TechCrunch author analyzes five ways Jensen Huang's removal could harm the AI industry

Nvidia's board of directors removed CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday, after he admitted to an extramarital affair; one of his mistresses is suspected by the U.S. government of being a Chinese spy, and the Singapore neocloud company she is affiliated with is also suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips to China. The author believes his departure could weaken the industry's momentum in five ways: open-weight models lose their most active advocate, and Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for 12.9 billion USD (expected to close in the first half of next year, pending regulatory approval); the Open Agent Safety Platform industry self-regulation effort, joined by more than 100 companies, loses its leading spokesperson; his position that AI is a controllable engineering system rather than a living entity loses its loudest voice; the high-end AI PC launched during the holiday season and aimed at running agents locally loses its main promoter; and according to Bloomberg, as of July Nvidia had committed about 750 billion USD in circular deals (taking stakes in customers to help them buy chips) to support data center financing. A Republican committee chair has subpoenaed him to testify behind closed doors on the security implications.