# NVIDIA Scandal: Chip Smuggling and Leadership Crisis

**Podcast:** Better Offline
**Published:** 2026-11-13

## Transcript

This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative?
This is a constant worry.
And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user why.
I'm Walter Isaacson.
On my new podcast, The Builders, I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future.
Listen to The Builders starting October 13th on the iHeart Radio app.
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In October 2021, my brother David was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
A year later, he convinced me to make a podcast with him.
This podcast...
My biggest fear is that I am afraid of being forgotten.
My brother David is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life.
It's weird and messy and vulnerable, and I'm gonna share all of it with you.
Okay, so here we go.
Listen to My Brother David on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself.
Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts.
So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts.
If you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something something for a dastardly individual like you.
Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Dan Friesen, host of the Knowledge Fight Country podcast, where I take some of our media's most clipped talkers and put their words in context.
To help spread the news about the new show, I called up a couple of my old buddies.
Dan in Illinois are on the air.
This isn't your show, dude.
Dan is dumb.
No offense.
I'm not repping me.
Guys, I'm trying to do a promo for my new show here.
They only gave me 30 seconds.
You know, I call him Dan the ****.
Oh, Dan just hung up.
Okay.
Listen to Knowledge Fight Country on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue.
I'm your host, Ed Zitron.
I'm going to cut to the chase.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has resigned after it came out that he had three affairs.
One with the CEO of what appears to be a front for shipping GPUs to China, and two separate affairs with NVIDIA employees.
He's been succeeded by CFO Colette Kress.
Much of what I'm about to tell you was reported by the New York Times in October 2025, Bloomberg in December 2025, and Culper Research in May 2026.
I myself first covered Megaspeed in March 2026, and I'm positive that I've mentioned it somewhere on the show too.
I'll link to my newsletter in the show notes so you can follow along.
Most of this is in there.
Anyway, to get specific, the first affair was with a woman called Alice Huang, or Huang Lei, and I'll note that Huang is a common name and they have no relation to each other.
Back in March 2023, a mobile app developer called 7Road rebranded to Megaspeed, and shortly after that was acquired by Huang Lei Ltd., making Alice Wong the managing director, and shortly thereafter created a subsidiary called Speed Matrix that would, over the course of a few years, buy more than $4.8 billion worth of GPUs, or many magnitudes more than its actual revenue.
Back in December of last year, Bloomberg took a look at Megaspeed's website and WeChat profile and found an investor deck that showed data centers in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and an unnamed specific area computing cluster, and five unnamed computing clusters under construction.
Bloomberg also found a company called Shanghai Shuyao, one with an identical website, identical GPUs, and an identical investor deck, except that deck revealed data centers in Beijing, Wuhan, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, China.
Bloomberg reported that the company was also connected to a project called the Yangtze River Delta Project, a data center owned by a company called Shanghai Hexi, whose CEO appears to be Alice Huang.
Its tenant?
Tencent, one of the largest tech companies in China.
So how did Jensen meet Alice?
Well, it all starts with Speedmatrix, that subsidiary of Megaspeed, which sometime in 2024 pledged its entire business as collateral for a loan from Alibaba, China's largest tech company, and Megaspeed's largest customer.
And based on various reports, it appears that Alibaba was the one that introduced Alice and Jensen.
Strewn across the internet are countless videos and pictures of the two hanging out together.
And based on reporting from the information, it appears that Alice may have, through Megaspeed and other subsidiaries, helped as much as $7.5 billion of restricted GPUs make it to China.
The information also reports that companies connected to Alice Huang invested in famed Chinese AI lab DeepSeq, and per sources promised to supply a stream of Blackwell GPUs.
The information had previously reported that DeepSeq models should be trained on Blackwell.
I also want to say, looking at these pictures of Alison Jensen, there is this one where she's got this kind of like, I mentioned this on the podcast as well, this arm around his neck and the wrist is on the back of his neck and her hands drooping.
Ladies, you ever see that with your man?
They're fucking.
I'm sorry to say.
Anyway, back to the journalism.
According to reporting from the New York Times, NVIDIA General Counsel Tim Tita called Undersecretary Jeff Kessler, who oversaw US export curbs, to ask about its investigation into Megaspeed in the summer of 2025, which had been ongoing for years.
By the Times, Tita also asked about whether Kessler and his team were involved in the detention of Alice Wong by the Singaporean police, and to quote the Times, reached out directly to the agency's staff about the company.
Tito had also recently said, per the Financial Times, that word of Jensen's affair with Alice was laundering salacious gossip mere days before reporting revealed the affair.
I think the California State Bar should open an investigation into Tito's actions, and if you are working for the State Bar, please, please make that happen.
It's time.
Mr.
Tito has apparently, reportedly, intimidated government personnel and appears to have lied.
And I...
Was it the 2018 rule, the 4.1?
No, I'm not a lawyer, but you may be, so please do reference it if necessary.
Now, Bloomberg, quoting Axios, reports that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had delayed taking action after Donald Trump authorized a new crackdown on companies suspected of diverting advanced AI chips to China, and I quote Bloomberg there, and that the Commerce Department delayed efforts to blacklist Megaspeed, per the Financial Times.
The most remarkable part of this story, though, as mentioned at the jump, is that the vast majority of this scandal around chip smuggling has been known for anywhere between six months and a year.
But I'm not even done telling the story.
Back in March, the Department of Justice arrested several Supermicro employees, they make AI servers and other PC gear, for GPU smuggling, including co-founder Wally Lior, a member of the company's board that had been photographed in a group, including Jensen Huang at GTC 2026, what, a couple weeks before he was arrested?
