Inside Jensen Huang’s Ouster

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1:28Hey guys, it's Lizzie. A quick heads up that this is a fast-moving news story, and some things may have changed by the time you listen. Okay, here's the show.

1:42Robbie Whelan covers NVIDIA for The Wall Street Journal, and when I got him on the line, I had one simple question. Is NVIDIA without Jensen Wong still NVIDIA?

1:54Robbie Whelan: I think that the answer is pretty resoundingly no, it is not.

2:02Robbie Whelan: Jensen Wong is an enormous part of what makes NVIDIA the company that it is. He co-founded it in 1993. He has set the agenda for how it's managed, how it's run, what technology to pursue, how to sell it, who to sell it to. Pretty much every decision that's made at NVIDIA comes from his brain or maybe the brains occasionally of one or two other people. And so, of course, it's still the same technology, still the same company, still the same headquarters building. But without him in it, it's hard to call it really the same company.

2:43Huang resigned from NVIDIA Thursday morning after a series of revelations about multiple extramarital affairs, including one with a woman the U.S. government believes was recruited by China to provide intelligence on him. Her name is Alice Huang, no relation. The story has exploded across Silicon Valley and Washington, where lawmakers want to know if national security was compromised. And if you are wondering why one CEO of one company would be so important, it's worth considering how much of America's AI industry is riding on NVIDIA. And by extension, is the AI industry without Jensen Huang still the same industry?

3:26Robbie Whelan: So if you'd asked that question in 2022 or 2023, I think the answer would have been no. or more tilted towards a no answer. And the reason for that is because in 2022 or 2023, NVIDIA was essentially the only provider of silicon, these microchips that could really make the gears turn at a place like OpenAI or Anthropic or not Google because Google had their own stuff that they were working with back then. But certainly this whole ecosystem of startups and enterprise AI tool developers. I can get to what that means in a minute if you'd like. But basically, the whole environment, so to speak, was running on NVIDIA's hardware back then.

4:19Today, three or four years later,

4:22Robbie Whelan: there are a lot more options. There are other companies. OpenAI is developing its own chips. They're named after hot peppers, like jalapeno and stuff like that. And you've got AMD has become a more advanced micro devices. That's another Silicon Valley chip maker. They have, you know, really improved their product offering and they're making stuff that competes more directly with NVIDIA. Broadcom has been taking contracts to make these big, powerful, muscular AI chips that NVIDIA makes for others in a sort of on a custom basis. There's a lot more options, in other words, in terms of hardware right now.

4:57Robbie Whelan: And so as the AI race has kind of changed and developed, you know, if you don't have NVIDIA chips, maybe you can't do things as fast as you want to, or maybe you can't do quite as big a task as you want to solve. But you can still do stuff. You can still do AI.

5:20Today on the show, the ouster of America's AI ambassador and what the industry looks like without him. I'm Lizzie O 'Leary, and this is What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around.

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7:01or the whole family. The holidays are complicated. Shopping our best deals and switching to Verizon is simple. For new customers, $30 per line includes auto pay and switch discount. Additional taxes fees and terms apply. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value.

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7:44Let's do a little housekeeping here. We're talking Thursday afternoon. This is a very fast-moving story. NVIDIA put out a statement this morning saying Hwang resigned, effective immediately. CFO Colette Kress is the interim CEO. Who is she? What do people know?

8:01Robbie Whelan: Colette Kress has been chief financial officer of NVIDIA for the last 13 years. And I've met her. She's a very polished executive. She's very cool-headed, from what I understand. In meetings, she is not usually a yeller or somebody who shows a huge amount of emotion. Jensen Wong, by contrast, is known to be a yeller. And when he's not getting what he wants or not getting it fast enough, he can be very hard on his employees. But Colette, she's kind of like a classic CFO, tech CFO, which is to say that she has very strong relationships with big banks, especially Goldman Sachs in her case. She's got a team that is very loyal to her.

8:46Robbie Whelan: These are like hardcore number cruncher analysts. And she also, it's important to know, kind of has a bit of a conservative streak in terms of she's more cautious about how much money NVIDIA should be investing, how much financing and financial backstops it should be giving to partners, especially. And I think she's sensitive to what has grown to be the most prominent or most pervasive criticism of the way AI is being built in this country, which is that the market has been saying recently, and you can see this just in how the stock market has gyrated recently. The market's saying, like, you guys are just like handing out money, circular financing.

