Good morning. Tech stocks rallied yesterday as Nvidia lost about $230 billion in market value. The three major U.S. indexes were up more than 2%.
And Nvidia? Well, the Silicon Valley chipmaker launched a thousand AI-generated memes in the wake of CEO Jensen Huang’s admitted infidelity with a suspected Chinese spy. (Find my favorite below in “Parting Shot.”) The world is still unpacking it all, but rest assured, Congressional hearings are surely coming.
More tech news follows. Have a productive day. —Andrew Nusca
P.S. Will Jensen keep his job? Early signs point to…yes.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Hot tip? Drop me a line.
THE BIG STORY
Nvidia ‘could be of great service’ to China, CEO told Fortune last month
Jensen Huang’s dealings with China and views on U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips are under fresh scrutiny after the Nvidia CEO confessed to an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence agencies reportedly believe to be working as a spy for China.
The U.S. has spent years restricting the sale of advanced Nvidia chips to China on national security grounds.
In an interview Fortune conducted before the allegations surfaced, Huang said that he thought the chipmaker “could be of great service” to China. He also said that Nvidia had a “large and growing” opportunity in China.
Huang spoke to Fortune in mid-October, before the New York Times reported that U.S. officials had concluded the woman, Alice Huang—who has no relation to the Nvidia CEO—was a Chinese intelligence asset. It isn’t clear how long the relationship lasted, but photos shared online show the two together in Taipei as early as June 2024.
Asked in October whether he expected sales in China to pick up, Huang said there would be a “natural tension” between Washington and Beijing that “lasts a long time,” adding that Nvidia would continue to give shareholders no guidance on its China sales.
The company has left China out of its revenue forecasts since August 2025, citing regulatory uncertainty in both countries.
The U.S. has not allowed Nvidia to sell its most advanced AI chips to China, but has granted the company export licenses for older models of its GPUs, the specialized chips that run AI and computer graphics applications.
Beijing, for its part, has officially tried to bar the country’s major tech companies from buying Nvidia’s chips as part of an effort to spur demand for domestic alternatives.
Nonetheless, Huang told Fortune he saw promise in the Chinese market. “I think the opportunity in China is large and growing, just like the AI market across the world is large and growing,” Huang said. “We could be of great service to the local market. We can compete and win as much of the AI market as possible for the United States, while also providing compute resources, which is really important to their economy.”
China has been a long-running headache for Nvidia. Back in 2022, the Biden administration imposed export controls that barred Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI chips to China, aiming to slow Beijing’s progress in AI and its potential military applications.
Nvidia designed scaled-down chips for the Chinese market, but successive rule changes cut many of those off too.
Since then, Huang has continually pushed for more access to the Chinese market. In October 2025, after export controls and Beijing’s pushback had shut Nvidia out of the market, he complained that the company had gone from 95% market share in China to 0%.
In December 2025, President Trump reversed course on some of the Biden-era restrictions, allowing Nvidia to ship its H200 chips—which are designed to comply with U.S. export controls—to approved Chinese customers, with the U.S. government taking a 25% cut. The decision came after months of lobbying by Huang, who met with Trump to discuss export controls days before the announcement.
In the wake of Huang’s latest disclosure, the Republican chairs of three House committees have asked Huang to attend a private briefing the day after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings next week. Lawmakers are likely to press Huang on whether his push into China has put U.S. interests at risk.
In October, he told Fortune that Nvidia could put American customers first and still compete abroad.
“The United States recognizes that because the technology is invented in the United States, and we’re an American company, we should provide, and we do provide, the best, the soonest and the most to American companies. However, we should compete,” Huang told Fortune during the interview. “AI is a five-layer cake, and America should go compete at every single layer, not just the model layer.” —Beatrice Nolan
THE BLIND BOX
“They find themselves at the day of reckoning, and it’s a sudden and perhaps forced one.”
THE RUNDOWN
—Jensen Huang’s son-in-law could play a big role in the company’s succession plan.
—Anthropic’s new Claude Fable, Mythos models cost 20% less than OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra.
—Fireworks AI discloses that hackers accessed some customer data over the past month.
—Tesla CEO Elon Musk: “The opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production.”
—Google rolls out two new TPUs for 2027 launch: the 8tx for confidential inference and 8i Max for “massive context windows.”
—France blames Iran for the October cyberattacks that affected commercial refrigerators and freezers.
—Uber launches an in-app parking reservation tool in 15 U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
—Spines raises $64 million to automate book publishing with AI agents.
—Adobe and Disney agree to build proprietary, “artist-led” generative AI models.
THE PARTING SHOT
With apologies to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, and Moz.