Jensen Huang lost Nvidia over two affairs.
That is the official story. Now read the calendar.
Ten weeks ago, Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face. $12.93 billion for the home of open-source AI. In July, Huang had rallied more than 200 companies behind open models. One frontier lab refused to sign: Anthropic.
Anthropic and OpenAI went to Washington asking for rules. Rules cost money. Incumbents have money. That is called a moat.
Then the dominoes. Democrats take both chambers on a promise to regulate AI. Anthropic opens its IPO roadshow, at up to $1.4 trillion. Two days later, the loudest voice against all of it resigns.
Nobody had to plan it. Everybody gets to enjoy it.
Nvidia still buys $10 billion of that IPO, by the way. The shovel seller funds the gold digger who wants the mine fenced.
In France, expense reports bring down CEOs. In America, zippers do. Neither country is shocked by the other’s sin.
And the spy? 600,000 Nvidia chips sit in Hong Kong. Washington cleared them. Beijing blocks them, to feed Huawei. China needs no agent to hurt Nvidia. Customs is enough. The spy story may be true. My read: it is less solid than Bernie Sanders on AI.
Now the part the market prices at 9%.
Elon Musk said hiring Huang "would be an honor". SpaceX stock rose 4% on five words. SpaceX is already building Terafab, a chip factory in Texas. First check: $16.8 billion. Huang once warned how hard that job is.
Washington lost a chip salesman this week.
Musk may have gained a chip maker.
First published on X.