9:28Robbie Whelan: You're giving money to your customers and paying them to buy your chips, essentially. And that's been a very sensitive topic inside NVIDIA for a while now. And I think that Colette, as CEO, will probably continue to take the same approach she took as CFO, which is that she, I think, maybe is less enthusiastic about doing tons and tons of deals, making lots and lots of acquisitions, and essentially using NVIDIA's balance sheet to prop up the whole AI trade. Looking at the markets the day we're talking, right, NVIDIA stock was down in the morning, but things have kind of stabilized. The Nasdaq is not off that much.

10:04The VIX has bounced around a bit. But I wonder if a lot of Wall Street is sort of keeping its powder dry and like getting a little more time for stock and debt markets to really absorb what is happening. I wonder how long you think it will take for investors to decide what they really think is going on here.

10:26Robbie Whelan: I think that depends 100 % on how NVIDIA communicates. And we, they conveniently, or perhaps inconveniently, have an earnings report coming next week. Tuesday. They're going to speak directly. It's a big one. They're going to speak directly to investors then, and they're going to have a chance to really present what everyone wants, which is a new story, a new chapter. And the story from NVIDIA, the story that NVIDIA has told Wall Street has been pretty consistent over the last two or three years. It's this story of kind of grand ambitions, big dreams. Jensen is an incredibly confident, optimistic guy.

11:08Robbie Whelan: He almost never concedes that there's anything wrong with the way that NVIDIA is doing business. He almost never concedes that he might, you know, he never sort of considers the idea that he might be on the wrong path. I think that next week when they report, it's going to be a lot of pressure on Collette because, you know, for one thing, it's already really hard to convince Wall Street that there's a really good reason to support NVIDIA stock price. It's just already been, they've set such a high standard, the status quo is such incredibly impressive performance that, you know, even really good performance sometimes is not enough.

11:50Robbie Whelan: And furthermore, you know, Colette's going to be without Jensen to help her. I mean, she's always on those earnings calls, but she was usually the technical voice of those calls, explaining the finances, explaining the balance sheet. And without Jensen's real narrative talents. And he was a really talented guy at telling the story of this company, which he loved and which he built. Without him, there's going to be something missing. And I'm very curious to see how that plays out. My colleague, Mary Harris, did a great show earlier this week talking about the Alice Wong affair. But since that has happened, there has been a story about another affair with a woman at the company, maybe another person as well.

12:32At what point did you think, oh, he's toast?

12:38Robbie Whelan: I thought he was toast when my sources told me he was toast. I know. I think that there was a real turning point yesterday afternoon, that is to say, the afternoon of Wednesday, November 11th, when, according to my reporting and to my sources, the board basically decided that they needed to move against him. And they called an emergency meeting, not only to discuss Jensen's future, as it was reported in some forums, but actually to talk about ousting him. And I think from the moment, the purpose of the meeting was understood that they had a very big problem. It wasn't at all clear that he could even stay, even if he wanted to, or if the board wanted him to.

13:28Robbie Whelan: And so I think the discussion became fairly quickly one about, you know, we've got to move on. What do we do next? I think for people who don't follow AI or haven't been following sort of China and tech, the size of the personalities and the influence of the people here might be hard to understand. And so I really want to unpack that and be clear. I am curious about how important Jensen Huang has been in shaping U.S. AI policy and specifically the export of powerful GPUs and how entrenched he has been in the Trump administration's decisions about AI policy. I can say from the standpoint, from the corporate world, I can say pretty comfortably there is no one more important than Jensen Wong in shaping AI policy when it comes to exports and technology transfer and the trade that we have with other countries.

14:32Robbie Whelan: There's simply no one comes close. And the reason for that is because Jensen is very close with the president. President Trump admires him, thinks he's not only an honorable man, like you said yesterday, but he also thinks he's a real winner. And that's, we know from experience that President Trump loves winners. He loves people who are successful, people who give America a good name and who can sort of be living exemplars of America's dominance in all kinds of industries. But tech is probably the biggest and most important one right now. And so to have this guy, I think he's really thrilled that for the last couple of years, the person most responsible for powering this AI boom, this most exciting thing since the Industrial Revolution, has been an American.

15:20Robbie Whelan: And so for that reason alone, he and Trump are close. But it goes much deeper than that. I mean, for the last year, year and a half, Jensen Wang has been in Washington all the time. He's talking to cabinet secretaries. He's talking to agency staff, the people who actually make the decisions, who write the policy papers about who we're allowed to sell chips to, what countries they're allowed to be shipped to, what are the restrictions, what kind of tracking do we have to do. And it's easy to see why he's so involved in this stuff. You would think that this would be below a guy who is the CEO of a$5 trillion company.

