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Notes -
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang caught having affair with Chinese spy.
There was some discussion of this in the Sunday thread, but I think this is a big deal worth a top-level post.
The woman, Alice Huang (no relation), is an executive at Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed. The official story from Nvidia, up until last week, was that this was a totally normal nothing-to-see-here business relationship with a client. Jensen himself now seems to admit this is not the case.
Jensen has been strongly opposed to chip export controls for some time. No doubt prosaic conserns about margins and market expansion were a major factor, but now we have to wonder how much corruption, blackmail, and CCP blackops might have played a role. There have been rumors of... irregularities regarding some Nvidia chip shipments to Asia. There is new reporting today that Nvidia itself intervened to squash a Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed.
I feel like the board has to fire him after this, but on the other hand it seems almost unthinkable. Imagine Apple firing Steve Jobs. There might be pressure from investors to keep him on. It will be interesting to see how the National Security apparatus responds to such a massive persistant vulnerability if it comes to that.
From what I can see she's currently being investigated as a potential spy but there's nothing confirmed yet. Either way, the potential there is meaningful as it shows a weak spot in industries important to national security, same way a plane need not actually crash. If she is a spy, the potential to either get information out through covert means/manipulation, or through blackmail is obvious.
That being said, just like with plane crashes Nvidia is hopefully set up in a redundant manner that things stay secure even if the CEO is compromised. I doubt it, but this sort of thing should be the goal for our tech industry and government.
I feel like spy as applied to this is such an odd continuum, too.
Like if 10 were 'literally trained espionage operative of China on an explicit mission to seduce Jensen' I'd expect this to be more like a 6 where it's more 'High-tier Chinese national likely has strong relationships with CCP and a strong overlap in interests with stuff the CCP also wants to have happen without being an explicit government operative'
Or the maintains relationships with (or surveils) all significant people and exert pressure on them when they believe they can do something that would be beneficial to the Chinese state.
Still is Jared Kusher an American spy by this metric?
Why American?
The question of who Jared Kushner is working for is an interesting one, but the way to bet is that he is working for the people paying him. Based on the publicly available information, that would be the Saudis. If the book claiming that the Dutch managed to flip the Russian spy who had pwned Kushner's phone is correct (which I doubt) then the Emiratis are paying even more.
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