Trump Survived His Scandals. So Who Wanted Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Gone?
Nvidia's Jensen Huang fell over an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Trump and Clinton survived worse. Hollywood will film it, and Huang has already picked his star: Jackie Chan.
Every Hollywood thriller needs a king who flies too close to the sun, and this week Silicon Valley supplied one. On Thursday Jensen Huang, the leather-jacketed founder of Nvidia, whose chips power the artificial intelligence boom, resigned as chief executive. Four days earlier he had confessed to his staff: “I was unfaithful to my wife. There is no excuse for what I did.” The woman at the centre of the storm, Alice Huang (no relation), is a former executive of a Singapore data-centre firm whom US officials believe works for China’s Ministry of State Security, the New York Times reported. Nvidia’s board says it has “no reason to believe” that national security or company secrets were compromised.
Hollywood is already circling. The Hollywood Reporter predicts a Jensen Huang movie, and a trailer made with AI for a film that does not exist, Honeypot, is doing the rounds online. Huang settled the casting three years ago. Asked who should play him in a biopic, he replied: “Jackie Chan. He looks just like me.”
Act One: The Chip Whisperer
Picture the opening scene. A Taiwanese immigrant who once washed dishes at Denny’s founds a company in a booth of the same diner chain and becomes the king of Silicon Valley. His chips render the dinosaurs, spaceships and digital armies of modern cinema: every film nominated for the visual effects Oscar for more than a decade was made with Nvidia technology. Then AI turns him into the most courted man on earth.
Cut to the Oval Office. Huang has one wish: let him sell his chips to China. Washington’s China hawks want those chips kept far from Beijing’s generals. Huang keeps talking, Donald Trump keeps listening, and in December 2025 the president allows Nvidia to sell its powerful H200 chips to China.
Act Two: The Honeytrap
Enter the mysterious woman, and the music darkens. In the spring a secret memo, drafted under the supervision of the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, warns that she is a Chinese spy. Trump is briefed and, according to the New York Times, does nothing. Then the leaks begin. Three Republican committee chairmen who have spent years warning about China demand a closed-door briefing, and Brian Mast declares that Huang “has some very serious questions to answer”. The Justice Department takes over an inquiry into her old company. The stock slides by billions a day. By Thursday the king has abdicated, and his finance chief, Colette Kress, is minding the throne.
Act Three: Who Wanted Him Gone?
This is where the screenwriter earns his fee, because an affair has rarely cost a powerful American man his throne. Trump was caught on the Access Hollywood tape boasting that “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” A month later America elected him president. A New York jury later found him liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll, and another convicted him of falsifying business records to hide hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels. He denies both women’s accounts, and he is back in the White House. Bill Clinton survived Monica Lewinsky and an impeachment trial. When it emerged that Microsoft’s board had investigated Bill Gates over a relationship with an employee, his spokesperson said his exit from the board was “in no way related”, and he carried on as the world’s favourite philanthropist.
Powerful men may stray as long as they play by the rules of power. Huang broke the biggest one. He had the president’s ear, and he used it to sell America’s most strategic technology to its greatest rival. In the movie, that makes him a man who has to be stopped, and the bedroom becomes the perfect weapon. Even his friend in the White House has shuffled towards the exit. “I just know he’s a fine person, but you never know what is going on,” Trump said on 8 November. This week he said Huang was “going through hell” and that everything turned on whether the woman was a spy. Hours after the resignation he was on Truth Social crowning a successor, Apple’s Tim Cook: “A Legend replaces a Legend!”
Roger Ailes ruled Fox News for 20 years while the stories about him circulated. He fell in 2016 only after Gretchen Carlson sued and Rupert Murdoch’s sons, long at war with him, called in the lawyers. When I interviewed John Lithgow, who played Ailes in Bombshell, he summed up how such men keep everyone quiet: “That’s how tyranny works.” Power and fear hold the room together, until someone more powerful decides the show is over.
Casting Jackie Chan
Every one of these scandals has already reached the screen. Ailes got Bombshell and The Loudest Voice. Clinton and Lewinsky got Impeachment: American Crime Story. The young Trump got The Apprentice, which his campaign threatened to sue. Huang’s story has better ingredients than all of them: a spy, a president, a superpower rivalry and the very machines that now make movies.
Will Jackie Chan take the part? The script would ask a lot of him. Chan has spent years as a loyal friend of Beijing, and in 2021 he said he wanted to join the Chinese Communist Party. Playing a man accused of sleeping with a Chinese spy is a delicate role for an actor who admires the party that allegedly sent her. Hollywood’s new owners have a cheaper option anyway. With enough Nvidia chips, they can put Jackie Chan’s face on anyone they like, and never ask his permission.
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