Nvidia's Board Weighs Ousting Jensen Huang Amid Spy Probe and Governance Crisis

Welcome to Super Intelligence News and Report. Today is Thursday, November 12th, here are the headlines.

Maya Today's thread is the AI trade getting tested on concentration and governance, with Nvidia's board weighing its own founder, so let's run the rest of the board first. Anthropic's IPO is reportedly oversubscribed. That's reported, not confirmed. Bloomberg says orders are several times the shares on offer, driven by very large anchor-size orders from big investors.

Theo Several times over. And they only filed the range on Tuesday.

Maya Right, seventy to seventy-eight dollars a share. The Financial Times, cited by Bloomberg, says bankers expect to price above that. Add a supplier private placement and total proceeds could reach about ninety billion dollars. Pricing is expected November 18th, with trading on Nasdaq as ANT the next day. It was also one of the biggest stories on X. If demand holds up right after the chip rout, investors still want exposure to the frontier labs.

Theo Mine's a long way from IPOs. Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome 2 on Tuesday. You give it a stretch of DNA and one tissue, cell type or state, and it predicts what a genetic variant does in that specific context. It was trained on more than a hundred million single-cell profiles from human and mouse samples.

Maya Does it actually beat the first version, or is it just more granular?

Theo Both. On an immune-cell dataset it found thirty percent of causal variants. The original, fine-tuned on single-cell data, found sixteen. That points toward where in the body a disease mutation acts, which version one couldn't do. It's research-only and not validated for clinical use. The API is open for non-commercial work, and commercial access is in private preview.

Maya Back to Anthropic for a second, because a central banker is uneasy. In a speech on Monday, Fed Governor Michelle Bowman listed a large AI-driven stock correction as one of the top risks if AI returns disappoint. She said a shock like that would probably slow the build-out and soften the economy.

Theo And people are tying that to the listing.

Maya Semafor did. To be fair, one analysis notes the speech never mentions Anthropic. Her backdrop is AI-related debt on track to pass eight hundred billion dollars this year, and that's before counting off-balance-sheet obligations and circular financing. The warning matters because it's coming from the Fed, not from a market commentator, in the same week as the year's biggest AI listing.

Theo Over to ByteDance, and this one is reported, not confirmed. Bloomberg says co-founder Zhang Yiming told the AI team at an all-hands that a personal agent like Meta's Muse launches in the coming weeks. He also reportedly said matching OpenAI and Anthropic will take until at least 2029 or 2030.

Maya That's an unusually candid thing to say out loud.

Theo Very. He reportedly argued against distillation and admitted the training data for the Seed models is far smaller than rivals'. Where they lead is video. So China's biggest consumer AI company is going after agents while openly saying it trails at the frontier. Staying with agents, Databricks turned Genie into an always-on one on Tuesday. It runs in the background on long multistep jobs, and a new feature called Ontology maps a company's business concepts onto its data.

Maya TechCrunch's headline says it tells Ali Ghodsi the unvarnished truth.

Theo Bold thing to put in a demo. The existing Genie features are generally available, and the always-on version is going to preview and beta. Data platforms are moving from chatting with your data to persistent agents, and that puts Genie up against Anthropic's Claude Data and Microsoft's Copilot. Next, a deadline. OpenAI's release notes confirm ChatGPT's older Advanced and Standard Voice modes retire on December 11th. Users move to Live Voice, which runs on GPT-Live. Live video and screen sharing stay on Advanced Voice until GPT-Live supports them.

Maya So about a month's notice.

Theo One month. Anyone with workflows built on the old modes has to move, and OpenAI is clearly consolidating around one voice model. My hidden gem today is from MiniMax in China. On Monday it put H3-Image on Hugging Face. It's a thirty-three-billion-parameter model for image generation and editing that claims 4K output in under ten seconds and takes up to sixteen reference images. The catch is the license, which excludes the US, the EU and the UK.

Maya Open weights, just not for the three markets with the most lawyers.

Theo Pretty much. Chinese labs keep releasing open weights while fencing off Western jurisdictions, probably to limit legal exposure, and most coverage isn't tracking that.

Maya Money again. Mercor, which supplies expert contractors to train and test models and agents, reportedly closed a seven-hundred-fifty-million-dollar Series D. That's reported, not confirmed. There's no company announcement, and earlier reports put the round closer to five hundred million. The valuation is twenty billion dollars, double where it stood in October 2025, with backers including Nvidia and Salesforce.