15:56Robbie Whelan: It's not. It's actually essential. And that's because NVIDIA has made it very clear that by being locked out of China, they've been locked out of China for the last couple of years now, since sort of roughly the end of the Biden administration, they are leaving tens of billions of dollars on the table. Their shareholders are missing out on enormous returns on invested capital, enormous revenues, and the stock price is being valued accordingly. It's being discounted accordingly. And so there's a tremendous incentive for Jensen Wong to not only be a CEO and a visionary voice in AI, but also to be a guy who influences policy, a diplomat even.

16:37Robbie Whelan: He goes overseas all the time. He meets with heads of state in the UK and in the Middle East and in the Far East and Singapore and Malaysia and these kinds of places. He simply does not stop ever promoting the interests of NVIDIA. And that includes increasingly in the last year or so, especially trying to influence the president, trying to influence the Trump administration and trying to make sure that policy, export policy is favorable to his company. So I actually want to take you through some statements of his because I think they're really telling. If we go back to September of 2022, he says, you know, sort of U.S.

17:16chip policy, and I'm quoting here, gives us plenty of envelope to run our business. And then in 2025, the U.S. tightens rules about NVIDIA is kind of made-for-China chip. And in September of 2026, Huang is saying, are we depriving China of a chip for their industry or are we depriving the United States of a market to compete in? Why did he change his tune?

17:44Robbie Whelan: Yeah, I can tell you exactly what happened. What happened was DeepSeek and the rise of Chinese AI models. In 2022, basically for context, in 2022, all there was to speak of in the world of large language models was chat GPT, right? I mean, you had OpenAI that was making some of the most advanced models. You had Google doing some interesting work. and this was basically, AI was a thing that existed in the lab and at research universities and it was just starting to break out and become a thing that private companies cared about and that private companies were willing to invest significant money in to develop it and make it into a profitable product.

18:27Robbie Whelan: In the meantime, in those four years that elapsed between those two quotes, the world exploded. I mean, not only did American AI become incredibly sophisticated and grow really fast. But Chinese AI, what we usually call open source AI, proliferated. And there's something, if you might remember, called the DeepSeq correction that happened in early 2025 when researchers in China released a new version of this model called DeepSeq. And the rumor was that it had been trained on NVIDIA's GPUs. And it was basically like a model that had been developed with many fewer resources than the American models are developed with, but it was almost as good as OpenAI's best models.

19:14Robbie Whelan: And that was a real sobering wake-up call for America. I don't think that Jensen Wang's change in approach toward China began then. I I think it had begun long before that because he kind of he sort of saw the writing on the wall a long time before that. But that was the first time the public and the markets fully digested this idea that, oh, the Chinese the Chinese AI industry is not that far behind ours. We always thought for years this is kind of an AI backwater. Sure, they might have some smart people, some smart developers and engineers, but they were never going to catch up. They could never catch up with us.

19:51Robbie Whelan: You know, we've we've got the best minds in the business. We've got the best tech in the business. We've got the best hardware. And that really, by early 25, at least, that was the nail in the coffin of that way of thinking. And so it totally makes sense, those two quotes. I don't remember reading them in a contemporary way. But now that you put them up like that, it totally makes sense. It's like the middle of the Biden administration, they're saying, we're going to put on some expert controls because we're a little worried about the military applications of AI or other things that could go wrong that aren't necessarily related to this giant, intense AI race that's going on, this arms race.

20:28Robbie Whelan: But by 2026, nobody thought of that problem the same way anymore. Because it's hard to think about this and not say, oh, well, was there a Chinese asset whispering in his ear during this period of time? I think that's a tempting line of thinking. And I think that it's too early to say that the woman with whom he had an affair, Alice Wong, you know, wasn't one of the voices in his head making him change his mind about these sorts of issues. So I'm not going to discount that. I'm not going to say it wasn't. I simply don't know. And there's a lot more reporting to do on that question. But I mean, throughout this period, I will tell you that throughout this period, an ecosystem of companies, including Alice Wong's company, Megaspeed, really developed and set up these elaborate, complicated networks of companies and shell companies and distributors that were doing effectively exactly what someone who didn't believe there should be export controls on Chinese chips would do.

21:39Robbie Whelan: which is find ways of, some of them illegal, find ways of smuggling chips in, find ways of giving remote access to Chinese companies. And we've reported on this pretty extensively. So if the question is, was Jensen Wang looking the other way while his chips ended up in China or ended up in the hands of, you know, access to them was in the hands of Chinese companies because of his girlfriend? or was he doing it because it was a way of selling chips? We don't have the answers to those questions. I mean, I know those are questions that people have brought up and that, you know, have sort of raised alarm among, especially among sort of China hawks in the Trump administration.

