Who would have thought that Jensen Huang, the high priest of silicon, would be pushed out so indecorously? We watched him stride across the globe like a Colossus in his trademark black leather jacket, preaching the gospel of accelerated computing and generative AI, and naturally assumed there were no bugs in his operating system. Who knew that humanity's glorious march towards Artificial General Intelligence would be held hostage by one billionaire's inability to keep his unauthorised background applications off the main server?
Should he not, at the very least, have asked Claude, or ChatGPT, or Grok or Deepseek before his romantic escapades? Or was he under the impression that AI stood for Amorous Indiscretions? Whatever the reason, it took remarkably little time for High-priest Huang to turn into Hanky-panky Huang. No wonder, his lady love and alleged spy Alice Huang’s Singapore firm is called Megaspeed. My heart bleeds for the black leather jacket, that epitome of biker chic, which will now be branded forever as the official uniform of the mid-life honeytrap victim.
But watching the US media pivot from uncritical tech-bro worship to pearl-clutching moral outrage over an unproven espionage plot has been truly a sight to behold.
It’s not just the AI industry that is at stake. Howard Marks has pointed out that according to JPMorgan, 42 AI-related companies accounted for around two-thirds of the S&P 500's price gains since January 2024. Such concentration makes markets vulnerable to setbacks in AI, whether related to chip life, corporate strategy or demand for computing capacity. And, we would now add, vulnerable to a CEO’s shenanigans.
The serious point beneath the gags is that chips are now an instrument of statecraft. As Vivek Kelkar argues in his column on LNG Geopolitics, the battle is shifting from controlling resources to controlling access, and that is as true for AI chips as it is for gas. A world that worries about who has access to what is a world that spends a lot on defence. Which is why we wrote about Bharat Forge, Data Patterns and HAL this week and whether they should find a place in your portfolio.