Theo Even after the breach and losing Meta as a customer.

Maya Even after that. Human data for training and evaluating agents is still one of the most valuable layers in the stack. And on the other side of the agent boom, United reportedly won't let unauthorized AI agents book flights. That's reported, not confirmed, via The Neuron's summary of The Verge. Assistants can show you flight options, but you have to complete the purchase yourself.

Theo What's their reasoning?

Maya Officially, personal data, accidental bookings and aviation rules. CEO Scott Kirby also reportedly doesn't want another middleman between the airline and its customers. That puts another big merchant in the fight against shopping agents like Muse, alongside Amazon and Delta.

Theo Last one, and it's another hidden gem. Also reported, not confirmed, via The Neuron citing GeekWire. Amazon released a free local emulator that simulates more than two hundred AWS services. The community emulators that appeared after LocalStack restricted its free tier in March cover somewhere between about forty and a hundred. Amazon says AI agents wrote the code and maintain it without engineers reviewing it by hand.

Maya That's quite a thing to admit about a product you ship.

Theo It is, and there are known gaps, like incomplete outage simulation. Still, it's a hyperscaler shipping a public developer tool it says agents built and maintain without manual code review.

Maya Next, we go deep on Nvidia's board and whether it will actually remove Jensen Huang.

Now for the Main Episode

Maya Here's the question. Can a board actually remove the man who has run Nvidia since he co-founded it in 1993, or at least seriously rein him in? And if it does, what is it really about: his personal conduct, what he told his own directors and when, or a China security risk?

Theo Those are three very different problems. Start at the beginning.

Maya Jensen Huang is sixty-three. He built Nvidia into a company worth roughly four trillion dollars, and nobody else has ever run it. The trouble starts in late October. The New York Times reports that US intelligence agencies believe a woman named Alice Huang, no relation, is a Chinese spy. She's an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based Nvidia customer.

Theo How big a customer?

Maya Big. CBS News says Megaspeed bought nearly five billion dollars in AI chips and other advanced hardware. Jensen Huang had a relationship with her. The reports say US intelligence believes she worked for China's Ministry of State Security and helped arrange Nvidia chip shipments to Chinese companies.

Theo And that intelligence comes from where?

Maya That's the first caveat. The findings are anonymously sourced and haven't been made public. So the most serious allegation in this story is the one we can see least.

Theo Okay. Then it moves fast.

Maya On Sunday, November 8th, Huang sends employees a memo admitting he was unfaithful to his wife. He says he takes full responsibility, no excuses, and he's deeply sorry. The board opens an investigation led by its independent directors, and from Sunday through Wednesday it says publicly that it has confidence in him.

Theo Did the market buy it?

Maya Not on Monday. The stock fell almost nine percent during the day and closed down a bit over four. Fortune put the hit at about a hundred and ninety billion dollars in market value, which is more than most companies are worth. Also on Monday, by President Trump's account, Huang told him he hadn't known the woman was allegedly a spy.

Theo That's an odd channel for a defense. Through the president.

Maya It is, and TNW is relaying his version, so treat it as his version. Then on Tuesday the independent directors hire Wachtell, Lipton. The probe is led by Joon Kim, a former acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York. The question is whether Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence effort. And the board says it has no reason to believe national security or Nvidia's secrets were compromised.

Theo So as of Tuesday the line is: bad personal judgment, we're checking the security angle, he stays.

Maya And on Wednesday, during regular trading, that line almost looks like it's holding. Nvidia goes up almost three percent, to about a hundred and seventy-four dollars, as chip stocks rally on CoreWeave's results. Baird downgrades it to neutral the same day, but the day's trading was about demand, not governance.

Theo And then the evening.

Maya Then two reports, one after the other. First the Times again, citing five current or former employees: Huang also had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's VP of healthcare, who reported directly to him. The Times says the two were filmed being affectionate at a San Jose hotel in March.

Theo A direct report. That changes the category.

Maya It does, and I'll come back to why. Neither Powell nor Nvidia responded. When the Times reached Huang himself, he said he didn't think they should be talking to him directly, and hung up.

Theo Not the reply you would script.

