Huang is the king who straddled an empire, only to allow his passions to lay siege to it

November 13, 2026 — 5:00am

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Imagine being the kind of person who could wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth, just by having an extramarital affair. Even Bill Clinton couldn’t manage that. It’s something more fit for a medieval king: the stuff of Louis XV, whose mistress became France’s unofficial prime minister, broke off France’s alliance with Prussia, realigned it with Austria, and promptly drove France into a disastrous war in which it lost most of its empire. Today, I give you Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, who resigned overnight. The man who, more than anyone else in the world, makes AI possible. And the man who was this week revealed to have been having two affairs, one with a woman US intelligence is convinced is a Chinese spy.

The news reduced Nvidia’s market value by nearly the entire GDP of Pakistan. It triggered strong denials from the Chinese, who dismissed the story as a smear. It also unleashed a torrent of questions about the future of AI, both in America and in China. It is, in short, the news story that distils our age, and all that is precarious about it.

That’s because most of the AI world runs through Huang. His company provides about 90 per cent of all the chips used to train AI models. And his company is basically him. He is not some distant CEO sitting atop a vast corporate structure, the actual work being done several rungs below........

© The Age