Here's why I don't quite buy the Jensen Huang scandal .And no, I don't exonerate him from anything 👇🏻
1. The now viral clip online happened in a popular restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan where Madison Huang, Jensen's daughter, Lori Huang, wife and Spencer Huang, son, were all present. Madison took that picture. So imagine if you're cheating on your wife, would you really put your mistress, you kids, your wife, your vendors , your customers, along with the Taiwanese media all together in the lobby of a restaurant?
Also check out Madison Huang 's gesture. She shows absolutely no discomfort or whatsoever around Alice Huang. She snaps a picture of Alice and her dad with enthusiasm as if she wants to make sure she has the receipt of them two being together. Does that sound normal? Does that sit right with you? It certainly sounds strange to me. 🤷🏻
2. Alice Huang is not some 25 year old hot Ukrainian model. She's 48, 49, married . She posted pictures of herself and Jensen Huang all over her WeChat moment. Why would you be flaunting your connection is Jesen Huang if you're spying for the Chinese State Security apparatus. Shouldn't you be as clandestine as possible? Now, I do not deny that she Could be a Chinese intelligence asset. But we need to trace the money. Who placed those $4.8 billion chip orders? It's not her. It's Alibaba. The Chinese State owned entities have a minority stake in Alibaba. So really, the H200s and Blackwells are going straight into Alibaba's data centers.
3. What does this all mean? It could mean that Huang and his entire family knew about the deal with Mega Speed and Alice Huang. It could mean that Jensen Huang knowingly evaded sanctions, which is an indictable offense, like Meng Wanzhou of Huawei. When pressed by evidence of shell companies and order destination, he had no choice to admit his possibly non existent extramarital affair, just to doge a legal bullet. Don't forget. Canada held Meng Wanzhou for 3 long years under house arrest. 🧐
4. Remember the Chinese election interference in Canada? Turns out it was a few dudes in CSIS getting super pissed off at Trudeau, and then leaked some stuff to the media. Most haven't been proven in court. Two Chinese Canadian politicians resigned. They sued @globalnews, @globeandmail in court and settled with one of the reporters. This to me , by all accounts, publicly available, sounds like a US intelligence hit job on Trump, perhaps rightly so. Trump didn't take swift actions and reign in those chip exports.
4. Lastly, Jensen Huang has always been a big proponent of Open Source AI. Some tech bro billionaires in the valley want him gone, badly.
#Nvidia #nvidiaceo
On a June night in 2024, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang held court with several of his company’s major Asian customers at a bar in Taipei. Next to him was Huang Xiaole (黄小乐) aka Alice Huang, an executive of Megaspeed, a shady Singapore-based data center company.
Nvidia’s compliance team has looked into Megaspeed and determined it’s “wholly owned and operated by a company based and headquartered outside China, with no China shareholder.”
Megaspeed was created in 2023 when 🇨🇳 7Road, a gaming company with ties to 🇨🇳 state-backed investors, split off its overseas operation in Singapore and renamed it Megaspeed, which in early 2024 set up Speedmatrix, a subsidiary in Malaysia that quickly snapped up ~$2B worth of Nvidia’s most advanced chips. Most of those chips came from Aivres, the US subsidiary of 🇨🇳 Inspur, a major tech company added to the 🇺🇸 Entity List in 2023 for supporting 🇨🇳 military 👉🏻 Nvidia is barred from selling its technology to Inspur without a special license. But since Aivres is based in California and records sales as a US company, it can buy Nvidia chips freely.
Megaspeed has funneled those chips to data centers in Malaysia and Indonesia that appear to remotely serve customers in China. That is not necessarily illegal, but it can be found unlawful if it is done on behalf of a 🇨🇳 company. US officials have also been scrutinizing whether Megaspeed diverted some of those chips on to China, in violation of US law.
Megaspeed is also facing scrutiny from Singaporean police.
Megaspeed listed Alice Huang as its managing director for its first 8 months, and its current director James Tan is from Singapore but is based in Shanghai.
It’s not clear when Jensen Huang and Alice Huang, who are not related, first met. She was mingling with a crowd of tech executives just after midnight at the Taipei bar in early June 2024 when she offered to ask Jensen Huang to join them.
“I bet you guys I can get Jensen here,” she said, and shortly afterwards Jensen Huang arrived in his trademark black leather jacket and drank a whiskey shot with the group.
Jensen Huang and Alice Huang were photographed together again in May, exiting a restaurant in Taipei with an Nvidia aide after a business dinner with other AI suppliers.
Alice Huang spent much of her career in China, including working as a TV reporter for 🇨🇳 state media and as a private banker. Huang left Megaspeed in recent months. It’s unclear when and why she left and what she’s doing now.
Both she and 🇨🇳 7Road, the Chinese company that Megaspeed split off from, have close ties to a web of wealthy investors and tech companies with data center projects in China.
The owners of 7Road include 🇨🇳 central government and several local governments. Before joining Megaspeed, Ms. Huang was executive director for a Shanghai-based fund that had invested in 7Road and had ties to state-backed firms.
Reporters looking into Megaspeed’s opaque operation have tracked business listings that led to a Malaysian data center and shopping mall, a near-empty office in Singapore and a dilapidated storefront outside Kuala Lumpur.
It’s not clear where Megaspeed’s billions of dollars came from. But a few weeks after the gathering in Taipei last year, Megaspeed began receiving a steady supply of multimillion dollar shipments of some of Nvidia’s most advanced chips.
Over the next 3 months, Megaspeed bought a billion $ of Nvidia technology. Within the next 9 months, it secured roughly a billion $ more. The bulk of those advanced Nvidia chips were purchased from 🇨🇳 Inspur’s US subsidiary Aivres. The shipments went to Megaspeed’s Malaysian subsidiary Speedmatrix.
The registered address for Speedmatrix on the shipping records led to a dilapidated storefront outside Kuala Lumpur, where the sign out front advertised a construction company. No one was inside when a reporter visited the address in late Sep. Employees at the law firm next door said they rarely saw people in the office.
1/2
https://t.co/L7atmyy6xs
It think it's stupid that "AI Bubble" gets used over and over. In infra names you have:
- 1-3x fwd P/E memory companies from Samsung to $ESMT. With HBM players now having hyperscaler multi-year price floor LTAs.
- Optical companies like $POET traded -$97M under net cash. Valuing the operating business very negatively, not even at $0.
- While AI companies with larger premiums continue to record demand over the next 3-5 years. Such as the new $20B LTAs signed w/ $COHR to $5B LTAs signed w/ $LITE.
Can someone in the media honestly see negative EV high-beta optical companies, where 2 years of burnrate would still value the company below $0.
or single digit memory companies with contracted demand + price floors years out and say that's a bubble?
Many of these names are extremely profitable today...
But obviously there's other elements inside the theme, such as:
- Certain startups like Instinct that look like a private valuation bubble.
- Leveraged Neoclouds that didn't finance properly
- and AI lab valuations and commitments, which should be viewed cautiously.
But everything gets grouped into one with the boogyman of "leverage" or "debt".
Yes, valuations can compress or correct from macro, potential regulatory uncertainty, or potential capex reductions.
But for the companies physically powering the AI buildout, it looks more like the Great AI Deleveraging of 2026...
Than anything like fundamental demand destruction.
As more earnings come out and free cash flow accumulates over time.
I'm confident in a recovery, especially in bottlenecks, and for markets to eventually discern durability + growth over frothy valuations tied to AI.