22:26Robbie Whelan: But, you know, it's, I don't, I wouldn't, I would caution against sort of like thinking about this in kind of like a straight line in Cosby. I think that Jensen's a lot smarter than that. I think that he has a much more sophisticated global strategy. And I think he's been pretty clear and consistent for a number of years that he doesn't think that his company nor any other American chip company should be kept out of China. I think he thinks it's the wrong way to approach global dominance in AI. And the better way is to keep everyone in the world on America's tech stack and make yourself indispensable to every AI company on the globe.

23:07Robbie Whelan: And part of that is pushing back when the U.S. government tries to limit sales to China.

23:17We'll be right back after a quick break.

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24:05They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

24:55Robbie Whelan: different assessments of this problem, how big a problem it is, how big a problem it isn't. But I guess that one thing we can say for sure is that when you look at the Chinese AI landscape and you see products like DeepSeek coming out of it, it's sort of hard to deny that one way or another, they're getting the capability they need to produce competitive models. And when we find these examples of alleged smuggling that are really blatant, like I'm I'm thinking of the Supermicro case from earlier this year where the founder of that company who had been photographed a week before with Jensen at GTC, their big conference up in San Jose.

25:32Robbie Whelan: And then that guy is suddenly raided by the FBI and with gobs of evidence that he is responsible for the smuggling of billions of dollars in NVIDIA's chips to China, you know, with photographs and all. When you see examples like that, you're right. It really does make you wonder, what am I looking at here? Is this the tip of the iceberg or is this the whole of it? And what does that mean for how tight or how lax rules should be going forward? And I think that, you know, there's an interesting metaphor here, which is like the election. A lot of people say the election was a referendum on data centers and on AI.

26:10Robbie Whelan: And I'm talking about the midterm elections. And I kind of think there's this weird idea where it kind of was, but people didn't really know it. Voters didn't really know it. I think that there was a reaction to Trump and to Trump's economic policies that swept in sizable majorities in both houses of Congress. And the result of that for AI on a practical level is going to be tighter laws. It's going to be tighter regulations. It's going to be less of a – it's going to be a shorter leash for people who want AI to go full bore and expand across the globe as fast as possible. And so it's sort of like this weird kind of, you know, galaxy brain thing, right?

26:51Robbie Whelan: It's like, hey, I didn't know I was voting for that. But really, people kind of were voting for companies like NVIDIA to be checked a little bit. What we're seeing with Jensen right now, his downfall as CEO of NVIDIA, that's the context that it's happening in. Well, I want to ask you about the administration because there has been a lot of different reporting, reporting that political appointees in the Commerce Department may have interfered with an investigation into NVIDIA that then got moved to justice. Certainly, Jensen went to China on Air Force One in 2025. Then he was at the state dinner for Xi Jinping.

27:31If the reported timelines are correct, the president had already been told about Alice Wong when those things happened. So I'm curious what the Trump administration was doing with this information.

27:46Robbie Whelan: Yeah, we've reported certainly that the president was briefed on Alice Wong. The president's been briefed on Megaspeed, her company, which has been accused of being involved in smuggling chips into China, and did not act. That's certainly true. What we don't really understand is how much of an impression that those briefings make on the president or, you know, if you mentioned one person or one or one company and how far is that going to go? He certainly said it didn't make much of an impression on him. You know, he was quoted saying something like, you know, well, if I saw that, it didn't really have an impact on me.

28:23Robbie Whelan: And I would point to a different incident as a little bit more telling. You mentioned the Air Force One flight in May where President Trump was going to see Xi. Initially, Jensen was not invited, but then they picked him up in Alaska and they took him on the plane to China. Yes. I would point to a slightly earlier flight that happened. About six months earlier, there was a flight to Busan, South Korea, where Jensen was not president, but President Trump was, as were his top cabinet secretaries, Marco Rubio, Jameson Greer. the U.S. trade representative. And at that moment, the stakes were almost higher for NVIDIA because NVIDIA was trying to sell a new chip called the Blackwell in China.

29:07Robbie Whelan: Their most powerful chip is still their most powerful chip on the market. They've got a new one coming, maybe started shipping recently called the Vera Rubin, which is a different type of server. But the Grace Blackwell server at the time and still through most of this year was like the marquee product that NVIDIA had. And all the American labs were using it. Everybody was using it to train the biggest and best models. And the Chinese badly want it. They wanted it then. They still want it now. And Jensen had just gotten a big victory. He'd just gotten the administration to approve the sale of one of his chips called Hopper.

