It only takes a prick to pop a bubble

Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, was in a relationship with a woman named Alice Wong — no relation — who was both a business partner of NVIDIA and, according to multiple reports, possibly a spy for the Chinese government. The story has been circulating for at least a month, with outlets like The New York Times and Wired reporting on it, but it exploded into public view when Huang acknowledged the affair and the business dealings. Now Marco Rubio is involved, the government appears to have known about this for some time, and the entire AI economy — which runs largely on NVIDIA's chips — is looking a lot less stable than it did a week ago.

Who is Alice Wong and what is Megaspeed?

Alice Wong was a former TV reporter who left journalism to become an executive at a company called Megaspeed. The Verge's Liz Lopatto describes Megaspeed as a "neo cloud" — similar to CoreWeave — that operates data centers across Southeast Asia filled with billions of dollars of NVIDIA chips, which it rents out to customers. The company's business model is essentially predicated on US export controls that restrict the sale of NVIDIA's best chips to China. Because Megaspeed's data centers are outside China, companies like Alibaba can rent chip access there as a way to circumvent the chip ban.