A scandal tests Nvidia’s dominance as tech billionaires seek to mend ties with Democrats after the midterm elections

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Today in tech, we’re talking about Nvidia’s salacious scandal, tech tycoons trying to reconcile with Democrats, and what billionaires should spend their money on if not elections.

On the opening night of Web Summit in Lisbon, the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang’s admission that he had an affair with a Chinese datacenter executive suspected to be a spy for Beijing hit the main stage. The news broke less than 24 hours prior, and the reaction was surprising.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, broadened the implications of the scandal from Huang’s personal life to Nvidia’s market dominance.

“Whatever Jensen did in his personal life, that’s very salacious. In the longer term, whether Nvidia is the hero or the villain, we’ll be asking: Were the things they did to cement their market position … just financial engineering?” Prince said in front of tens of thousands of onlookers.

Nvidia’s essential role in the AI boom as the world’s premier chipmaker had given it a Teflon reputation in Silicon Valley. It served as both a bank – providing loans to its own buyers to purchase its chips – and hardware provider. Prince credited Huang for doing “a lot to cement the AI ecosystem”.

Likewise asked to respond to the news, Richard Socher, CEO of the four-month-old AI startup Recursive Superintelligence, simply said he was “grateful to have Jensen in my corner”.

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