Today, we’re talking about the Jensen Huang scandal at Nvidia, which is developing so quickly that we had to do an emergency update of this intro minutes before publishing this episode.

Huang just resigned from his position as CEO of Nvidia as news of his affairs, including with an alleged Chinese spy, threatened to engulf the company.

We’ll have more on that story as things develop and we learn how Nvidia will restructure itself after Jensen — he had something like 60 direct reports, after all, and the entire AI financial ecosystem flows through the company. This is pure Decoder bait.

But just two days ago I talked to Kyle Chan, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, about the real heart of the scandal: What would China even seek to accomplish by having a spy so close to Jensen? And what does the real state of the US-China AI conflict really looks like, particularly from the Chinese point of view?

Kyle’s answers about chips and how China is perceiving the so-called AI “race” were very illuminating, but maybe even more interesting was his observation on Jensen Huang’s relationship with Trump was the most important thing of all — because maybe what China most stood to gain was someone who could whisper in the right ears.

Let’s just dive right into it. But keep in mind that when we were talking, we still didn’t know what would happen with Jensen.

Okay: Kyle Chan on Nvidia, China, and the future of AI export controls.

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