29:40Robbie Whelan: But it wasn't the best. It wasn't the latest and best thing. And so the Chinese wanted the Blackwell, the latest and best thing. And he wanted to be able to sell the Blackwell to them. And he was really close to convincing the administration to let him do it, to give him export licenses for Blackwells. And there was this fight. And as we reported last December, Marco Rubio stepped in, Jameson Greer stepped in, a couple others stepped in and said, look, Mr. President, this is not a good idea. We've seen the reports. We've seen the intelligence. We've seen the data. This has nothing to do with Alice Wong, as far as I know, nothing to do with Megaspeed.

30:13Robbie Whelan: But simply the idea that the U.S. was going to, in some sense, give away their greatest technology to their top geopolitical adversary, which had been going on. I mean, there had been this tension and pushback, and Jensen had been having a lot of wins on this question, but a wall slammed down in front of him. And suddenly he couldn't, it didn't work anymore. People were increasingly thinking in a way that was more hawkish about China and that we should not really share this technology so readily with our adversary. And so that moment to me was almost like a clearer shift in the sort of relationship between the U.S.

30:52Robbie Whelan: and China and a clearer shift in NVIDIA's fortunes. Does Jensen still have allies in the Trump administration? As far as we know, Trump still thinks he's a great guy. Although Trump did say today that he thinks Tim Cook from Apple should be the next CEO. Yes, he did. But I think he does. And I think that but I think that unfortunately, without the CEO's hat, he's not going to be able to have as much influence as he'd like on this particular issue. And I think that even if he had remained as CEO after the revelations of Alice Wong and Megaspeed, I think he would have lost a fair amount of credibility in Washington.

31:33I want to talk a little bit about the AI market going forward, because, you know, we've been talking about NVIDIA's both chip sales to basically every other AI company out there. This sort of like erbros of funding and chip usage. It owns pieces of Intel, SpaceX, CoreWeave. it's pledged up to$10 billion to Anthropic, which is going to IPO maybe next week. That seems like a lot. Is there a way for the AI industry to extricate itself gracefully from NVIDIA? Is it even going to? I mean, I guess I'm wondering how much the future of the AI industry rides on what happens next for NVIDIA?

32:21Robbie Whelan: A lot of the future depends on what happens next with NVIDIA and whether or not they pull back their support of the whole ecosystem, that you're certainly right about that. I mean, but what I don't, what I'm not so sure about is whether or not it depends on Jensen Wong being the CEO of NVIDIA. I mean, all these, all these commitments are largely already made. Some of them are not totally signed on the dotted line. Some of them shows that this kind of business model, what you call the Ouroboros of circular financing and sort of being an equity investor in your biggest customers and all this stuff, was already showing some signs of strain in the last few months, especially.

33:04Robbie Whelan: And so it was no secret, really, that it wasn't going to last forever. I feel like without Jensen in the chair, it's probably going to slow down more than it might of otherwise. And so we might see a pullback to what critics of this type of thing would say is more of a normal situation where you rely on more organic demand, you get prepayments from customers, you don't go and build, build, build data centers without knowing that there's demand for them. A lot of people, I think, look at the market and said, we were going hell or high water towards like a huge bubble. And so I think for some people like that, I could imagine that it's a relief to see that Jensen is not going to be making those decisions anymore, because I think a lot of people might've thought that NVIDIA under his leadership was moving a little too fast.

33:56Robbie Whelan: In fact, he himself said he was unwilling to slow down the development of AI. He said it on stage with Trump on his phone in front of a crowd at the All In Summit a couple months ago. He said, no, sir, we're not going to let that happen. We're not going to slow down. And so in the context of this like giant debate about like not just slowing down the infrastructure build out, but also slowing down the development of advanced capabilities and machine learning for models. I think both of those things could take a hit without Jensen Wang as the head of NVIDIA, but I don't think that he's by any stretch the only factor.

34:32Robbie Whelan: And I think that NVIDIA, it takes us right back to your first question, which is, is NVIDIA still the same company? And it still is, and it still has these commitments, and it still has some of the smartest engineers in the world designing its chips. But the tone of things and the pace of things may be a little different going forward.

34:56Robbie Whelan, thank you so much for talking to me.

34:58Robbie Whelan: Thank you, Lizzie, for having me. Robbie Whelan covers NVIDIA for The Wall Street Journal. And that's the show for today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Madeline Thames-Ducharm. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer for What Next and What Next TBD. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. And Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations. I'm Lizzie O 'Leary. You can go yell at me on Blue Sky where I am at Lizzie O 'Reilly. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you soon.

36:04We'll see you next time. finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value.

36:41Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.