zug_zug
20 hours ago
According to these allegations (May):
1. 20% of Nvidia's FY2026 compute revenue was ultimately driven by Chinese demand through intermediaries and alleged illegal diversion.
2. This was driven by Alice Huang (the spy)
3. Crucially this report has allegations that Jensen KNEW that these chips were being sold illegally, and that he even went on-site to these sites ALONGSIDE ALIBABA representatives.
Nvidia is down 5.7% this morning (probably on this news), but is trading at a P/E of 23x still -- my mental math if it's expecting to lose 20% of its revenue AND a CEO that it has more to fall.
Joker_vD
19 hours ago
OMFG, it's an open secret that lots of Malaysia-, Indonesia-, and Singapore-registered businesses resell GPUs to China instead of building AI datacenters themselves. And they don't need to sleep with NVIDIA's CEO to do that, you know.
rramadass
16 hours ago
Right. There are tons of companies (shell or otherwise) all over South-East Asia which feed China with what they need, sanctions or no sanctions.
Hence there is no way the US did not know of this.
My conspiracy theory is that the US used this to pump "poisoned" Nvidia chips (with hardware trojans via fab masks) into Chinese datacenters. Maybe the Chinese found out (they stopped buying) and hence this was framed publicly with/without the consent of the parties involved (who may not know they were just pawns) as "CEO honeytrapped by beautiful spy" which is a nice salacious piece of popular news.
PS: Michael Barr wrote a sci-fi novel "Metacompiler" which has something about hardware trojans - https://metacompiler.me/
gregw2
13 hours ago
If you are interested in earlier conspiratorial sci-fi books featuring hardware trojans, you might try to get a copy of another sci-fi novel called "Acts of the Apostles" by John Sundman.
John Sundman wrote and published the book in 1999 after working for many years at Sun Microsystems so it is a fiction born out of the Silicon Valley geek/tech culture of that era.
Pertinent only to this thread's context, and not indicative of anything in particular, John would have been at Sun for many years at the same time as Nvidia cofounders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, late 80s through early 90s.
zug_zug
19 hours ago
Well now that it's documented in writing, that business will have to be shut down (-20% revenue), somebody will have to be blamed for it (fired, arrested?), and who knows how big the fines will be.