Column says Nvidia board moved with incredible sloth
Aditya Chakrabortty, a Guardian columnist, argues that the Nvidia spying scandal shows how far the leaders of the largest technology companies stand outside the rules that govern everyone else. Nvidia’s chief executive, he writes, is boss of the most strategically important business in the fastest-growing, biggest-spending industry in the world’s No 1 capitalist economy, and is part of “a tiny coterie of people, who may well feel they sit above the norms and laws that govern the rest of us.” The characterisations and conclusions in the piece are Chakrabortty’s.
The column is built on this week’s events. The 63-year-old Huang and his affair with a much younger woman, who the US government strongly suspects is a Chinese spy — identified in the column’s caption as Alice Huang, head of Megaspeed — wiped more than $400bn off the value of his company in just two days, which the column calls the costliest fling in human history.
Chakrabortty opens on the theme of the tech billionaires’ self-professed intelligence, which he says they never stop telling the public about. When Elon Musk goes hiring, he wants “super-high-IQ small-government revolutionaries.” As a teenager, Huang wooed his future wife, Lori, with the promise: “If you do homework with me every Sunday, I promise you you’ll get straight As.” The column then asks why, if these executives are that clever, they act so dumb — and notes that at last week’s midterms it was Musk who backed Team Trump to the tune of $446m.
The column sets out why Nvidia matters. Huang runs Nvidia, which makes the chips powering AI, and no one is more central to the future of technology than Huang, the column says, telling readers to forget Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Previous generations of chips, it says, have been compared to kitchen knives that chop one vegetable at a time, while the graphics-processing units Nvidia builds are more like food blenders that can blitz an entire vegetable patch. That is what makes Nvidia the foundational infrastructure company of AI and one of the most valuable businesses in the world. The column adds that in some of the biggest funny-money deals over the past year in AI, Nvidia has been the money printer, and that it stumped up at least $20m for Donald Trump’s new ballroom.
On the national-security dimension, Chakrabortty writes that Trump was personally warned aboard Air Force One that Huang’s love interest is believed to be a spy for Beijing. China, the column notes, is an ever-greater threat to US AI dominance and has been banned by Washington from getting Nvidia’s top-of-the-range chips. And, the column writes, the US president takes no discernible action.
Not only is Huang one of Trump’s favourite businessmen, the column says, he is warmly welcomed by leaders around the world — including Andy Burnham, who last month in London sank a whisky with him. Even as Huang falls from grace, the column adds, his supporters have brought out the superlatives: “torchbearer,” “irreplaceable,” “incredible human.”
Chakrabortty also addresses the political reaction to the spy allegations, singling out the Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, who, after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, demanded that every Russian in Britain be rounded up and expelled. Washington, he argues, is not similarly agitated: it has been more than a year since Nvidia was revealed to be selling some of its best stuff to a “dilapidated storefront” outside Kuala Lumpur that sounded awfully like a pit stop on the way to China, and again, the column says, there has been no action. The message ordinary Americans can take from this, it says, is that a company so vital to America’s AI-military complex is too big to subject to ordinary laws.
In the everyday world, a chief executive caught in both a sex scandal and a national-security imbroglio would not stay chief executive for more than a minute, the column says. At Nvidia, the column says the board “has moved with incredible sloth”: it declared on Sunday that it “has no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised” — a statement the column notes came before any independent investigation — and it finally met on Wednesday evening after further revelations of a separate extramarital affair with an Nvidia executive. Huang’s fate now reportedly hangs in the balance.
The column points to the board’s composition. It includes several of Huang’s longstanding business associates, and several members of his family are serving in senior positions at Nvidia, Chakrabortty writes. Chakrabortty writes that one of the protections for Huang, like Musk, Zuckerberg and Altman, is that there appears to be no succession plan in place should any of those men fall under a self-driving automobile. A suggestion doing the rounds is that the father may now be replaced by one of his children; the Vatican, the column remarks, has a more codified succession process for the pope, even if it includes white smoke and Ralph Fiennes.
The column states explicitly that this scandal is different from the allegations over David Walliams or the convictions handed down against Russell Brand, while identifying one black thread that connects them: the grace afforded to each man by enablers and the powerful. Asked about the Huang affair, Trump described him as a “fine person.” Many of us will remember Trump defending the white nationalists who stormed Charlottesville in 2017, the column says; they were “some very fine people,” he said.
Chakrabortty places the episode in a wider political moment. The same sense of impunity, he writes, drove so many Americans out last week to protest against Trump, datacentres and AI. At the midterms, the column says, the Democrats rode a wave of populism — the many v the money. Nearly two decades after the banking crash, the public anger against an unaccountable, ruinous elite is finally finding a political vehicle, he writes, yet it still lacks the policies to match.
What do even the brightest minds in the Democratic party, or Labour for that matter, want to do about the tech billionaires? A moratorium on datacentres, certainly; a wealth tax, maybe — but given the largeness of the moment and the scale of popular anger, these are tiny measures, the column says. Chakrabortty instead poses breaking up private monopolies such as Nvidia and socialising AI, and asks how about combining that with a refoundation of welfare and other essentials of everyday life.
The tech bubble has not burst, the column concludes, but this week offered a small taste of how it might end. When America’s AI bets do collapse, Chakrabortty writes, that will be a financial failure, an economic failure and a political failure, and given the strategic importance of these companies and their technologies there will be demands for huge bailouts. The left, he writes, should start preparing its own response: through diffidence and a lack of preparation it squandered the crisis of 2008, and it mustn’t this time.