“For him to just call this idea far-fetched, I've never been able to let that word go, because there had been so much public evidence to the contrary. There had been smuggling, there had been prosecutions in the United States and elsewhere. It just flies in the face of everything that was publicly known at the time in a way that is really not believable.”
The AI Policy Podcast · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026
Context
Gorin had just read out Nvidia's response to reporters about a chip-smuggling story, which called the idea "far-fetched". He ties that to Jensen Huang's years of public denials about chip diversion, now that Huang has admitted an affair with an alleged Chinese spy tied to Megaspeed.
Transcript
…covering this story. It says, we haven't seen any substantiation or received tips of, quote, phantom data centers constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners, then deconstructed, smuggled, and reconstructed somewhere else. While such smuggling seems far-fetched, we pursue any tip we receive.
…about this happening in the US too, where sort of like because of, say, shady transportation companies, people will hand off quite valuable loads of Nvidia's Crisis and a delivery company will sort of like drive off with them and disappear. And then those chips are. Are lost in the ether, right?
Right. And so for him to just call this idea far-fetched, you know, like I've never been able to kind of let this word go because there had been so much public evidence to the contrary that there had been smuggling, there had been prosecutions in the United States and elsewhere about smuggling. And then to turn around and just say that they're far-fetched, it just flies in the face of everything that was publicly known at the time in a way that is really not believable, right? And at the time, I always kind of felt like that this was a way of signaling to his customers in Southeast Asia and perhaps eventually to China itself, you know, whatever problems you're going to run into with export controls and buying these chips, you're not going to get any trouble from NVIDIA. That had always been my sense before. But now that we know that there was also this additional layer where, you know, his, I don't know what to call her, girlfriend might end up in prison over this. It sort of gives a different valence to how much he would defend this idea and just say things that just were totally not credible. You know, in personal life, we would call…
And you've kind of previewed my next question a little bit. You've covered the mega speed angle and how that plays into this. But what about the Chinese spy or alleged Chinese spy element? How does that kind of affect the story?
Well, there's a few different ways. We should, you know, obviously having a Chinese spy in a relationship with America's, you know, the CEO of America's biggest company, the biggest company in the world, and who also makes possibly the most important technology in the world, you know, for U.S.…
Well, why don't I think there's still a lot of unknowns, right? Including exactly the extent to which intelligence was shared between NVIDIA and MegaSpeed or between Jensen and Alice Wong. Do you want to talk a little bit about what's likely to happen next or what we know is going to happen next?
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