in his head. What do you think was going on there? Was it just a total lapse in judgment? Yeah, yeah, pure hubris. I mean, I don't think, I don't think it was some strategic thing he was doing. What do you think was going on in his head? You know, he fell for it. I mean, he got played. He got played. That's all, that's all

you can say. Yeah. In terms of, just to return to the question of Jensen's role at NVIDIA, if he does end up having to leave the company down the road, is there a succession plan in place? As you say, he's the king. Like, who's the heir? I asked him, who's your successor? And he's like, nobody. He didn't have any kind of plan personally. He never personally selected or named any kind of successor. You know, again, hubris. Maybe he thought he was immortal. You know, I did put this question to the board. This was back in 2024. And they say, oh, you know, we've looked at some candidates. One of those candidates was a guy named Jay Puri. He just retired. He's in the 70s, so I don't think it's going to be him. You know, I think Jensen's going to fight this one as hard as he can. And Jensen is a fighter. He's a knife fighter. I actually think he will probably survive this, believe it or not. You know, the thing that would bring him down, as I say, is congressional hearings. I don't, you know, never say never. I don't think the board will get rid of him. And the board is comprised of some of the original founders of NVIDIA, guys like Tench Cox, who have been there since day one, since 1993.

You know, Tenchcox has, I think, something like $2 to $3 billion worth of NVIDIA stock. Like, he's not going to do anything to damage the company. Yeah. So I know that two of Jensen's kids and his son-in-law work at NVIDIA. They're not being, as far as you know, sort of groomed to take over his position at some point. Yeah, so this is an interesting question. Listen to the thing. Jensen always presented to me and to others this total family man image. And we talked about his wife a lot, how much he loved her. They've been together since he was 17 years old. They got married in the early 20s. If they get divorced, she may become one of the wealthiest women in America independently, sort of like Mackenzie Scott Bezos. But his kids are close. He keeps them at the company, Madison and Spencer. But they don't have technical backgrounds. Spencer studied photography. Madison went to culinary school. And whoever runs NVIDIA, whoever's the CEO, has to be, in addition to being a business person, a world-class computer scientist. They have to be one of the best computer scientists alive, which is what Jensen is.

I mean, he's in the National Academy of Engineering. He's got a master's in electrical engineering. You know, you talk to people, you're like, yeah, his computer science skills are excellent. So they can be present for the transition. They will inherit a large number of shares, but I don't think they can run the company. Madison married this guy, Nico Caprez, earlier this year. I think it was just about a month ago in Hawaii. So Jensen has him as a son-in-law as well. He's been promoted rapidly within the company. We'll see if he actually has a role to play. Yeah. Let's turn to the political question here. I think it's fair to say that Jensen is Trump's favorite CEO or certainly one of his favorite CEOs. I think he was. So the president says he will take him on his upcoming trip to China. Here's the Trump quote. I haven't heard he's done anything wrong. He dealt with somebody, but, you know, so does everybody else. I think he's an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it. You have to hear it. No, you can't do that with people. He has done an amazing job for our country. That's the president of the United States on the man who is having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

But let's talk. How did Jensen get into this position in the Trump administration? And furthermore, like how how did he become such an important figure in the AI sector in general? Yeah, this is the amazing thing. When I was talking to Jensen in 2024, he had no interest in politics. He had never made a political denation and he had never endorsed a political candidate or indeed any policy. I mean a couple of things related to exports, but very little. He was not a political guy and he didn't even attend Trump's inauguration. He was in Taiwan while Sam and all the rest of them were kind of behind Trump in that show of power in the inauguration. But he got Trump's ear, and my impression is that he kind of became Trump's friend through this really kind of shameless approach of flattery. Jensen is an engineer, and what he told me is he thinks about everything as an engineering problem, meaning you're going to study the inputs, look at the outputs, and then modify the inputs to control the system until you get the outcome that you want. Well, you know, Trump is a bottomless need for validation.