Maya No. Right behind that, The Wall Street Journal reports the board is preparing to force him out. The stock drops more than eight percent after hours, to around a hundred and sixty dollars. CoreWeave falls six percent and SK Hynix slides with it. That night Reuters and CNBC confirm the board met late to decide his future. CBS says the Trump administration knew about the plans, and Bloomberg reports the board is working with an outside firm to find possible replacements.

Theo And a decision?

Maya None announced as of early Thursday, European time. Premarket, Nvidia was down roughly seven to eight percent, and Bloomberg says a global stock rally stalled while investors weighed it.

Theo There's a big number going around, something like six hundred billion lost. How real is that?

Maya That's TNW's figure. It's the value lost since the investigation began if Wednesday's after-hours drop holds, about fifteen percent of the company. Two caveats. After-hours prices are thin and don't always hold. And the stock had already fallen six straight weeks before any of this, after the midterms raised doubts about data-center building. So not all of that weakness is about Jensen.

Theo Fair. Here's what I keep coming back to. Founder-CEOs at this scale usually have the votes locked up. Does he?

Maya No, and that's what makes this live. Nvidia has eleven directors. Under its bylaws, a simple majority can dismiss the CEO with or without cause. Every director except Huang is classed as independent, and there's no board chair. The lead independent director, Stephen Neal, can convene the independents without him.

Theo So mechanically, six people in a room can do it.

Maya Mechanically, yes. And his stake doesn't stop them. TNW puts his ownership at about three and a half percent. That's real influence, mostly through trusts he co-owns with his wife, Lori. But it's not a controlling vote.

Theo But independent on paper and independent in practice aren't the same thing.

Maya Right. Three directors, Huang included, have been there since the 1993 founding, and another joined in 1997. That's the argument Jo-Ellen Pozner, a management professor at Santa Clara, makes to Fortune. She calls the board captive. In most major scandals, she says, the CEO is replaced or put on leave while the investigation runs. She also blames Huang's flat structure for keeping successors from emerging, and she suggests some long-serving directors step down.

Theo I actually agree with her on the flat structure. He has dozens of direct reports and has never laid out a succession plan. On the build side, that's what lets Nvidia move fast. One person sees across chips, systems and software and makes the call. But it also means nobody else has been trained to make that call.

Maya Which is exactly what the keep-him side turns against her.

Theo Right. Dan Ives at Yorkville Ives told CBS no CEO or interim team can replace him. Michael Monaghan, a partner at Founder ETFs, told Fortune his firm would sell its Nvidia stake if Huang left, and said real succession doesn't exist at founder-led companies.

Maya I'd push on Monaghan. His fund is built on founder-led companies. Of course he sells if the founder leaves. That's the mandate, not an analysis.

Theo Fair hit. But it still tells you who's holding the stock. Some shareholders own Nvidia because it's Jensen's company.

Maya And others are already acting as if it isn't. Armina Rosenberg at Minotaur Capital, a shareholder, told TNW the market is already pricing an Nvidia without its founder.

Theo What about Polymarket? I saw the odds swing wildly.

Maya Fortune had the market on Huang resigning or being removed by year-end at sixteen percent on Wednesday morning. By late Wednesday it was eighty-eight.

Theo That's a betting market reacting to the Journal story, not to a board decision.

Maya Exactly. The reports about the board's plans rest on anonymous sources, and no vote has been confirmed. So eighty-eight percent tells you how the Journal story landed, not what eleven people decided.

Theo Then what actually forces a board's hand? You said Powell changes the category.

Maya This is where Jason Schloetzer, a governance professor at Georgetown, is the most useful voice. He points out that boards usually remove CEOs over candor. The key question is what Huang told directors, and when.

Theo So the affair alone probably isn't enough. Sunday's memo was an apology.

Maya Right. But look at the sequence. Sunday he admits infidelity. The board spends three days saying it has confidence in him. Then on Wednesday night there's a second relationship, with someone in his own reporting line. If the board didn't know about Powell while it was publicly vouching for him...

Theo Then those confidence statements were made on bad information.

Maya That's the candor problem. To be clear, we don't know that. Nvidia hasn't confirmed the Powell relationship, and we don't know whether it involved a reporting-line or disclosure violation. But that's usually what makes boards act.

Theo I'd argue the security thread is the bigger one, though. Not for the board's legal exposure, for the business.

Maya Go on.

Theo Because the China leak isn't hypothetical. Reuters reported Wednesday that Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an bought two Nvidia H200s in October, through a reseller, for about a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars.

Maya Two chips sounds trivial.

