The Nvidia Affairs

Plus: Measles in New York, Democrats in Mississippi, and more...

More on that Nvidia affair: CEO Jensen Huang resigned following the extramarital affair he had with a woman who stands credibly accused of being a Chinese spy. (News also broke yesterday that Huang had another extramarital relationship with an executive who worked for him, per The New York Times, but that's less pertinent to national security.)

"Huang is synonymous with Nvidia, a company that rose from building graphics cards used in video game computers to controlling the precious chips used to develop artificial intelligence," notes The Washington Post. "The company is one of the heavyweights in a stock market heavily reliant on the AI, and he enjoys a close relationship with President Donald Trump, who as late as Monday sought to defend Huang."

"I did speak to him today," Trump told reporters Monday, referring to Huang. "He said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy.…I really believe him."

Trump refused to say when he first became aware that intelligence agencies had worries about the woman, Alice Huang, who is an executive at the Singapore-based tech company Megaspeed, and the degree to which she was working on behalf of Beijing. "I just know Jensen very well," added Trump. "I just think he's a very honorable man."

Nvidia, the nation's dominant chipmaker, whose chips power AI data centers, has seen its shares tank in recent days. Huang has steered the Nvidia ship from the start, and is widely credited with the company's success. "Huang's importance to Nvidia is that he decides on the aggressive tech upgrades and makes them happen," Ming-Chi Kuo, a veteran analyst at TF International Securities, tells Bloomberg. One remaining question, per Bloomberg, "is whether Nvidia can keep developing new products and technologies as efficiently as before, if the chipmaker ends up reducing its reliance on Huang's personal decision making."

The Washington Post reports:

"Chip policy experts raise broader questions about the competition between the United States and China over the technology. American companies lead the industry, and many in Washington have sought to use export restrictions to keep the most powerful chips out of Chinese hands. But Nvidia has argued for allowing at least some exports, which the administration permitted last year.

U.S. officials have previously suspected Megaspeed of acting as an intermediary that shipped Nvidia chips to China to circumvent export controls, according to news reports. The Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment."

In China, officials have denied that Alice Huang is an intelligence asset. Social media there steers users toward believing that the scandal is simply that Jensen Huang cheated on his wife, as if the espionage angle does not exist at all.

In the U.S., "two House Republicans—Rep. John Moolenaar, who chairs a House China committee, and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast—said that they'll likely subpoena Huang for an appearance if he doesn't answer an earlier request for a closed-door briefing," reports Bloomberg. And "Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, a Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee, which oversees US export control programs, said Huang should resign."

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Scenes from New York: "All across Lewis County, N.Y., where the trees are already bare and stands selling maple syrup dot the roadside, Amish families—Mr. Stoltzfus's included—have stories of measles sweeping through their homes in recent weeks, their community disproportionately affected by the virus," reports The New York Times. "One man described how it had attacked nine of 10 people in his house. Another said it had infected eight of nine people."

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QUICK HITS

• "Scott Colom won a long-shot bid to oust Mississippi's Republican incumbent senator," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Colom, a local prosecutor, is the first Democrat that Mississippi has elected to the Senate since 1982 and the first Black senator from the state since the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War.…The race carried an undertone of personal drama, as Hyde-Smith [Colom's opponent] had blocked Colom's nomination to a federal judgeship—a lifetime appointment—when then-President Joe Biden tried to place him on the bench in 2023. Colom later said it was unlikely that he would have left the federal judiciary to run for the Senate."
• A military sentinel standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery reprimanded Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yesterday as he laughed following a photo op. "All visitors will maintain an atmosphere of silence and respect at all times!" yelled the sentinel.
• Darby Saxbe's Dad Brain "claims that fathers are innately 'wired to participate in care,' because their brains and bodies respond to babies in ways that 'prime nurturing and sensitive caretaking behaviors.' But most of these supposed adaptations only 'come online when fathers invest time and practice into parenthood'—that is, when they agree to abide by the prescription that fathers should participate in childcare." But, Justin Murphy argues in Unherd, "if fathers 'need parental experience in order to trigger adaptation' in the brain and helpful changes such as increases of oxytocin, this does not technically support the interpretation that fathers are 'wired' or even 'primed' for hands-on caretaking. If that were the case, there should be evidence of brain changes before, during, and after the birth of a first child, but before the father submits to the practice. This is precisely what we find with mothers, who lose nearly 5% of their gray-matter volume during pregnancy, before they have engaged in caregiving. The argument, more accurately, is that fathers can adapt to childcare, to some degree, when they have to."