Beijing may benefit more from the discovery of its (alleged) wrongdoing than from the wrongdoing itself.
It may be a long time, if ever, before we know the full extent of any gains for the Beijing regime arising out of Alice Huang’s liaison with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. But, depending on what emerges from the various investigations that are either underway or imminent, it is possible that one of them could be Jensen Huang’s departure from Nvidia, the company he co-founded and, as CEO for 33 years, has led to extraordinary heights and a market capitalization of some $4.5 trillion.
Having Congress in Democratic hands won’t make things any easier for a man who is close to Donald Trump, as well as being one of the biggest names in boogeyman AI, and, to complete the trifecta, a billionaire (many times over).
Sure enough (and there are other examples to choose from) Delaware Democratic Senator Chris Coons tweets:
I’m pushing to investigate Jensen Huang and Nvidia to determine whether our national security was compromised. We need answers about the relationship between AI billionaires and the Trump administration, who’s making these decisions, and who’s really got their hand on the wheel.
Note the wording: That is the language of a politician who is interested in doing more than investigating what China has been up to with respect to Nvidia. And if the result of such maneuvering is — whether by imposing an EU-style regulatory regime, succumbing to data-center panic, wrecking Nvidia, or all three — to throw away America’s lead in a technology of possibly immense geopolitical consequence to win a round — several rounds — in a domestic political battle, well, omelet, eggs, and all that.
If Huang has broken the law, he will have to answer for that. But there is a clear danger that he may become the target of a prolonged inquisition more focused on political gain than getting at the truth, something that can only hobble Nvidia, a participant in the AI race of an importance that is hard to overstate. Huang was early to see the possibilities in the technologies that underpin AI. It was a brilliant call. Nvidia reportedly supplies about 90 percent of the microchips used for training AI, and 70 percent of those needed to run LLMs. The company’s revenues have surged, from $26.9bn in 2022 to $215.9bn in 2025. And so has its profit, increasing more than ten-fold over the same period to $120bn. Throughout all this, Huang has been a central figure. Nvidia is very much Huang’s show. Its structure is flat, he is a famously hands-on manager, and there is no obvious successor.
Should Nvidia’s growth slow, either with Huang or without him, there is another danger. Nvidia has used its cash to play an important part in the development of the American AI ecosystem (so much so that it has been described as the central bank of AI).
To the company’s critics, this is a form of circular financing (Nvidia is helping fund the clients that buy its products), but that ecosystem is real enough.
Nvidia invested $30bn in OpenAI as part of the latter’s February funding round, before agreeing to provide $105bn in credit backstops to the ChatGPT maker’s proposed data centre campus in Ohio.
Alongside six Wall Street asset management giants, the company also helped mobilise $500bn in third-party capital designed to finance infrastructure for frontier AI labs, enterprises and neoclouds seeking access to Nvidia’s chips.
Nvidia is also a critical source of venture capital across the industry. DealRoom estimates that it has participated in more large funding rounds than traditional venture capital firms like Sequoia and Lightspeed this year. It is a critical investor in a new generation of cloud computing companies, like CoreWeave, Nebius and Nscale, all of which are major customers.
As it is, there are signs of concern in credit markets about the sustainability of this model, especially after the recent jitters in the AI sector. Should Nvidia falter, that flow of funds would likely to be cut. Given the hit to market sentiment that serious trouble at Nvidia would trigger, the financing available for AI projects from elsewhere could well shrink too.
In short, Beijing may benefit more from the discovery of its (alleged) wrongdoing than from the wrongdoing itself.