{"text":[[{"start":5.94,"text":"Since co-founding the chipmaker Nvidia in 1993, Jensen Huang slowly emerged as the world’s most influential businessman at the core of its most critical industry. His spectacular fall, due to his affairs with a suspected Chinese spy and a fellow Nvidia employee, leaves a chasm at the giant company he created, the industry he boosted and the geopolitical world he helped shape. There’s a lot of Jensen jeopardy in almost every corner of the AI industry."}],[{"start":35.6,"text":"In recent years, Nvidia’s graphics processing units have become the indispensable magic sauce of the generative AI revolution, propelling the company to a record stock market valuation of $5.8tn in October and turning the leather-jacketed, 63-year-old tech executive into a business rock star."}],[{"start":54.84,"text":"Nvidia has also become one of the most active equity investors in the AI boom, committing $124bn in equity investments by the end of July. These investments have included other listed companies, such as Intel and SpaceX, and scores of private start-ups, including OpenAI, Anthropic and CoreWeave. That’s one way to buy the loyalty of your customers even if it creates an ugly web of financial interdependencies."}],[{"start":81.36,"text":"The omnipresent Huang emerged as one of Donald Trump’s most influential advisers on AI policy. He repeatedly urged the US president not to regulate the AI industry and play nice with China."}],[{"start":93.32,"text":"But Huang’s position was deeply compromised by the revelations about his personal relationships. Even before his departure, it was clear that the scandal had obliterated his influence as the most powerful American advocate of closer ties between the US and China tech sectors. The fallout from his resignation will now be global."}],[{"start":111.56,"text":"Most obviously, it means that Nvidia’s continuing chip sales to China will come under extreme scrutiny. Huang had previously persuaded Trump to soften some of Washington’s export restrictions to Beijing, giving the government a cut of revenues from chip sales in China. Although Nvidia has lost significant market share in the country, China, including Hong Kong, still accounted for about 8 per cent of its total revenues, according to its latest quarterly filing."}],[{"start":136.8,"text":"China has been sprinting to boost its own leading-edge chip capabilities but will struggle to replace Nvidia’s technology. Industry experts say that even Huawei’s latest semiconductors are not good enough to replace Nvidia’s older chips, which China uses to train its AI models. Beijing has warned that the US should stop “fabricating so-called espionage narratives” to impose a “technological blockade” on China."}],[{"start":163.48,"text":"Nevertheless, Washington’s national security hawks will surely feel emboldened to tighten restrictions on China. They may well find allies among the incoming Democrat majorities in Congress. Last year, Senate Democrats demanded an investigation into national security decisions made “at the behest of a well-connected CEO” who stands to make money “from the lifting of critical export controls”."}],[{"start":187.64,"text":"Although it lags behind the US in developing proprietary frontier AI models, China excels in developing open-weight models that can be downloaded and customised by users themselves. In the US, Huang was among the most influential supporters of these open-weight models, which have won over many users in corporate America."}],[{"start":206.6,"text":"However, some of the biggest US AI companies, most notably Anthropic, have been warning of the dangers of US exposure to these Chinese models. Their voice will only grow louder amid talk of minimising US reliance on foreign technology."}],[{"start":221.32,"text":"Finally, Huang’s closeness to Trump made him one of the most powerful forces in persuading the president to resist any federal AI regulation. The midterm elections confirm how far the public debate has swung against the AI industry. During those elections, voters backed 40 of the 41 ballots restricting new data centre projects. That political groundswell may yet slow the US AI industry’s expansion, perhaps buying China some time to catch up."}],[{"start":249.44,"text":"The widening divide between the US and China will leave the rest of the world in an uncomfortable straddle. Stiffer US export restrictions to China are bound to intensify the pressure on critical foreign industry players, such as the Dutch chip equipment manufacturer ASML and Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, to curtail sales. But it still seems likely that Chinese open-weight AI models will dominate outside the US and Europe."}],[{"start":274.76,"text":"Increasingly, the rest of the world will have to choose between the red China tech team and the blue US team. Huang will no longer be there to help bridge the divide."}],[{"start":284.3,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1794566295_6661.mp3"}