Theo In volume it is. What matters is who bought them. That university is on the US Entity List, one of China's so-called Seven Sons of National Defense schools. This year it also signed contracts to rent servers with eight H200s each. So controlled chips are still reaching restricted buyers. Nvidia and Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security didn't comment.

Maya And there's a Commerce angle on top. TNW, citing Axios, says Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick delayed a planned crackdown on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia chips to China. That's reported, not confirmed.

Theo Put it together. A customer that bought nearly five billion in hardware, an executive there that US intelligence reportedly thinks is a spy, the CEO in a relationship with her, and evidence that diversion is still happening. Even without proof that anything was compromised, Washington isn't going to drop that.

Maya And it isn't dropping it. Lawmakers are threatening to subpoena Huang if he won't do a closed-door briefing. We reported on November 7th that House chairs had requested it for November 18th.

Theo The day after earnings.

Maya Earnings are on November 17th. So whoever is CEO next week faces analysts one day and possibly Congress the next.

Theo I'd still be careful here. The intelligence isn't public, and the board says it has no reason to believe secrets were compromised. If it fires him over a security risk it can't back up, that's a problem of its own.

Maya Agreed. That's why I think if they move, the stated reason will be governance, not espionage. The board can document candor and the reporting line. Whether a Ministry of State Security operation touched Nvidia is something it may never get to see.

Theo So the security story creates the pressure, and the governance story supplies the justification.

Maya That's how I'd read it.

Theo Then the obvious question. Who runs it?

Maya Nobody knows. There's no publicly developed successor. Some analysts name the CFO, Colette Kress, as a possible interim CEO, and there's the outside search firm Bloomberg reported. That's it.

Theo For anyone building on Nvidia, that's what matters. The roadmap, the product cadence, the big platform bets have run through one person for over thirty years. An interim CFO can keep the business running. I'm not sure who makes the next big architecture call.

Maya Which is why Schloetzer's stay-with-less scenario gets attention: a named second-in-command, more openness about succession, changes to who sits on the board.

Theo Honestly, that's where I land. Keep the product leadership and fix the structure around it.

Maya I'm less sure. Stay-with-less was the right answer on Tuesday. After Wednesday night, it depends on whether he was straight with the board about Powell. If he wasn't, I don't see how directors who publicly vouched for him justify keeping him, especially with a proposed shareholder class action already alleging he and the company misled investors about his ties to Alice Huang.

Theo That's fair. If it turns out to be a candor failure, my view doesn't survive it. I just don't think we know that yet.

Maya We don't. One more thing in the market reaction shows how investors are hedging. On Wednesday, CoreWeave's results lifted AMD about seven percent and Broadcom about four, and Goldman called chip stocks oversold, with Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD as top buys. Then in Nvidia's after-hours drop, AMD and Broadcom rose again as possible winners.

Theo So investors are separating AI demand from Nvidia's governance. A little ironic, since Nvidia's pitch has always been that the demand is Nvidia's.

Maya And this week the market found it can buy the AI build-out without buying Jensen, at least partly. That's the risk that outlasts this week. Once big holders get used to hedging through rivals, some of that money may not come back.

Theo Even if he stays.

Maya Even if he stays.

Theo So where do you come out on the opening question?

Maya Can they? Plainly, yes. A simple majority, with or without cause, and he doesn't control the vote. The real question is whether this board, with founding-era directors on it, is willing. And I think that turns on candor. Did he tell them about Powell before they went out and said they had confidence in him?

Theo My view is that the China thread sets the stakes even if it never becomes the stated reason. Two H200s at a blacklisted military university is a tiny number, but it means this doesn't go away when the personal story fades. Congress will keep it alive.

Maya And the calendar turns this into a pressure test. A board announcement could come any hour. Then on November 17th, whether Huang is on the earnings call, and the next day, whether he shows up for that briefing or gets a subpoena.

Theo Whether he's on that call will tell you more than any statement.

Maya Agreed. And the last point is the uncomfortable one. Even the best outcome, with him staying alongside a deputy and a refreshed board, admits something Nvidia never had to admit: the company has to be able to work without him. Pozner and Schloetzer disagree on how far to go, but they both end up there.

Theo So whether or not he's out this week, the board has started planning for an Nvidia without Jensen Huang. After more than thirty years, that's new.

Thanks for listening to Super Intelligence News and Report. Please subscribe and share it with your friends.