And Jensen supplies that to him. He just shamelessly kisses his butt. And I think this makes Trump like it. You know, the other thing is Jensen's a winner, right? Trump always knows the beer hot winners. And for most of this year, NVIDIA was the single most valuable company in the world, maybe in human history. And so this made Trump and Jensen want to be close to each other. I think Jensen understands Trump at a certain level, how to program him. But, you know, ego is not going to get in the way of Jensen and the way it might for another tech executive. Right. Let's talk about his Jensen stance on China, because that's important to the story on a couple of different levels. He's been a pretty outspoken advocate for essentially selling his own chips directly to China in contravention of U.S. export restrictions on those chips, which have been put into place to try to slow down China's own AI development. Tell me a little bit about his stance, how he came to that, and how he's advocated for it. You know, I was always a little surprised by it myself, but there's really a great business case for it, right? China is going to have a massive data center build-out that looks just like the U.S. is,

and when they do, they're going to fill that all within computing equipment. So that's another entire data center build-out that he could supply, which presumably would double the value of his company. So it's a very straightforward kind of like P&L profit reason that Jensen wants this. I think also the justification for this is if we don't sell this to them, they will build it. They will build their own kind of AI hardware stack, and then we'll have to compete against that, and that will be very challenging for us, and we might lose. And Justin is genuinely very afraid of that. That is a theme that has been going all the way back to his career right to the beginning the fear that his equipment even in the video game days would get cloned by Chinese competitors and sold at a fraction of the cost and he would go out of business certainly that the history of hardware So it normal that he would be afraid of that and would be looking to prevent that What poisons the discourse now is this romantic relationship. Well, are you saying this because you believe it? Or are you saying this because you're entangled with a foreign intelligence asset who was manipulating you?

You know, and I think probably that that narrative is not true. I think Jensen would say this anyway. but his credibility is zero. Like, he can never talk about China or export restrictions again without sounding like a fool. Like an intelligence play has happened. Like a patsy, basically. Yeah, precisely. Yeah, like a stooge. So I think that argument has gone out the window. I imagine NVIDIA will, in short order, not be able to sell anything to China ever again. Yeah. I mean, well, let's talk about a little bit. You brought up before the possibility that essentially what's happened here is that Jensen's enemies within the Trump administration had sort of gotten their knives out for him. Tell me why you think that and who those enemies, you know, would be. There were people on the right who did not like this. I don't think that they didn't like Jensen. They didn't like his kind of soft take on China. They didn't like that he was kind of pro free trade with China. These are the China hawks in the right. So, you know, guys like Peter Thiel, guys like Paul Luckey, and in particular, you know, Marco Rubio, who is a very longtime China hawk and who was also Trump's secretary of state.

Rubio actually wasn't permitted inside of China for a while because his statements were so hawkish. The intelligence communities in the U.S. got to this story because they had some kind of wiretap on the woman, on Alice, and Jensen showed up in that wiretap. And Marco Rubio prepared a memo showing that it was Jensen and shared that with Trump. And then Trump took no action. And so I imagine at least part of the reason we in the press are now hearing that is because someone in the White House wanted to reduce Jensen's influence over the president. So I think that there was an element here of the China Hawks taking back control of the narrative and taking back control of power within the White House. Yeah. Let's talk about the chips and the sort of supply chain. So this is a very, you know, the details are sort of complicated of exactly what is happening in the Megaspeed case, but it's something like NVIDIA is selling chips to the U.S. arm of a Chinese company, which then sells them on to Megaspeed.

Yes. Is this a sort of normal? I mean, I think you sort of answered this question before. This is how you smuggle something, right? You establish a dummy corporation in a different country, and then you – that's why import-export can be kind of a shady business sometimes, right? So there was a case earlier this year where guys at Supermicro were taking these boxes for NVIDIA equipment, and they would take a hairdryer and blow the packaging label off and peel it off and then replace it with a fake packaging label. You know, in Megaspeed, the details are still a little fuzzy. one thing that seems to have possibly happened is that they were using the data centers actually with dummy servers. So the NVIDIA equipment would show up, they would install it, quote-unquote, but actually they would install either non-functional or other equipment in the data center to make it look like a functional data center. And then, you know, you wheel the NVIDIA equipment maybe out the back door, and you cart it off to China to some secret location somewhere. So that's one thing that seems to have been happening.