I should also add that Wally was fired from Supermicro in 2018 around an accounting scandal, rehired as a consultant in 2021, and then added back to the board in 2023.
The operation, which included using a hairdryer to move serial numbers to dummy servers, per Culper Research and Bloomberg, was selling GPUs to China through a past-door entity called OBON Corporation, which Culper suspects is a subsidiary of, you guessed it, Megaspeed.
Additionally, Bloomberg reports that a few hundred Supermicro AI servers were used to train Chinese AI lab Moonshot's latest model.
I wonder how they got there.
I thought we arrested the people at Supermicro shipping those servers to China.
What's going on?
We said we arrested the right people, but it looks like these AI servers are still getting to China.
What if this happened to you?
What if this happened to your family?
It's almost as if Supermicro is still somehow involved in GPU smuggling.
Anyway, enough Tucker.
Culper Research, which again published its report in May 2026, also makes one much larger, much messier allegation.
That over 20% of NVIDIA's fiscal year 2026 revenue, or over $43 billion, came from sales to Chinese companies through various shell entities.
Based on everything I've dug through in the last few days, I have confidence that Culper is right and that Jensen Huang appears to have been directly building remarkable growth through illicit sales to China.
I should also add that back in November 2025, as reported by Kakashi at the time and ignored by most of the media, NVIDIA changed how it reported its revenues from reporting revenue by the location of the company to the location of the customer's headquarters, which mysteriously led to billions of dollars of sales to Singapore disappearing overnight.
How weird!
And the fact that this has all been out in the open for over a year and almost entirely ignored by the media...
is a fucking disgrace.
Right now, everybody on Twitter is freaking out, saying that this is the end of innovation at NVIDIA, as if Jensen Huang was the guy building the GPUs or who created CUDA.
What they're actually scared of is the end of Jensen Huang's mob-like circular financing operation, and the collapse of what appears to be one of the most aggressive attempts to circumvent US sanctions in history.
Jensen Huang's innovations at NVIDIA were mostly around financial engineering, pumping more than $100 billion into the AI ecosystem, including giving OpenAI $30 billion, backstopping OpenAI's Ohio Data Center, putting $10 billion into Anthropics' upcoming IPO, and becoming a customer of every imaginable AI NeoCloud as a means of helping them raise debt.
The information reports that CFO, and now CEO, Colette Kress, has historically pushed back.
on Jensen's attempts to become the central bank of AI, specifically on the Ohio Data Center reportedly, cutting an initial plan to backstop $250 billion worth of credit support down to $100 billion.
I expect she will either slow or entirely stop NVIDIA's sordid circular financing, and that $10 billion for Anthropics IPO, I don't know, maybe it goes through, maybe it doesn't.
It's definitely a question.
And it's really, really important that we see this situation for what it is.
Everyone will try and frame this as being about Jensen Huang's affairs, but that's largely a distraction from Jensen's obvious involvement with a massive AI chip smuggling ring, one partially run by Alice Wong, one of the women he had an affair with.
This is a massive smuggling ring, far beyond any affair, and it's clearly one that both Jensen Huang and General Counsel Tim Teeter knew about, and I'd be surprised if Colette Kress's hands were clean.
I know journalists listen to this podcast, so I'm going to speak directly to them.
Stop pretending this is about an affair.
Stop talking about Jensen being a great man or an innovator, and stop bringing up the morals of cheating, because that's not what this is about.
Cheating is awful, but Jensen Huang's ousting is not about where he chose to get his willy silly.
It's about the very obvious, extremely large illegal smuggling ring that has led to billions of dollars worth of chips getting to China.
Whether or not you have a problem with that is irrelevant to me.
The problem is it's illegal, and the problem is that Jensen Huang appears to have found a way to profit off of breaking the law.
This whole situation has been fascinating to watch, and this is one of the more difficult monologues I've ever had to write and read, so forgive me if I fumbled a word here and there, but this is a very important week.
I have like four or five interviews today, more tomorrow, on TV three times next week.
Life's so strange, but...
I have the best job in the world and the best listeners and readers in the world.
And I'll be back next week with a chat with Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus, but I should add that that was recorded before Jensen Huang was ousted.
So there'll be some outdated information in there.
But the thing I need you to think about is, do you think it's just China?
Because there are far, far more nations, like Russia, for example, that are also sanctioned with these GPUs.
More to come on that.
I'll speak to you later.
I love you all.
How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative?
This is a constant worry.
And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user why.
I'm Walter Isaacson.
On my new podcast, The Builders, I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future.
Listen to The Builders starting October 13th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In October 2021, my brother David was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
A year later, he convinced me to make a podcast with him.
This podcast.
My biggest fear is that I am afraid of being forgotten.
My brother David is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life.
It's weird and messy and vulnerable, and I'm gonna share all of it with you.
Okay, so here we go.
Listen to My Brother David on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself.
Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts.
So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts.
If you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself or getting revenge, then we've got a little something something for a dastardly individual like you.
Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Dan Friesen, host of the Knowledge Fight Country podcast, where I take some of our media's most clipped talkers and put their words in context.
To help spread the news about the new show, I called up a couple of my old buddies.
Dan in Illinois are on the air.
This isn't your show, dude.
Dan is dumb.
No offense.
I'm not repping me.
Guys, I'm trying to do a promo for my new show here.
They only gave me 30 seconds.
You know, I call him Dan the ****.
Oh, Dan just hung up.
Okay.
Listen to Knowledge Fight Country on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.