And then kind of even without that, you know, Megaspeed seems to be downstream of Alibaba, which is kind of the Chinese eBay. And it seems like Alibaba was the main customer for Megaspeed's products. Again, that appears to – it depends on how you read the law, but I think that's in violation of the export restriction as well because, you know, you can't use these fronts. Lawmakers are aware that this sort of thing exists. So there's a couple ways to get around it. And, you know, this year I have heard that NVIDIA has actually cracked down on this a lot. perhaps recognizing the political liability of a lot of these sales. It's really forcing the data centers to make sure that they have legitimate customers who are not in China. I'm in Singapore right now. This is actually just across the bridge. It's like 30 minutes away from me. But, you know, as is typical with these facilities, you can't access them at all. They're surrounded by gates. They're surrounded by security. No one's allowed in or out. So it's really hard to know what's going on in there. You know, as I say, I think it would just, it defies imagination that Jensen would not understand what was going on here.

It just is not plausible. Yeah. Let me ask. So it's the Commerce Department that is, for the most part, sort of investigating. Like if you're installing dummy servers in your fake data center, it's Commerce Department investigators who are stopping by to check on those. Well, not in Malaysia, right? Like they're saying, like they have a limited – there's only so much they can do outside of the United States. So I think that they're probably guaranteeing that the original point of sale or the original destination that is, whatever, where the thing is delivered is, in fact, a data center in Malaysia. I mean, they're real. They exist. There's not nothing there. Right. But once it goes in, like the U.S. has only very limited authority and insight into what might happen in Malaysia. And from there, there's not much they can do. So, and I'm not quite sure how to ask this, but Megaspeed, it's a real company. It's not like a fake company. It's not a cutout or anything? It appears, it's a great question. I'm not sure, but it appears to have been formed in 2023.

In 2023, NVIDIA announced that they were a preferred cloud partner, meaning we're going to prefer selling our equipment to this company in Malaysia. You know, they have facilities. They have big data centers. that seem to use a lot of power. I mean, they built something here. So it's not completely phony or anything. And it seems like people do use their computing resources and pay them for it. It is a real company in that sense. It's just who's using it, who's paying it, and how legit is any of it are kind of open questions. Well, that's a good place to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about what's going on in Singapore, where you are right now. Welcome back to Hard Fork. I'm talking with Stephen Witt. You are, in fact, in Singapore. What's the reaction been like on the ground? Like, have you, you know, what is everybody in Singapore talking about this? Oh, yeah. I mean, everybody in Singapore is like, I mean, I think the reaction is what took you guys so long.

This was Singapore had been busting smuggling rings. The authorities here going back to 2024. Like, they were aware that at least some of this was happening. And I think that, you know, because Johor is just across the way, and a lot of people who live in Singapore actually work kind of in Malaysia, because Malaysia has become, outside of Megaspeed, a data center hub, this should be said. Right. Like, there's legitimately a big industry there, and it employs a lot of people, and they're very proud of it. So I don't want to smear them all as some kind of, like, criminal conspiracy. It's a real thing. But, you know, I think the impression that they got was like, what is going on here? I think there were a lot of whispers about Jensen and this woman, both inside NVIDIA and sort of people who were working around there. I think you know I think people got the impression that there was more to their relationship than simply business But it a hard thing to prove And I think you know without a wiretap which is ultimately what brought them down like how are you going to demonstrate this

Right. I mean, there was a short seller report back in May that has now been recirculating that seems to have put some of the pieces together, but wasn't able to sort of specifically describe an affair as happening because, as you say, they didn't have a wiretap themselves. Yeah, it's very hard. I think people knew, or they suspected that something was going on, that his behavior and, you know, you see videos of the two of them together. There's kind of awkward body language when they're together. You know, there's more photographs and videos leaking out. So I imagine if you were part of Jen's immediate entourage, you probably had at least a fairly good idea of what's going on. And I had heard kind of like stray whispers from coming from within NVIDIA actually earlier this year. But I was not – I just wasn't able to find it. I wasn't able to track it down. You know, so it was a hard story to get. So in terms of times, actually, we're getting it. I'll take – I'm happy to take that credit, you know, as a podcast host. I can't imagine that trying to honeypot the CEO is the first, you know, line of attack for Chinese intelligence services

or the Chinese government in general trying to accomplish whatever in particular they're trying to accomplish. I presume that NVIDIA has been a target of infiltration attempts and signals capture and whatever else you might do. Is that true? Oh, they all have. Yeah. I mean, NVIDIA in some ways is the least valuable target. They're really going after anthropic and opening eye. You know, with Jensen, too, trade secrets from NVIDIA are pretty valuable, but China can't actually manufacture what NVIDIA manufactures because they can't get the equipment. So I think with Jensen, it probably is more about an influence campaign. At the time that this relationship started, this is the other thing. Jensen was not close to Trump at that time. So they probably had some other motive for going after Jensen at first. And then suddenly they were like, oh, my God. We were literally in bed with the president's top tech advisor. This is awesome. So this was a big win for the Chinese spies. It was like Christmas morning for them probably. Yeah, I bet.

So at the time we're recording this, NVIDIA stock is down, but the market overall is relatively calm, despite the importance and power of the companies we've been talking about. Why do you think there isn't a bigger reaction in the markets over this? You know, it's funny. So all of the AI infrastructure stocks that make up so much of the market now are actually trading at very cheap valuations. The market thinks that actually the AI infrastructure play is coming to an end or that there's going to be a drawdown in sales in the next couple of years. That's how the stocks are priced. And so maybe some of this was priced in already. The other thing is what's bad for NVIDIA is actually good for NVIDIA's competitors, specifically AMD, Broadcom, and Google, who are all manufacturing rival microchips. Google in particular has really started to become one of NVIDIA's top rivals. So NVIDIA has a number of significant business risks outside of this spy scandal that it already shapes. And I think some of that was priced into the stock as well.

Well, let me ask you one final question sort of along these lines. So Jensen is sort of unique in this moment as a tech CEO, especially as an AI CEO, in that he's maybe the least safety focus or he's the least afraid of AI as a technology. Yeah, it's almost the opposite of somebody like Dario Amadei, who's constantly warning of the possible catastrophe. Denson gave a big interview to my colleague Ezra Klein earlier this year where he sort of makes the case that it's just a tool. We shouldn't be worrying about it like this. You know, you wrote about this for the opinion section recently. There's a scene at the end of your book where he sort of yells at you for even pressing him on this belief. So my question is, what happens if AI's biggest, least afraid booster loses power, loses credibility, like we've been saying? Do policymakers change their sense of what AI is? I mean, is this change the direction of AI development in the future? Yeah, probably. I mean, Jensen's not the only person who feels this way. Most of Trump's advisors feel this way. David Sachs certainly feels this way.

Mark Andresen certainly feels this way. Same as Jensen. They all think AI is completely safe, and then all this doomer's discourse is kind of disconnected from reality. And that has been a long debate. I mean, Jensen believed that long, long before he ever hooked up with a Chinese spy. I mean, this goes back to 2015. But I do think he was probably the most convincing and powerful advocate for that point of view. His point of view is he's looking at it from the microchip up. He's saying, I have complete control over each kind of individual component here. And so if I'm losing control at somewhere along the system, that just means it's an engineering failure. And we know how to fix engineering failures. I'm sort of parroting his point of view. You know, from Dario and Sam and the other people who are more worried, they're looking at it from the top down. And they're saying, I don't know how this thing works. It's extremely powerful, and I might lose control of it. So that's a really different point of view. I think that Jensen has lost this one. I've noticed even Trump has started to talk a little bit more about, you know, well, maybe we'll regulate it a little bit.

I think the Democratic wave that was just put into power had a number of reasons, including oil prices that they went in. But it seems like voters were very concerned about AI. I think Trump's point of view and Jensen's point of view is, no, you don't understand. If we stop doing this, China wins. China takes control of this technology. They are not afraid and they are not slowing down. And I think that's the strongest argument, actually, against the AI Doomer narrative is that people out here in Asia, not just China, but Japan and Korea, Singapore, they don't believe this at all. They just do not believe this. And you don't hear a lot of Doomerists. I never get AI risk questions out here. In U.S. it's the most common thing that I'm asked. So to some people it looks like kind of a cultural hysteria, almost like a moral panic. Yeah. All right, Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really enlightening and elucidating conversation. I really appreciate you making the time at 3.30 in the morning in Singapore from your hotel room. My pleasure. Yeah. The book is The Thinking Machine.

It's a great read if you're at all interested in one of the most important and now sort of most talked about figures in the AI era. And I look forward to reading more of your reporting on this. Thank you so much. This episode of Hard Fork was produced by Whitney Jones and Stoyer Roque and edited by Viren Povich. With additional editorial support from Brendan Klinkenberg, Lisa Tobin, and Brooke Minters. We were fact-checked by Will Peischel and engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by We love to hear from our audience.

If you have any questions or comments or want to give us a piece of your mind, find us at newyorktimes.com slash hardfork. You can also email us hardfork at newyorktimes.com.